Colonial Legacies: Urbanization in the Global South

When you walk through an older Indian city, you often pass through two very different worlds within a few kilometres. One has narrow, dense lanes that grew over centuries; the other has wide tree-lined avenues, large bungalows, and orderly grids built during British rule. This contrast is not accidental. It is the physical memory of colonialism, and it explains a great deal about how cities across the Global South look and function today. Urbanization in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America did not unfold gradually from local needs. It was shaped, accelerated, and distorted by colonial power, leaving behind patterns that still influence everyday urban life.

Colonial influence on cities
Altering traditional settlement patterns
Imposed urbanization
The dual city: white town and black town
Infrastructure inequality by design
Post-colonial patterns
Urban primacy
Over-urbanization
The rise of the informal economy
Metro Manila: a post-colonial case study
Why these legacies still matter

Colonial influence on cities

Long before Europeans arrived, many regions now grouped under the Global South already had rich urban traditions. Cities in the subcontinent, China, the Middle East, and the pre-colonial Americas were organised around local religious life, trade networks, and environmental conditions. These were largely organic settlements that reflected the cultures that built them.

Colonial rule interrupted this. Colonizers either founded entirely new cities or radically reorganised existing ones to serve imperial goals. Instead of growing around temples, markets, or river crossings, colonial cities were built around ports, military bases, administrative offices, and points of resource extraction. The function of the city shifted from serving local populations to serving the colonial economy and the movement of raw materials toward Europe. As scholarship on urbanisation in the Global South notes, the legacies of colonialism and imperialism are among the defining themes that still shape these cities.

Altering traditional settlement patterns

The new urban forms often clashed with older ones. European planners favoured straight grids, formal civic centres, and architectural styles imported from home. In the subcontinent, the British added entirely new layers to towns: planned residential zones, military stations, railway colonies, and grand government quarters built in European styles. These additions sat alongside the older “native” city but followed completely different logic. The result was a city with two personalities, one inherited and one imposed.

Imposed urbanization

This is the central difference between urban growth in the Global North and the Global South. In Europe and North America, cities largely grew from internal economic forces such as industrialisation, trade, and population movement. In the colonised world, urbanization was frequently sudden and externally driven. Colonial powers needed administrative centres to govern, ports to ship goods, and processing hubs for export crops. Cities expanded to meet these needs, not the needs of the people living in them. Planners call this imposed urbanization.

Because the city existed primarily to serve the coloniser, it was deliberately divided. Colonial cities were segmented along lines of race, class, and function, and these divisions were written directly into the urban landscape.

The dual city: white town and black town

In India, this division produced what historians call the dual city. The European or administrative areas, often known as Civil Lines, housed senior British civil officers such as district magistrates and commissioners in spacious, well-planned bungalows. Nearby cantonments were military settlements, usually laid out on grids at the edge of the existing town and kept physically separate from it. Together, these formed the “white town,” sharply distinguished from the “black town” where Indian residents lived in dense, older quarters.

An IGNOU study on urbanisation in India describes how this separation reflected what has been called the rule of colonial difference, with administrative European areas kept distinct from Indian neighbourhoods and maintained as better planned, better served spaces. This was not unique to India. French colonial planners in North Africa built wide-boulevard European quarters beside traditional medinas, creating the same stark physical and social split inside cities like Algiers and Casablanca.

Infrastructure inequality by design

The dual city was not just symbolic. Modern amenities followed the colonial population. Piped water, sewerage, street lighting, and wide roads were selectively extended to Civil Lines and cantonment areas while Indian residential zones were largely bypassed. This deliberate inequality in basic services deepened the divide between the two halves of the city. The pattern is durable: many neighbourhoods that received colonial investment remain better serviced today, while areas that were neglected continue to struggle. Colonialism, in this sense, helped lock in long-term advantages for some districts and lasting constraints for others.

Post-colonial patterns

Independence ended colonial rule, but it did not erase the spatial and economic structures colonialism created. Several distinctive patterns emerged across the Global South in the decades that followed, and they remain key challenges for urban planners.

