A R T I C L E
What is a settler‐colonial city?
David Hugill
Department of Geography, Simon Fraser
University, Canada
Correspondence
Department of Geography, Simon Fraser
University, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Email: david_hugill@sfu.ca
Funding information
Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, Grant/Award Number:
756‐2015‐0506
Abstract
What is a “settler‐colonial city” and how does it differ from other
forms of imperial urban spatial organization? This article seeks to
answer these questions by attempting to urbanize recent insights
in settler‐colonial theory. It begins by considering well‐established
theorizations of the “colonial city”—particularly those developed
by geographers and urbanists in the 1970s and 1980s—in order to
assess their suitability for analyses of contemporary settler‐colonial
milieu. Building on this discussion, the paper asks if and how the
insights of settler‐colonial theory offer new opportunities to
renovate earlier theorizations in ways that are more explicitly
relevant to making sense of the urban process in North America
and other societies where colonists have “come to stay” and no formal
process of decolonization has unfolded.
1 | INTRODUCTION
Geographers have been key contributors to scholarly debates about colonialism, both as interpreters of its spatial
effects (Blunt, 1999; Braun, 2000; Cameron, 2015; Gregory, 2004; Harris, 2004; Holmes, Hunt, & Piedalue, 2015;
Pasternak, 2013) and as critics of their own discipline's complicity in its historic practice (Blomley, 2003; Driver,
2001; Godlewska & Smith, 1994; Smith, 2003). Urban geographers, in particular, have been at the center of long‐
standing multidisciplinary efforts to interpret and understand colonialism's role in the production of cities (Blomley,
2004; Jacobs, 1996; Kipfer, 2011; Peters, 2005).
Until comparatively recently, however, work in the latter subfield has been disproportionately concerned with the
urban forms, cultures, and governance practices that have prevailed in so‐called “exploitation colonies,” or what Dan
Clayton (2009, p. 95) describes as territorial units established primarily for the purpose of mercantilist or capitalist
extraction in which a “minority” of “expatriate colonial elites” govern “large subject populations,” generally at the
behest of a European state. Thus while work in this vein has yielded an important literature on what have long been
called “colonial cities,” it has remained comparatively silent on the question of how the production and governance of
urban environments differ in milieus where colonial settlers have established a permanent and demographically
majoritarian presence on the colonized territory, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States,
among others. In the broader social sciences, these questions have achieved a greater salience, as theorists from a
range of disciplines have worked to theorize “settler colonialism” as an ontologically distinct form of social, political,
and geographical domination (Banivanua‐Mar & Edmonds, 2010; Bateman & Pilkington, 2011; Belich, 2009; Brown,
2014; Coulthard, 2014; Elkins & Petersen, 2005; Goldstein, 2008; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 1999; Wolfe, 2006), with
the help of a handful of geographers (Hoogeven, 2014; Inwood & Bonds, 2016; Pasternak, 2013). In spite of this
Received: 16 June 2016 Revised: 1 December 2016 Accepted: 27 March 2017
DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12315
Geography Compass. 2017;11:e12315.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12315
© 2017 The Author(s)
Geography Compass © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gec3 1 of 11
flourishing, however, few researchers have sought to explicitly urbanize the insights of settler‐colonial theory,
and only a very small number of studies have gestured toward theorizing the settler‐colonial city on its own terms
(Baloy, 2016; Blomley, 2004; Coulthard, 2014; Edmonds, 2010; Hugill & Toews, 2014; Toews, 2015; Tomiak, 2013;
Veracini, 2012).
In this article, I contribute to the closing of this gap in the research by asking whether the theoretical innovations
of settler‐colonial theory offer geographers new opportunities to renovate and extend their interpretations of the
“urban” implications of colonial practice. To do so, I begin by looking closely at some of the core premises that have
animated existing geographical research on colonial urbanism with a keen focus on the writing that has dominated
geographical thinking on these questions since at least the mid1960s, or what we might call the “colonial cities” literature.
