- Europeanization of the Cities
While current debate is already problematizing a global "Americanization of the city", another question is left unexamined: To what extent can the European urban model, treated as the endangered contrary model, be at all separated from the violence of its historical expansion around the world? How tolerant and cosmopolitan can an urban culture be that imposed itself as a framework, still effective today, over urban structures in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, even destroying them entirely, or, vice versa, today rigorously prevents streams of refugees and migrants from entering its purportedly cosmopolitan model - using mechanisms of segregation, such as refugee camps, that are supposed to contradict their essential character?

Social-spatial segregation is an export product of the European colonial masters: The division of the urban space into a "European city" and a "native zone" was in the nineteenth century the central colonial principle of urban construction. While white rulers reserved areas for themselves and ruled these districts as copies of their respective home model, the "African village," spatially separated from the European centre by a neutral cordon sanitaire, was at first left on its own. The claim that the "natives" maintained a rural way of life, and only stayed in the cities temporarily, while the whites were used to a European standard, legitimated this racial separation through urban planning (see Stren/Halfani 2001). Residents of these "native zones" were considered illegal immigrants (Mitullah/ Kibwana 1998). Up until the last decade of their rule, colonial rulers operated with a notion of the "African" city as temporary, despite ample evidence to the contrary: For example, the East African Royal Commission reported still in 1955: "Centres had to be established at places where they [the Europeans] could live free of the dangers of tropical diseases ... The city was not an adequate habitat for a lasting African society" (quoted in Cochrane 1999, p.302).

The European fear of catching disease from the African population played a central role here. Using the example of Leopoldville, today the megacity Kinshasa with six million residents, the anthropologist Filip De Boeck (2002), referring to Foucault, showed that the construction of the colonial city was closely linked to technologies of control that formed with the rise of the nation-state: With the new social categories of irrationality, marginality, or deviance, "geographies of perversion" emerged, such as the prison, the work camp, the asylum or the colony, that served to separate this "other," stigmatizing or pathologizing it. Medicine, inseparably linked to nineteenth century imperialism, played a central role in the design of colonial cities both ideologically as well as in terms of practical policy: The aim, motivated both economically and morally, to reduce illness rates among the "natives" legitimated drastic interventions in local forms of living, the construction of new forms of settlement, and the control of the life customs of the colonialized subjects. The racification of society allowed colonial rulers to bring cities to conform with Western notions of aesthetics, spatial conception, and social everyday life.

This can be illustrated using the example of Lagos: Before British rule a socially integrated Yoruba settlement, marked by block houses for extended families, Lagos had become by Nigerian independence a multiethnic metropolis, divided along lines of "race" and class. When the British named the city capital of Nigeria in 1914, workers migrated there from all over British West Africa. The colonial answer to the emerging housing problem, as Nkiru Nzegwu (1996) explains, is an example of the injection of "racist" values classifying humanity into the urban landscape: Since the colonial rulers considered native architecture mere "huts and shacks" and the traditional informal use of space as "messy" and "chaotic", they could declare these spaces slums posing a health danger. Their massive demolition was legitimated by the stereotype of the "dirty African" and arguments of hygienics. Since the colonial myth of the temporary presence of African workers also played a role here, the Public Works Department built small single-person huts, thus preventing African residents from living in larger households, the preferred form of living. These huts would become the precursors of today's shantytowns.

- The Bourgeois City
The European influence on large cities in South America during the twentieth century, which at the start of the century had already been decolonized for decades, operated in a more subtle fashion. In Rio de Janeiro, which underwent an industrial boom after the end of slavery, the elites oriented themselves towards the radical reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann, still considered by today's urbanists as the originator of the European bourgeois city, although the military-strategic motivations of his model have long been known (Benjamin 1982). Following the Parisian model, between 1902 and 1906 huge swathes were cut through the city under the Passos reform, destroying entire working-class neighbourhoods to erect bourgeois boulevards and middle-class housing. Here as well, the so-called corticos, where former slaves and poor European immigrants had already established an Afro-Brazilian street culture, had been previously stigmatized as dangerous breeding grounds for epidemics and moral decay. Now, thousands of homeless people who could not afford new housing after the destruction of their former homes occupied the steep hillsides around the city, founding the first of over 600 irregular settlements that now house far more than one million people - and themselves are now considered the prime source of urban violence and decay (see Abreu 1988).

Whether in Paris or Rio de Janeiro, the construction of the modern "European" metropolis enabled the bourgeoisie for the first time to put the lower classes at a distance and ban them from the city. While the celebrated boulevards, so euphorically described by their advocates, served the representation of bourgeois male citizens, the poor, workers, and women, now confined to the private home, disappeared from public life: The historical form of European urbanity that supposedly integrated all social groups essentially served the needs of one class only.

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