Literature, planning and infrastructure: Investigating the southern city through postcolonial texts

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which postcolonial literary and other cultural texts navigate, decode and in some cases re-imagine the infrastructures that organize urban life, particularly in the postcolonial cities of Johannesburg, London and Delhi. Readings of Ivan Vladislavić, Mark Gevisser Brian Chikwava, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta and Manju Kapur consider the constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, the organization of public space, and various other forms of human intervention, and suggest that the ways in which urban spaces are mapped in creative practice can explore, negotiate and at times disrupt and reconstruct that relationship.

Keywords:

• planning
• infrastructure
• postcolonial city
• London
• Johannesburg
• Delhi
• writing as mapping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Chikwava explained his choice of title at the first “Planned Violence” workshop on 30–31 January 2013, at King’s College London, entitled “Empire and Post-Empire in the Global City”: http://plannedviolence.org/brian-chikwava-reading/

2. http://plannedviolence.org/selma-dabbagh/

3. A political point that now carries even greater resonance after Israel’s Operation Protective Edge that dominated western media through the spring and summer of 2014.