I then turn to an explicit consideration of how settler‐colonial theory poses challenges to these long‐established
premises and demonstrate why the “colonial city” frame is perhaps a poor fit for urban analysis in societies where colonists
have “come to stay” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388), and no formal process of decolonization has unfolded. I then conclude
by surveying some of the perils and the promise of adopting settler‐colonial theory as a frame for urban and
other sorts of analysis.
Before proceeding, however, it is critical to sound a couple notes of caution. First, rigidly construed ideal‐typical
constructs (such as “colonial” and “settler‐colonial” cities) fail to capture the dynamic fluidity of actually existing social
environments. It is important to point out that by provisionally adopting a formulation that theorizes “colonial” and
“settler colonial” political forms as distinct, I am not suggesting that elements of both cannot coexist in the same place
at the same time. Indeed, “reality is inevitably complex,” writes Lorenzo Veracini (2010, p. 12), and these two modes
inevitably “interpenetrate each other and overlap in a variety of ways.” Second, neither colonial nor settler‐colonial
relations articulate in a vacuum; they are elements of complex social totalities that differ markedly between and within
diverse geographical sites. For this reason, it is critical to point out that the clear cut distinctions that I draw in the
analysis that follows are perhaps best understood as heuristic interventions aimed at demonstrating the inadequacies
that inhere in conventional colonial analysis (and not least of the production of urban space) as much as they are about
promoting “settler colonialism” as a framework for urban interpretation. In my view, settler‐colonial theory is persuasive
and generative because it orients our interpretative energies towards the complex persistence and centrality of
the colonial relation in the urban present, not because it offers a definitive account of the social totality in places
where no formal end to colonization has been achieved.
2 | PART 1: THEORIZING THE COLONIAL CITY
Geographers and urbanists have been at the centre of efforts to theorize the “colonial city” as a distinct urban form
and have contributed to the development of a robust literature that has attempted to do so, even if the provision
of anything like a “universal account” has proved an elusive scholarly task (Home, 2014, p. 75) In general, research
in this vein has been concerned with the ways in which metropolitan imperial power has shaped and reshaped urban
spaces in the colonized world (Abu‐Lughod, 1965; AlSayyad, 1992; Home, 2013; King, 1976; Legg, 2007; Ross &
Telkamp, 1985; Simon, 1984) and, to a lesser degree, the ways in which colonial relations have shaped and reshaped
urban spaces in the metropolitan “core” (Driver & Gilbert, 1998; Kipfer, 2011; Ross, 1995). Interpretations of the politics
of “colonial city” building have generally been consistent with well‐established interpretations of “colonialism” as
a form of metropolitan domination, often undertaken by a minority of colonial expatriates, and aimed primarily at
exploiting the wealth and resources of a colonized space (Osterhammel, 2005; Said, 1993). In geography and beyond,
the “exploitation” mode of imperial practice has so long dominated academic interpretations of what “colonialism” is
that its core assumptions often function as a kind of scholarly common sense. For our purposes here, it is critical to
point out that this is particularly true in the key writings of the “colonial city” subfield. To illustrate this point and elucidate
what, precisely, is meant by the term “colonial city,” I turn now to a brief survey of some of the core premises
that have animated this conceptual framing.
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First, conventional theorizations of the “colonial city” tend to define their objects as nodal points in the
networked geographies of European empire. In general, contributors to this subfield have been keen to show how
cities like Cairo, Madras (present‐day Chennai), Algiers, Leopoldville (present‐day Kinshasa), and Hanoi, among
hundreds of others, were developed (or redeveloped) as key loci of coordination that were capable of linking “metropolitan”
interests in western Europe to vast stretches of territory in the colonized world, and vice versa (Abu‐Lughod,
1965; Home, 2013; Nightingale, 2012). As such, their empirical work demonstrates how “colonial cities” operated as
key centers of military and administrative coordination, staging areas for incursion into continental interiors, markets
and entrepots for extracted raw materials, residential collection points for missionaries, settlers and imperial agents, as
well as theaters for performances of imperial strength, among other things. Thus Anthony King (1985) (perhaps the
leading theorist of the “colonial city”) stresses that “colonial cities” need to be understood as relational multi‐scalar
productions, shaped not only by local dynamics but also by their substantial linkages to regional hinterlands, broader
imperial networks, and the shifting imperatives of the “world system” of capitalist production.
