Settler-colonial urbanisms: convergences, divergences, limits, contestations

ABSTRACT

The past few years have seen a groundswell of geographic scholarship on settler colonialism and its manifold articulations with the urban, from the historical development of cities to ongoing logics and practices of colonization and resistance alike. Given this growing attention to “settler-colonial urbanism” – as well as concerns that a focus thereupon risks obscuring Indigenous theories and practices – the goal of this Debates & Interventions forum is to reflect on settler-colonial urbanism’s limits and possibilities as an analytical lens for understanding processes of dispossession and for re-imagining cities as Indigenous spaces. The eight interventions address: 1) conceptualizations of settler-colonial urbanism; 2) how the diverse processes and mechanisms of settler-urbanization unfold in a variety of geographic contexts; and 3) how such processes are (or can be) challenged and unsettled.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• Indigenous geographies
• Indigenous resurgence
• racial capitalism
• urban theory

Acknowledgments

Our institution, INRS – Centre Urbanisation Culture Société, is located on unceded Indigenous territory. The Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) are recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters of Tio’tià:ke (Montréal), long a gathering place for many First Nations and today home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We are grateful to the Debates & Interventions editors for their assistance and to the VRM for financial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Villes Régions Monde (VRM) network, which is funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture.