A recent overview of the literature on colonial architecture and urbanism in India reminds us that the spatial analysis of buildings and urban form says much about economic, social, and cultural change.Footnote ¹ These two books, by an architectural historian and geographer, respectively, make significant, interdisciplinary contributions on this front and also point research in this field toward significant new directions.

William Glover's main title, Making Lahore Modern, is precise and to the point. Eschewing current preferences for notions of Other, or “alternative” modernities, he opts for a conception of the “modern city” as that in the late-nineteenth-century West, defined by three functional criteria: “zoning … a nominally secular form of institutionalized governance … and the concentration of industrial and commercial activities … in the service of a broader regional or national economy”; a city that “can exist empirically regardless of its geographical or cultural setting” (xiv). With this proposition, the book charts the way modern urbanism was brought to Lahore by British colonialism, following its conquest from the Sikhs in 1846 and showing how this was modified by cultural difference both Indian and British. Challenging earlier assumptions about the socio-spatial divide characterizing colonial urbanism in India, Glover documents the development of a city produced by collaboration between the British and an Indian elite.

Two key themes inform the book's theoretical framework: the idea of a “colonial spatial imagination” used by the British in planning the city, and their belief (shared by the Indian elite) that the material world had the power to shape human conduct and moral development. There is much of interest here, but for this reader the most innovative chapter traces the gradual transformation of Lahore's vernacular housing and, as it became influenced by new sanitary and public health knowledge, changes in the use of domestic space, including the adoption of specialized room functions and the house as a status symbol. Although the 1930s suburban “Model Town” with its bungalows may have introduced a modified form of Ebenezer Howard's reformist “garden city” ideas, the ex-government, Indian employees who lived there were more likely to follow traditional conceptions of family and social life. Glover also reminds us of the uncontrollable “disquieting anxieties” attached to British bungalow life.

This is an original, sophisticated, and very well-researched account that draws on a rich fund of British and Indian sources, contemporary fiction, extensive fieldwork, and recent work on colonial urbanism. Yet there is also an unusual absence: none of the book's maps of Lahore show, in one image, the three constituent elements of what I would maintain is the “colonial city”; that is, Old City, Civil Station, and Cantonment as, for example, depicted in the map of Lahore (and eight other north Indian cities) in the Government of India's Imperial Gazetteer of India Atlas (1931). Restricting the notion of the “colonial city” to the “modern city” developed in the Civil Station (59) neglects the fundamental function of the Cantonment as the source of sovereign military power and ultimate controlling force without which the “colonial city” could not exist.

The title of Stephen Legg's book is equally apposite. It points immediately to the Foucaultian conceptual tool kit which Legg uses to peel away the superficial appearance of order conveyed by the maps and actual physical-spatial layout of New Delhi, to reveal the extent of disorder, racial privilege, and social and political unrest accompanying the building of India's new capital (1911–1947). Although the introduction to Foucault's central ideas may seem a little daunting to the uninitiated, Legg uses these well-tried concepts (sovereign power, discipline, archaeology, analytics, surveillance, visibility, episteme, and so forth) to extremely good effect in interpreting some fascinating archival material. While the book is of special interest to Foucault aficionados, it also has new things to say about New Delhi and colonial urbanism generally.

Following the introduction, other chapters examine classificatory, disciplinary, and biopolitical power in a particular governmental landscape of ordering. While the theoretical sophistication of the book cannot be captured in a brief review, chapter 2 provides a “spatial archaeology” of residential and racial segregation in New Delhi's well-documented hierarchical classification system based on rank, race, class, gender, and religion-as-culture. Here housing acted not only as a form of shelter but also, within the spatial hierarchy, as “a physical space of subjectification” (39). What is a new insight is that throughout the 1920s and 1930s, because of economies and miscalculations, deliberate under-building of housing by the government created constant crises of accommodation, leading to rancor and protests, and a situation where 66 percent of the government's own workforce had no accommodation. The result was massive overcrowding in the Old City, with rapidly rising levels of sickness and mortality. Social unrest and protest were exacerbated by revisions in housing provision that privileged European senior officers at the expense of Indian government clerks.

Chapter 3, “Disciplining Delhi,” focuses on the policing of crime and terrorism as anti-colonial nationalism built up between the attempted assassination of the Viceroy in 1912 and the Quit India Movement of 1942. Legg describes the incredibly complex strategies of surveillance and control: the constant flow of rules, regulations, and legislation prohibiting innumerable activities; the partitioning of the Old City and development of “diagrams” for disciplining its space; rules governing the width of streets used by the Viceroy, the rationale being always one of “visibility”; the use of female police officers of untouchable status to confront physical protests by upper caste women nationalists; the deployment of new forms of techne (tear gas, armored cars); the intelligence gathering, controlling, and policing of the often violently conflicting spaces and times of religious processions and festivals of Delhi's different communities. Legg's research here invests an immense sense of dynamism and action into earlier accounts of the capital's development. Chapter 4, “Biopolitics and the Urban Environment,” addresses among other issues the government's aims to regulate the rapidly deteriorating health state of the Old City population, especially excessive mortality from tuberculosis. Legg, like Glover, seeks to undo the “dual city” concept of colonial urbanism by emphasizing the essential interaction and interdependency between old and new city, a theme central to his thesis. These two richly textured books illuminate each other. Reading them together expands the interpretation of both.