{"id":2071,"date":"2026-10-05T18:20:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T18:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/?p=2071"},"modified":"2026-10-05T21:22:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:22:00","slug":"big-other-is-watching-you-navigating-methodological-approaches-to-the-colonial-city-between-structure-and-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/2026\/10\/big-other-is-watching-you-navigating-methodological-approaches-to-the-colonial-city-between-structure-and-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Other is Watching You: Navigating methodological approaches to the Colonial City between Structure and Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amongst scholars who have dwelt on colonial urbanisation, there is a dominant vein that agrees that the phenomenon of the \u2018colonial city\u2019 constituted a \u2018heterogeneous but distinct urban type\u2019.1<\/sup><\/a> The explanations for this distinctiveness, however, have varied considerably. While Immanuel Wallerstein emphasised the colonies\u2019 specific \u2018peripheral\u2019 place within the expanding global frame of industrialisation, Ronald Horvath and Terence McGee countered that this uniqueness was not reducible to such conventional classifications of urban development as \u2018pre-industrial\u2019, \u2018transitional\u2019 or \u2018industrialised\u2019.3<\/sup><\/a> Instead, they understood the distinctiveness of the urban environment as the \u2018spatial expressions of the imposition of an alien culture on an existing one\u2019.3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, as Brenda Yeoh argues, such approaches tend to treat the urban landscape as a reflection<\/em> of colonial rule without attending to how the colonial city was physically \u2018made\u2019. In doing so, no matter what cultural, economic or political factors are invoked, these scholars \u2018implicitly or explicitly\u2019 assume that \u2018the colonial town or city is either wholly or largely a creation of its colonial masters\u2019.3<\/sup><\/a> Although colonial administrators undeniably possessed vastly greater political and economic power than the populations they governed, to understand the colonial city simply as a product of imperial power obscures the ways that indigenous populations inhabited, negotiated and shaped these spaces. The challenge, then, is to account for the power of colonial rule without reducing those subject to it to passive, insignificant actors.<\/p>\n

This is a familiar problem in the social sciences: how can we recognise the force of oppressive \u2018structural\u2019 power without negating the agency of individuals? \u00a0Michel de Certeau\u2019s The Practice of Everyday Life<\/em> offers one influential approach. Its central proposition, that \u2018space is a practiced place\u2019, sought to reinstate the agency of the \u2018ordinary people\u2019, who are \u2018commonly presumed to be passive and guided by established rules\u2019.4<\/sup><\/a> Published in 1980, de Certeau described his work as both \u2018analogous and contrary\u2019 to Michel Foucault\u2019s Discipline and Punish<\/em> (1975), which emphasised how \u2018proliferating technocratic structures\u2019 of domination trapped the individual with an ever-intensifying \u2018grid of discipline\u2019.6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, de Certeau\u2019s account does indeed remain more \u2018analogous\u2019 to Foucault than this opposition suggests. In his example of walking in the city, de Certeau explains how authorities exercise conscious \u2018strategies\u2019, while individuals on the street must resort to \u2018tactics\u2019, that:<\/p>\n

\n

Lack [their] own place, lack a view of the whole, [and are] limited by the blindness resulting from combat at close quarters 7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although walkers possess \u2018agency\u2019, they operate in the \u2018absence of power\u2019, within, or beneath, the \u2018god-view\u2019 of the authority.8<\/sup><\/a> De Certeau therefore risks reproducing the binary he seeks to challenge: the omnipotence of power and the helplessness of the individual before it. As Doreen Massey argues, such a binary obscures the complex social relations through which power is produced and negotiated.9<\/sup><\/a> This is particularly problematic in analyses of colonial cities, where it reinforces the image of an all-powerful empire acting on a passive population. While de Certeau\u2019s effort to restore agency to \u2018the weak\u2019 is valiant, characterising their \u2018tactics\u2019 as unconscious and fragmented ultimately implies that they are still insignificant, incapable of driving change. Thus, the question is only intensified: how can we account simultaneously for the power of structures and the capacity of individuals to reproduce, negotiate and transform them?<\/p>\n

Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s invocation of the \u2018big Other\u2019, elaborating on Jacques Lacan\u2019s original conception, provides a way to approach the problem. The big Other does not refer to an individual or an institution but to the seemingly autonomous authority of the social order: the structures, rules and expectations that appear to exist independently above those that enact them.10<\/sup><\/a> Yet, when \u017di\u017eek claims, \u2018the big Other doesn\u2019t exist\u2019 he does not deny the reality of power but rather challenges the idea that power exists as a natural or autonomous structure.11<\/sup><\/a> The big Other has no existence independent of the people and institutions that reproduce it, yet it cannot be reduced to any one of them.<\/p>\n

This can be illustrated through the all-too-familiar frustration of bureaucracy: after waiting two hours on hold, the customer service representative informs you that, while they sympathise with your situation, their \u2018hands are tied\u2019.12<\/sup><\/a> By invoking regulations or higher-ups and referring only \u2018to decisions which have always already been made\u2019, they embody the authority of the \u2018system\u2019 they seem only to administer.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

This distinction is particularly useful for understanding colonial power. As Yeoh shows in her analysis of the Singapore Municipal Council, conflicts between government officials, councillors, ratepayers and professionals reveal how colonial power was actually practised: how legitimacy was claimed, negotiated for and given material effect.14<\/sup><\/a> Colonial authority was not simply an autonomous structure imposed from the \u2018god-view\u2019 above but was produced and reproduced through individuals who embodied and enacted institutional power.<\/p>\n

The methodological task, then, is not simply to replace the study of elites with the study of subalterns, but to examine the \u2018interface\u2019 through which power was enacted. It is through the \u2018daily encounter\u2019 that power can be studied:<\/p>\n

\n

in its external visage, at the point where it is in direct and immediate relationship [\u2026] it installs itself and produces its real effects 15<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Following Massey, this offers a way beyond the structure-agency binary by locating power in the relations between people, institutions and spaces. As Yeoh argues, while we must recognise the \u2018specific structural inequalities within colonial society\u2019 that constrained different groups\u2019 capacity to shape the built environment, these individuals (and groups) were also capable of intentional \u2018strategies\u2019: both those that were \u2018motivated and intended\u2019 and \u2018those habitually carried out in practical consciousness.\u201916<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Oriented in this way, de Certeau\u2019s insight that space is practised remains valuable, provided that \u2018practice\u2019 is understood not simply as the resistance of \u2018atomistic individuals\u2019 but the way that social relations construct \u2018the spatial\u2019, \u2018an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification.\u201917<\/sup><\/a> The colonial city should therefore be approached through the encounters in which authority became tangible: municipal meetings, planning disputes, petitions, regulations, professional networks, streets and buildings. The question is not simply who possessed power, but how actors mobilised, negotiated, subverted or reproduced its manifestations, practices enacted in space.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore<\/em> (Singapore, 2013), p.1.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid, <\/em>pp.5-8.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid, <\/em>p.5<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., <\/em>pp.3-4.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life<\/em> (Berkeley, 1984), p.35-6<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid., <\/em>p.xiv.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> De Certeau, Practice, <\/em>pp.35-6, 38.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Ibid., <\/em>p.38.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Doreen Massey, For Space<\/em> (London, 2005), pp.45-6.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, How to Read Lacan <\/em>(New York, 2006), p.8-10<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Section 3 from Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, \u2018The Big Other Doesn’t Exist\u2019, Journal of European Psychoanalysis<\/em>, 5, (1997)<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism<\/em> (Washington DC, 2009), p.25.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em><\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> See Yeoh, Contesting Space, <\/em>pp.28-59.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Michel Foucault, Power\/Knowledge<\/em>, p.97.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Yeoh, Contesting Space<\/em>, p.17.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender <\/em>(Cambridge, 2007), p.3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amongst scholars who have dwelt on colonial urbanisation, there is a dominant vein that agrees that the phenomenon of the \u2018colonial city\u2019 constituted a \u2018heterogeneous but distinct urban type\u2019.1 The explanations for this distinctiveness, however, have varied considerably. While Immanuel Wallerstein emphasised the colonies\u2019 specific \u2018peripheral\u2019 place within the expanding global frame of industrialisation, Ronald […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2078,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions\/2078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}