Beyond the postcolonial: Architecture, urban planning, and political cultures in Indonesia

This dissertation considers the production of architecture and space and the concomitant discourses of modernity and nationality in postcolonial Indonesia. Its central theme concerns the ways architecture and urban space are appropriated, represented, and politicized, or equally, nationalized, aestheticized and traditionalized, bought and sold in order to "develop" the nation following the end of formal colonial rule. The main objective is to see the discourses of architecture and urban planning in a postcolonial country as implicit or explicit evidence of political directions and tendencies and to understand them as socio-cultural forces that represent an emerging as well as declining social order.; I approach the subject by using one of the paradigms in postcolonial studies, that of "intertwined histories and overlapping territories." Looking at what the colonial and the postcolonial have done to each other, the dissertation shows the ways in which "old" colonial imaginings are restructuring the politics of time and space of the later postcolonial regime. Linking architecture and urban planning with their socio-political circumstances, I argue, is one of the first steps to remove "colonial culture" from the structure of architectural knowledge in the postcolony.