Impact of Colonization on Urbanization in the Global South

Walk through the historic streets of Manila, Mumbai, or Lagos and you will notice something remarkable: the bones of these cities were not laid down by their own people. Wide colonial boulevards, segregated quarters, port-centric layouts, and gridiron plans imported from Europe still dictate how millions live, work, and commute today. The story of urbanization in the Global South cannot be told without colonization, because the two are deeply intertwined. Colonial powers did not just rule territories; they restructured how societies inhabited space, often replacing organic, locally rooted settlement systems with cities designed for extraction and administration. The consequences, from sprawling informal settlements to extreme urban primacy, continue to define the urban experience across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

How colonization reshaped traditional settlement systems 🔗

Long before European powers arrived, regions across Asia, Africa, and Latin America had thriving urban traditions. Cities in China, India, the Middle East, and the pre-Columbian Americas grew organically based on trade routes, religious practices, water sources, and local governance. Colonization disrupted this trajectory by imposing a fundamentally different model of urban growth, one that responded to the economic and administrative needs of distant metropoles rather than local communities.

Researchers describe this as imposed urbanization: city growth shaped by external demand for raw materials, administrative control, and military positioning. European colonization restructured economies around agricultural and mining capitalism, with globally oriented port cities expanding rapidly while inland manufacturing centres, some with long traditions of proto-industrialism, declined. Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in India, or Lagos in Nigeria, did not grow because local economies demanded them. They grew because empires needed harbours through which to ship cotton, tea, spices, and minerals out, and finished European goods in.

Segmented and segregated colonial cities 🔗

One of the most visible legacies of colonial planning is the segmented city. Colonial administrators rarely integrated with the populations they governed. Instead, they built parallel cities: a “white town” or “civil lines” with wide avenues, bungalows, clubs, and sanitation, separated by a buffer zone from the “native quarter,” which was denser, poorly serviced, and often saw little public investment. Old Delhi versus New Delhi, or the cantonment areas in nearly every Indian city, are textbook examples of this dual structure.

This spatial segregation was not incidental; it was central to colonial governance. It encoded race, class, and political hierarchy into the very layout of the city. Even after independence, these patterns persist. The well-planned colonial cores continue to host elite residential and commercial districts, while the historically neglected zones often remain the sites of overcrowded housing and weak infrastructure.

Imported planning systems 🔗

Colonial planning did not just affect appearances; it rewrote the legal and institutional framework of urban governance. In Nigeria, contemporary urban planning law traces directly to the 1932 Town and Country Planning Act of the United Kingdom, which formed the basis for the 1946 Nigerian Town and Country Planning Ordinance and continues to shape the current Urban and Regional Planning Law. Singapore’s planning legislation similarly derived from the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. India’s town planning acts, building bye-laws, and municipal structures also carry strong colonial imprints.

The problem is not simply that these laws are foreign. It is that they were designed for low-density European contexts and for governing colonial subjects, not for managing the rapid, complex urbanization of post-colonial societies. Many planning frameworks still treat informal housing and street vending as illegal nuisances rather than as essential responses to housing and employment shortages.

Case study: The making of Metro Manila 🔗

Few cities illustrate the layered impact of colonization on urbanization as clearly as Metro Manila. The Spanish built the walled city of Intramuros in the 16th century using a gridiron plan that blended Western and New World urban techniques in an Asian setting, complete with European-style fortifications. This was not Manila adapting to global trends; it was a colonial template being installed onto a pre-existing trading port.

For more than 250 years before the Spanish arrived in 1571, Manila had been a prosperous trading hub linked to China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond. During both Spanish and later American rule, colonial policies deliberately promoted Manila as a primate city, with the countryside economically exploited to support the colonial bureaucracy in the capital. Manila became the single gateway for exporting agricultural products and raw materials to Europe and the United States, and for importing manufactured goods in return.

Layered colonial influences 🔗

The American colonial period (1898 onwards) added another planning layer. Wide boulevards, neoclassical government buildings, and Daniel Burnham’s “City Beautiful” plan reshaped central Manila in the early 20th century. These changes deepened the city’s role as the political and economic nucleus of the Philippines, while also concentrating modern infrastructure, education, and health facilities almost entirely within it.

Economic disparity and informal employment 🔗

Today, rapid urbanization in Metro Manila has produced severe overpopulation, traffic congestion, and widespread informal settlements, even as commercial districts like Makati and Bonifacio Global City have flourished. The result is a deeply unequal metropolis where gleaming financial hubs sit beside vast slum communities. Millions of residents earn their living in the informal economy as jeepney drivers, street vendors, domestic workers, and small-scale manufacturers, because the formal economy cannot absorb everyone who migrates to the city.

This is not accidental. Colonial economic structures concentrated investment in a single capital, drained the countryside of opportunity, and shaped a labour market that has continued to produce surplus workers. Post-colonial governments inherited this lopsided structure, and despite decades of policy effort, Metro Manila still generates a disproportionate share of national GDP while housing some of the country’s most precarious urban communities.