Secondly, conventional theorizations of the “colonial city” tend to interpret their objects as historical artefacts. By
and large, they are focused on the urban effects of the world‐historic processes by which imperial administrations
remade the political geography of nearly the entire world in the modern period, employing shifting forms of predatory
expansion in order to accumulate wealth, extend influence, enhance global standing, and resolve domestic contradictions,
among other motivations. This temporal and thematic orientation is certainly warranted in geographical study.
Indeed, the geopolitical implications of imperial conquest in the era of high European imperialism are simply staggering.
By the zenith of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1989) calls the “age of empire” (1875–1914), giant swaths of
global space had been neatly carved up into European “possessions.” The British Empire alone controlled nearly one
quarter of the globe's inhabitable surface and claimed roughly 500 million people as “subjects” at the height of its
influence. In imperial “cores,” meanwhile, colonial accumulations fuelled massive industrial growth and urban development.
On the strength of conquest, European domestic economies grew exponentially and so too did European cities.
Certainly, Joseph Conrad (2002, p. 103) could not have described late 19th century London as the “biggest, and the
greatest, town on Earth,” without the economic boon of empire. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that imperial practice
played an integral role in the making of the contemporary global order. What is critical for our purposes, however, is
the way in which such theorizations have tended to treat colonial urbanism as a “historic” process of city building, as
the property of a bygone era, a now‐concluded “age of empire.” Thus although many analyses acknowledge that contemporary
inequities often have their roots in colonial occupation and administration (Davis, 2006; Home, 2014;
Prashad, 2007), the “colonial cities” literature generally promotes the idea that the time of colonialism has passed.
Finally, conventional theorizations tend to insist that the “colonial city” is an environment designed to secure the
dominance of imperialist actors by concretizing hierarchical divisions in city space. “From Rangoon to Cairo, Luanda to
Singapore,” writes King (1976, p. xii) in his seminal study on colonial urban development, “cities were laid out by the
rulers and not the ruled.” Indeed, “colonial cities” were often rigidly segregated, and theorists have routinely emphasized
their “dual” character (Abu‐Lughod, 1965; Nightingale, 2012; Simon, 1984; Wright, 1991). In such accounts, the
“colonial city” is depicted as a space divided between a quarantined zone of privilege, defined by spaciousness, relative
luxury, and European planning practices, on the one hand, and a so‐called “native” zone, defined by dense settlement,
privation, and “traditional” infrastructures, on the other (Immerwahr, 2007; King, 2009). Thus in King's (1990, p. 34)
terms, “the fact of race” is the “distinctive social characteristic” of the “colonial city.” Indeed, the spatial segregation
of “races,” observes Robert Home (2014, p. 75), was very consciously embedded in the legal and political frameworks
that governed such environments. Notably, these theoretical formulations resonate with Frantz Fanon's (1967, p. 4–6)
memorable description of the compartmentalized geography of colonial space in “The Wretched of the Earth.” “The
colonial world is a Manichean world,” he writes, with its cities violently carved up between the abundance of the
spaces of the colonizers—sectors with “lights and paved roads, where trash cans overflow with strange and wonderful
garbage, undreamed of leftovers,” and the generalized precariousness of the spaces of the colonized—“a world with no
space,” where “people are piled one on top of the other, squeezed tightly together,” a “famished sector, hungry for
bread, meat, shoes, coal and light.” In their design and function, then, “colonial cities” communicated and enforced
HUGILL 3 of 11
an acutely racialized segregationist social order designed primarily to ensure the uninterrupted persistence of
metropolitan accumulation.
Taken together, then, the interpretation that emerges from this thinking is that the “colonial city” was designed to
function as a kind of exploitation machine. By assembling the analyses that emerge from the texts cited above, we can
define the “colonial city” as a “historic” form of spatial production that is typified by a highly segregated urban
organization and designed to facilitate the smooth flow of human and resource surpluses from a colonized “periphery”
to a metropolitan “core.” But as we shall see, such interpretations, with their characteristic emphasis on metropolitan
forms of domination, have only limited explanatory purchase in contexts where a demographically majoritarian group
(or series of groups) has settled permanently on existing Indigenous territories and asserted a settler sovereignty
distinct from that which emanates from a far‐flung metropolitan “core.”
