The Study focuses on the social and, more especially, the cultural processes governing colonial urban development and develops a theory and methodology to do this.

The author demonstrates how the physical and spatial arrangements characterizing urban development are unique products of a particular society, to be understood only in terms of its values, behaviour and institutions and the distribution of social and political power within it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in ”colonial cities” of Asia and Africa where the environmental assumptions of a dominant, industrializing Western power were introduced to largely ”pre-industrial” societies. Anthony King draws his material primarily from these areas, and includes a case study of the development of colonial Delhi from the early nineteenth century to 1947. Yet, as the author explains, the problems of how cultural social and political factors influence the nature of environments and how these in turn affect social processes and behaviour, are of global significance.

This book was first published in 1976.