Topothesia

Ameeth Vijay approaches town planning as a kind of speculative fiction, tracing how it has been shaped by British colonial rule and liberal political thought. A central thread is the idea of place itself and the way these forces have defined it.

Covering the period from the late nineteenth century to the present, the book argues that Britain's current landscape, with its steep inequalities and divisions along racial lines, carries forward ideas about place that were first developed in colonial settings. Planning, the author contends, produces imagined future towns that promise to settle political conflict while remaining realistic enough to be built. Such imaginings could only have emerged within the ideological structures of colonialism and empire.

The title refers to a rhetorical figure that vividly describes a place, often one that does not exist. Drawing on this device, Vijay argues that planning functions as a narrative form, so that even routine planning documents tend to generate elaborate visions of places yet to be built. Through a study of particular planning movements across different eras, the book examines what these speculative worlds look like and what is at stake in them.

Planners have repeatedly borrowed from literary critiques of the present and from dreams of the future, adopting the style of literature while discarding its critical edge. At the same time, writers and artists have worked both inside and against these colonial imaginaries, searching for alternative ways to represent place.