3 | PART 2: THE SETTLER‐COLONIAL CHALLENGE
In an effort to address this analytic inadequacy, scholars across the social sciences have sought to draw clear lines of
demarcation between a metropole‐oriented form of “exploitation” colonization, on the one hand, and a more
internally‐oriented form of “settler” colonization, on the other. Indeed, a growing chorus of scholars has begun to
insist that “settler colonialism” ought to be interpreted as an ontologically distinct form of colonial practice. For
example, the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe (1999), who was perhaps the leading proponent of this position before
his untimely death last year, argues that “colonial” (i.e., “metropolitan”) and “settler‐colonial” forms of imperial
conquest are animated by fundamentally different relationships to the colonized territory and its inhabitants. In his
terms, settler colonists differ from metropolitan colonists in that they “come to stay” and are foremost concerned with
the construction of a “new” society on the expropriated land base (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). They are, therefore, primarily
driven by a desire to possess and settle the land in perpetuity, in addition to benefiting from new opportunities to
accumulate. Of course, such efforts are never undertaken in a social vacuum and because the territories claimed by
settler colonists are used and occupied by Indigenous people, the imposition of settler‐colonial orders necessarily
requires explicit forms of territorial alienation (Wolfe, 2006), as well as cultural forms of disavowal (Barker, Rollo, &
Battell Lowman, 2017; Fortier, 2016; Mackey, 2016; Veracini, 2008). “Supersession,” or the “displacement of
Indigenous peoples and their replacement with settlers,” is thus the “central dynamic” of settler‐colonization
(Edmonds, 2010, p. 5). Of course, in the materiality of actually‐existing situations, such “replacement” is never fully
achieved, in spite of the persistence of settler strategies of “elimination” that range from explicit forms of frontier
violence (Daschuk, 2013; Wolfe, 2006) to coercive assimilation (Milloy, 1999), to strategic exclusion (Lawrence,
2004), and to more cunning forms of integrative pacification (Coulthard, 2014; Dempsey, Gould, & Sundberg, 2011;
Pasternak, 2013).
If we take this analysis seriously, then we begin to see why the “colonial city” literature is of limited use in efforts
to theorize and understand the production of urban space in settler‐colonial milieus, even if we are not prepared to
insist that the two forms of colonialism are “absolutely” distinct from one another. If theorists of settler colonization
are correct in their assertion that “metropolitan” and “settler” forms of colonial practice are animated by different
dynamics, then surely the forms of urban analysis associated with the former need to be recalibrated in order to
render them useful tools for making sense of the latter. This basic insight has been the inspiration for a number of
recent scholarly engagements, including a series of panels on “Settler Colonialism and the City” at the 2015
Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in Chicago (organized by geographers Daniela Aiello,
Jessica Hallenbeck, and Natalie Knight), a forthcoming special issue of “Settler‐Colonial Studies” dedicated to
“Rethinking the Urban through the Lens of Settler‐Colonialism” (edited by the urban planner Libby Porter and political
geographer Oren Yiftachel), and a special session on “Settler Cities” at the 2016 European Association of Urban
Historians in Helsinki (convened by the historians Carl Nightingale, Vivian Bickford‐Smith, and Johan Lagae), among
others. Inspired by this interdisciplinary energy and the preliminary questions that have animated it, I want to turn
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now to a discussion of some of the ways that we might begin to renovate the insights of “colonial city” analysis in
order to begin the theoretical work of defining, however provisionally, what a “settler‐colonial city” is.
First, settler‐colonial cities have a more internally‐oriented political economy than their colonial city counterparts.
Conventional geographical approaches have tended to theorize the latter as nodal points in the networked
geographies of European empires that function primarily as instruments for the reproduction of metropolitan power
and accumulation. For this reason, they should be distinguished from settler‐colonial cities, whose very raison‐d'etre is
the enrichment of local (or at least national) settler constituencies, as opposed to far‐off metropolitan sponsors.
