Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Renugan Raidoo — 2026-01-20T06:00:00Z

Some of the gated estates in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria sell residents a settler colonial fantasy of a bucolic idyll away from the urban condition. But Renugan Raidoo examines the important role agricultural surplus played in mining industrialization, which tells a much more complex story of urban–rural relations.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” “A piece of the past has found its' [sic] way to the future” in all-white majuscule is the first thing one sees on the

- Essays / Africa, South Africa, Global South, Johannesburg, Pretoria, gated communities, rural, colonial urban planning, agriculture, industry, history, apartheid, real-estate turn, real estate

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914

Vanessa Caru & translated by Oliver Waine — 2022-11-18T06:00:00Z

What consequences can an epidemic have on a city? Vanessa Caru describes the ways in which a plague epidemic in Bombay at the turn of the 20th century changed the British colonial authorities' attitudes, the urban policies they implemented, and ultimately even the very morphology of the city.
On September 18, 1896, the first case of bubonic plague, in all likelihood spread by rats on board a boat from Hong Kong, was detected in Bombay (today Mumbai). As the first Indian city to be infected,

- From the Field / colonial urban planning, Mumbai, India, Bombay, history, urban policy, epidemic

Metropolitics

Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914