Urban primacy in the Global South 🔗

The Manila example points to a broader pattern: urban primacy, where a single city dominates a country’s urban system in population, economy, and political influence. In most countries of the Global South, the primate city is the former colonial capital. The pattern is so consistent that geographer Mark Jefferson formulated his famous “Law of the Primate City” in 1939, observing that one city in many nations is “disproportionately large and exceptionally expressive of national capacity and feeling.”

Colonial powers established or developed one administrative centre to serve as the nexus of political control and economic extraction. Railways, ports, telegraph lines, universities, hospitals, and government offices were concentrated there. Once independence arrived, that concentration became self-reinforcing: businesses located near government, migrants moved toward jobs, and infrastructure investment continued to favour the already-developed city.

Bangkok: primacy without formal colonization 🔗

Thailand was never formally colonized, yet Bangkok shows how external pressures can still produce extreme urban primacy. The Bangkok urban area accounts for nearly 80 percent of the total urban area in Thailand, and the metropolitan region houses close to 10 million people. The city is about forty times larger than Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city, and dominates Thai political, economic, and intellectual life.

Several factors drove this. In the 19th century, European powers pressured Thailand to open its economy through unequal treaties, and Bangkok became the primary node connecting the country to global trade. Major infrastructure, including Thailand’s first railway lines and port facilities, was concentrated there. As the royal capital, Bangkok also housed all significant political functions, creating a cycle of investment that smaller cities could not match. The result is uneven regional development, severe traffic congestion in the capital, and persistent inequality between Bangkok and the rest of the country.

Why primacy matters 🔗

Urban primacy is not just a demographic curiosity. It distorts national development. When one city captures most of a country’s investment, talent, and political attention, smaller cities and rural areas struggle to retain people or generate opportunities. This pushes more migration toward the primate city, worsening congestion, housing shortages, and pollution while leaving the rest of the country underdeveloped. India’s experience with the dominance of metro cities like Mumbai and Delhi, even alongside other large cities, reflects similar dynamics, although on a less extreme scale than Manila or Bangkok.

Over-urbanization and the informal economy 🔗

Closely linked to primacy is the phenomenon of over-urbanization: cities growing faster than their capacity to provide jobs, housing, water, sanitation, and transport. Between 1950 and 1975, the Global South’s urban population grew by 188 percent, compared to about 100 percent in the Global North during its swiftest urbanization between 1875 and 1900. The speed and scale are simply different.

In the Global North, urbanization was largely pulled by industrial job creation. In much of the Global South, it has been pushed by rural poverty, agrarian distress, and limited rural alternatives. People arrive in cities hoping for a better life, but the formal economy cannot absorb them. The result is a vast informal sector, from street vendors and rickshaw pullers to home-based garment workers and waste collectors, alongside sprawling informal settlements often built on marginal land.

This pattern is partly a colonial inheritance. Colonial economies were structured to extract resources, not to industrialize local societies. Post-colonial nations often inherited weak manufacturing bases, dependent trade relationships, and infrastructure that served export rather than internal development. Even decades later, this shapes the kinds of livelihoods cities can offer.

Why this history still matters 🔗

Understanding the colonial roots of urbanization in the Global South is not just an academic exercise. It explains why solutions imported wholesale from Western planning textbooks often fail. Master plans that ignore informal settlements, zoning laws that criminalize street vending, or transport projects that prioritize highways over walking and public transit all echo a colonial logic that treated the existing city as something to be cleaned up rather than understood.

More inclusive approaches are emerging. Urban researchers and movements across the Global South are pushing for planning that recognizes informal housing as part of the city, that strengthens secondary cities to reduce primacy, and that draws on local cultural and ecological knowledge rather than imported models. Decolonizing urban thinking is slow work, but it is essential if cities like Manila, Mumbai, Lagos, and Bangkok are to serve their residents rather than the ghosts of empire.

What do you think? Look at the city or town closest to you: which features of its layout, governance, or economy do you think carry colonial imprints, and which feel rooted in local needs? If you were redesigning a Global South city today, would you focus more on reducing urban primacy or on integrating the informal economy into formal planning, and why?

References

1. https://citychangers.org/editorial-colonial-urbanism/
2. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/69045
3. https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6715/
4. https://pidswebs.pids.gov.ph/CDN/PUBLICATIONS/pidsdps9903.pdf
5. https://histofreak.com/manila-through-ages-timeline-of-asias-pearl-of-the-orient/
6. https://unhabitat.org/thailand
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261572759_Bangkok_The_Political_Economy_of_a_Hyperurbanized_Primate_City
8. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/114262/1/RandolphStorper_Is_Urbanization_in_the_Global_South_Fundamentally_DifferentAccepted2021.pdf