Moreover, settler‐colonial political imaginaries are fundamentally premised on the idea of a severed link with Europe
and the idea that a “new” society is being constructed on settled lands. Exemplary of this thinking, for example, is
Frederick Turner's (1986) late 19th century view that the Euro–American conquest of Western North America
constituted both a literal and figurative turning‐of‐the‐back on Europe. Connectedly, interpretations of city building
in settler colonies have often been shrouded in a mantle of colonial amnesia (Barman, 2005; Mays, 2016; Vicenti
Carpio, 2011); in both official histories and boosterist accounts, settler‐colonial urban environments are routinely (if
dubiously) treated as sites of settler creation in “wasted” or “virgin” landscapes, great hubs of commerce, and
exchange brought to life by the brilliance and ingenuity of rugged and ambitious arrivistes rather than spaces of
conquest, eviction, and resettlement (Hugill, 2016a). In settler‐colonial situations, such disavowals are commonplace
and often function as an effective means of denying the very existence and persistence of Indigenous presences and
claims. Thus “settler colonial” historical writing “frequently refer[s] to Indigenous people as “shadows,” figures lurking
in thickets,” and members of “dying races” (Veracini, 2008: 368). In a certain light, all forms of imperialism are premised
on what historian James Belich (2009) calls processes of “mass transfer” but what, precisely, is being transferred marks
a key point of distinction between patterns of colonial and settler‐colonial accumulation. In the case of the former, the
“mass transfer” takes the form of steady flows of human and material resources between sites in the colonized world
and the metropolitan “core.” Colonial cities were often built and sustained precisely to serve the function of
coordinating the transfer of extracted raw materials and the fruits of colonial labour to Europe, for example. In the
case of the latter, however, the “mass transfer” manifests as an arrival of a majoritarian settler population that is
primarily concerned with the founding of a new political order grounded in permanent and comprehensive territorial
appropriation. Thus in settler‐colonial contexts, there is “no spatial separation between metropole and colony,” as the
critical education theorists Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012, p. 5) put it. For Wolfe (2006), the project of settler
colonization must therefore be distinguished from other colonial projects because its fundamental aim is
“replacement” rather than exploitation, although the former need not preclude the latter. Of course, none of this is
to say that settler‐colonial cities were (or are) somehow isolated from transnational circuits of institutional, cultural,
political, or economical exchange. In fact, the work of a number of historians has traced such connections explicitly
(Mawani, 2016; Perry, 2001), and the work of other theorists has demonstrated that settler colonialism often
articulates with (or is organically linked to) the deployment of very “outward” looking forms of imperial violence
(Barker, 2009; Tuck & Wang, 2012). With that said, it is critical to draw a clear line of distinction between such forms
of integration and the explicit mode of metropolitan command that defined “colonial cities” in the classic era of
European imperialism.
Secondly, “colonialism” cannot be understood as a historical artefact in societies where colonizers “come to stay”
(Wolfe, 2006, p. 388), and no formal process of decolonization has been achieved. As Glen Coulthard and others argue
—and abundant evidence demonstrates—the hierarchical political dynamics that have animated the inauspicious
beginnings (i.e., moments of conquest) that gave rise to settler‐colonial societies do not belong to a now concluded
historical past. Indeed, one of the core objectives of settler‐colonial scholarship is to understand how these inequitable
dynamics have been recalibrated, recomposed, and transformed in ways that allow them to continue to shape relationships
in the present. Because Indigenous presence and counter‐claims persist in settler‐colonial milieus and the
project of replacement is always incomplete, even a “failure” (Simpson, 2014), settler‐colonial dynamics continue to
shape interactions between settler and Indigenous constituencies in the present. Thus, settler‐colonial practice is
not an historical “event” (Wolfe, 1999) but an enduring and constitutive element of the broader field of power
HUGILL 5 of 11
relations that shape outcomes in settler societies, a key element of the complex amalgam of intersecting forms of
domination that are “structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue
to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land and self‐determining authority” (Coulthard, 2014,
p. 6–7). For this reason, the key task for scholars interested in interpreting the production of urban space in
settler‐dominated societies is to ask how the persistence of these hierarchical social relations continues to shape