Urban primacy

One of the most significant inheritances is urban primacy, where a single city, usually the capital, becomes disproportionately large and economically dominant compared with all other cities in the country. This stems directly from colonial policy. Colonisers typically concentrated political control, infrastructure, education, and health facilities in one administrative centre, giving it a head start that no other city could match. After independence, that lead simply compounded. The effect is visible in many countries, and even in larger systems the dominance of a few metropolitan centres over secondary towns reflects the same logic of concentrated investment.

Over-urbanization

A second pattern is over-urbanization. This describes a situation where cities grow faster than their economies can generate stable, formal jobs or than their governments can provide housing and services. People migrate to cities in search of work, but the formal economy cannot absorb everyone. Projections suggest that Global South cities, especially in Asia and Africa, will receive the overwhelming majority of the world’s urban population growth in coming decades, as work on future planning of Global South cities highlights. When growth outpaces planning, the result is overcrowding, strained infrastructure, and the rapid spread of informal settlements.

The rise of the informal economy

The gap between population growth and formal employment gives rise to the informal economy. Street vendors, waste pickers, small-scale manufacturers, domestic workers, and informal transport operators fill the space that formal jobs cannot. According to research by the World Resources Institute, more than two billion people work in the informal economy globally, and roughly one in three urban residents is underserved daily by basic services such as good housing, transport, water, and sanitation. These workers are not marginal. They keep cities running. But they often do so without legal recognition, secure incomes, or protection, which is itself a legacy of economic systems built to extract rather than to include.

Metro Manila: a post-colonial case study

Few cities illustrate these patterns as clearly as Metro Manila in the Philippines. The city was established by Spanish colonisers in 1571 and was deliberately built to be the colony’s primate city, concentrating administrative, commercial, and religious power. The Spanish created Intramuros, a walled city reserved for Spanish residents, while Filipinos were pushed to areas outside the walls. This was a textbook colonial dual structure and the first layer of spatial segregation in the city.

The Spanish also spread the plaza complex across the islands, organising settlements around a central square containing the church, government buildings, and elite homes. American colonisation later added another layer, bringing in the planner Daniel Burnham to redesign Manila with wide boulevards, civic buildings, and parks inspired by the City Beautiful movement. Each colonial phase reinforced Manila’s dominance over the rest of the country.

These inherited structures explain the city’s present condition. Metro Manila exhibits extreme urban primacy, holding around 13 million people in a country of well over 100 million, and concentrating the bulk of national economic activity. Yet, as the University of California’s Urban Displacement Project documents, a very large share of Metro Manila residents now live in informal settlements, with one estimate placing it at over a third of the population. The skyline captures the contradiction: gleaming financial districts rise within sight of dense informal communities. Millions earn their living in the informal economy, from jeepney drivers to street vendors, while the city struggles to supply clean water, sanitation, and reliable services to everyone. Growth has simply outpaced the city’s capacity, a direct expression of over-urbanization layered onto a colonial foundation.

Why these legacies still matter

Understanding colonial urbanization is not only a historical exercise. It explains why so many cities in the Global South face strikingly similar problems despite being on different continents and having been ruled by different empires. Segregated layouts, primate cities, service inequality, and large informal sectors are not random failures of governance. They are structural inheritances. Academic work on colonial and settler-colonial urbanism argues that cities were central instruments of colonial control, which is why their effects are so durable.

The encouraging side is that these patterns can be addressed once they are recognised. Planners across the Global South are investing in secondary cities to reduce primacy, formally integrating informal workers and settlements rather than evicting them, and extending services into long-neglected areas. Decolonising the city means moving beyond planning approaches inherited from former rulers and building around the realities of the people who actually live there.

What do you think? Looking at the city or town you know best, can you identify spaces that still carry the marks of the colonial dual city, and how do those old divisions shape who has access to good services today? If urban primacy concentrates so much opportunity in one or two metros, what would it take to make secondary cities genuinely attractive places to live and work?

References

PDF 📄

Colonial Legacies: Urbanization in the Global South

Table of Contents

Colonial influence on cities 🔗

Altering traditional settlement patterns 🔗

Imposed urbanization 🔗

The dual city: white town and black town 🔗

Infrastructure inequality by design 🔗

Post-colonial patterns 🔗

Urban primacy 🔗

Over-urbanization 🔗

The rise of the informal economy 🔗

Metro Manila: a post-colonial case study 🔗

Why these legacies still matter 🔗