urban outcomes. Geographers and others would do well to start such investigations from the premise that
colonization is a contemporary phenomenon because settler‐colonial political communities remain, by definition,
animated by the “unreformed immanence of fundamentally unequal relations between Indigenous peoples and their
nonindigenous counterparts” (Veracini, 2015, p. 1)
Third, the abundant literature on “colonial cities” demonstrates how urban environments were carved up with the
explicit intention of facilitating the exploitation of the colonized, as I argue above, but urban environments that
emerged in settler‐colonial societies have not necessarily followed the same developmental trajectory. Although many
were (and are) profoundly divided along ethnic and “racial” lines (Burley, 2013; Comack, Deane, Morrissette, & Silver,
2013; Estes, 2014; Hugill, 2016b; Tomiak, 2013), Indigenous peoples themselves were historically more often
removed from city life through a series of evictions, expulsions, and relocations than they were contained in urban
enclaves. Of course, it is a matter of historical fact that most North American cities were built on geographies already
used and occupied by Indigenous peoples (Peters, 2004), and an important body of literature has stressed the
enduring presence of Indigenous people in many such urban milieus (Deloria, 2004; Peters & Andersen, 2014; Wilson
& Peters, 2005). Yet because settler colonists were generally more interested in seizing the lands belonging to
Indigenous people than they were in accumulations generated by Indigenous labour (Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe,
1999), their preference was often to seek removal rather than integration or local containment for the purposes of
economic exploitation (Stanger‐Ross, 2008; Wood, 2006). In Canada, for example, the history of settler urban
development is partly a history of what JulieTomiak (2013, p. 2–3) calls the “deterritorialization of Indigenous people.”
As she observes, settler colonists achieved “radical reconfiguration[s] of space” by pursuing a diverse range of
expulsive tactics, including denying aboriginal title, the “entrenchment” of a private property system “from which
Indigenous people were excluded,” and the creation a network of reserves. In settler colonies, urban spaces operate
less as sites where the interests of far‐flung sponsors are coordinated and more as sites where the interests of a
landed settler majority of “foreign invaders” are made manifest in the materiality of bricks and mortar. Although settler
colonists did (and do) sometimes rely on Indigenous labour to achieve their objectives, their primary interest lies less in
the systematic exploitation of a colonized workforce than it does in the eventual clearing of the expropriated territory
for settler use and the incorporation of that territory into the regulatory ambit of settler institutions of governance. In
other words, Indigenous land, not labour and its associated surpluses, is the sine qua non of settler‐colonial desire, as a
range of empirical studies illuminate (Carter, 1990; Harris, 2002). Of course, my point is not that Indigenous people
have never been exploited as labourers in settler‐colonial societies but rather that such exploitation has always been
peripheral to the core objective of settler accumulation strategies, which have hinged primarily on the exploitation of
expropriated lands. Thus in Coulthard's (2014, p. 125) terms, the fundamental organizing principle of settler‐colonial
political orders is not primarily to exploit local resources and populations but to “shore up” sustained access to
territory “for the purposes of state formation, settlement and capitalist development.” The production of urban spaces
has often reflected this imperative.
To summarize, then, if we take these points of departure seriously, it becomes clear that the insights of
settler‐colonial theory offer a provisional blueprint for a comprehensive theory of the settler‐colonial city. Specifically,
I have identified three key points of incongruence between the production of urban space in geographies that are
animated by a metropole‐oriented logic of extractive accumulation and those that are animated by a more permanent
ambition to settle and permanently transform the colonized territory. To reiterate, I have argued that the “settler‐
colonial city” differs fundamentally from the “colonial city” because (a) its accumulation strategies are primarily
oriented around the enrichment of settler constituencies, rather than far‐flung metropolitan sponsors, (b) the colonial
relation remains a central and enduring element of its contemporary life, albeit in dynamic and frequently recomposed
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forms, (c) and Indigenous peoples themselves have more often been excluded from, rather than exploited in, its core
economic activities. My hope is that these provisional points of distinction will stimulate conversations about how,
precisely, we might theorize the “settler‐colonial city” as a distinct sociospatial form.
4 | CONCLUSION: PERIL AND PROMISE OF THE SETTLER‐COLONIAL
FRAME
Importantly, there are good reasons to be cautious about a full‐throated endorsement of settler‐colonial theory as an
analytical framework, as critics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have pointed out. The legal historian Renisa
Mawani (2016), for example, argues that settler‐colonial theorizing has sometimes traded in crude binaries, including
“imposed divisions between settler and native, colony and settler colony, and land and sea” that are incapable of
capturing the complexity of colonial power and the varied movement of “people, ideas, and legalities” across a diverse
range of imperial spaces. Others insist that an over‐reliance on settler‐colonial theory's interpretive frame can lead us
to overstate the completeness of the colonial enterprise. The Indigenous political theorists Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff
Corntassel (2005, p. 601) observe that such interpretive strategies risk “allowing colonization to be the only story of
Indigenous lives.” “It must be recognized,” they continue, “that colonialism is a narrative in which the Settler's power
is the fundamental reference and assumption, inherently limiting Indigenous freedom and imposing a view of the
world that is but an outcome of perspective on that power.” Connectedly, the anthropologist Tim Rowse (2010, p.
66) cautions that critical interpretations of settler‐colonial practices in Australia have often problematically asserted
Indigenous “helplessness” in the face of “overbearing colonial pressure.” And the effect of such presentations, he
contends, is often to reproduce a “sorrowing” form of outrage in which “defeat and marginality are highlighted at
the expense of understanding the nature and limits of Indigenous agency.” Meanwhile, Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth
Strakosch (2013, p. 435) argue that scholarship in this emergent subfield has sometimes promoted a kind of “colonial
fatalism” by presenting settler‐colonial domination as structurally embedded, “highly stable,” and relatively impervious
to serious interruption. They also suggest that analyses that rely too heavily on this structuralism can lead
non‐Indigenous scholars to treat “settler action” as “always already colonizing” in ways that present anti‐colonial
practice as futile and tacitly excuse those scholars from the ethical demand of engaging in it. More troubling still is
the risk that the considerable attention being heaped upon scholarship in this subfield may actually operate to
“displace, overshadow, or even mask over” long‐standing traditions of knowledge production and colonial critique that
have emerged from the field of Indigenous studies, including “feminist and queer Indigenous work that is centred on
Indigenous resurgence,” as Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, and Jeff Corntassel (2014) have pointed out (see
also Bhandar & Ziadesh, 2016; Mawani, 2016). Indeed, much would be lost if a critical overreliance on settler‐colonial
theorizing operated to obscure the many promising and generative insights that have emerged from a recent surge of
work in that vein (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005; Kino‐nda‐niimi Collective, 2014; Simpson, 2008; Simpson, 2011). Finally,
it should also be said that settler‐colonial theory has been perhaps overly focused on places that were first colonized
by the British and French (most research has focused on Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, for
example), but these are not the only places where projects of demographically majoritarian settler “invasion” are
ongoing. Although settler‐colonial theory has been put to promising use in Palestine (Badarin, 2015, Pappe, 2014,
Piterberg, 2008, Shihade, 2012), more is certainly from needed from Latin America and other geographies where its
theoretical commitments can be put to new empirical tests.
For these and other reasons, it is critical that what we take up the insights of settler‐colonial theory both with a
degree of caution and alongside other critical literatures. As I argued at the outset of this paper, the relatively narrow
category of “settler colonialism” is not sufficient to capture the dynamic complexity of the social totality, so we ought
to treat settler‐colonial theory as a set of heuristic insights that allow us to highlight and stress the “centrality” of the
colonial relation in our analyses of places where settler populations have “come to stay.” In doing so, analysts would
do well to heed the spirit of the critical interventions listed above, including the injunction that we recognize the
HUGILL 7 of 11
instability, impermanence, and contingency of the settler‐colonial order of things. The good news is that the reproduction
of settler‐colonial economic, political, and territorial advantage requires sustained iteration in the present and is
therefore always vulnerable to interruption and contestation (Blomley, 2004).
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
David Hugill is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University.
How to cite this article: Hugill D. What is a settler‐colonial city?. Geography Compass. 2017;11:e12315.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12315
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