Remembering Tony: Anthony Douglas King (1931-2022)
Anthony D. King, a doyen of colonial urban studies, passed away on Nov 13, 2022, in Bristol, England, at the age of 91. A sociologist-turned-architectural historian-turned-leading theorist of global urbanism, he was the author of six monographs, three edited volumes, and scores of papers. His influence went well beyond the library or the classroom. In an academic career spanning fifty years, he inspired scholars with his wide-ranging contributions to architecture, planning and urban history, and was a de facto mentor of anyone who worked on colonial architecture and urbanism. His publications, translated into German, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, and Japanese, reached audiences around the world. In the book series Architext he edited with Tom Markus for Routledge, he nurtured the work of two generations of scholars and heartened many more to take up studies in this field (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The author list of Architext, Routledge.
Tony, as he was universally called, was born in the small cotton-manufacturing town of Darwen, England, in 1931. That same year Mahatma Gandhi made a detour from the Round Table Conference in London to visit Darwen’s India Mills in response to the boycott of Lancashire-manufactured cotton goods in India (Figure 2). The boycott as part of the civil rights movement in India had resulted in large-scale unemployment in the cotton towns of Lancashire. Everywhere he went, Tony noted about this historical visit, Gandhi emphasized that it was Britain’s colonial policy that destroyed India’s cotton industry: “if England faced unemployment, India faced starvation.”[1] It is tempting to imagine that this accident of history had something to do with Tony’s later interest in India and colonial economy and urbanization.
Figure 2. Mahatma Gandhi during his visit to Darwen, 1931.
Having spent the first 22 years of his life in Darwen, he would go on to live and work in Delhi, Leicester, Leeds, London, Bristol, Binghamton, Berkeley, to name a few places that comprised his global journey (Figures 3 and 4). Between 1965 and 1970 he was a faculty in Social Science and Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Having taught part time at Brunel University for several years, in 1987 he took up a faculty position in the Departments of Art History and Sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton, becoming the Bartle Professor of Art History and of Sociology from 2000 until his retirement in 2006.
Figure 3: Anthony King in Jakarta. Photograph courtesy Abidin Kusno.
Figure 4: Anthony King at the Fatahilla Museum, Jakarta, 2011. Photograph courtesy Abidin Kusno.
King’s first monograph Colonial Urban Development was published in 1976, followed in 1980 by Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, an edited volume of emergent scholarship that would define the social turn in architectural history. Both volumes were published before he launched his doctoral work, completed in 1982 at Brunel University. Long before it became fashionable to think of “global” cultures of architecture or even architecture as social history, he began asking how “the, social, political and especially the cultural processes” governed urban development. “Only with a thorough understanding of a society’s values, beliefs, institutions and social organisation is its built environment properly understood,” he argued.[2] In his 1982 PhD thesis on the bungalow as a global building type, he embarked upon “a comparative, inter-disciplinary approach to the-historical study of the built environment, drawing on social and cultural explanations of built form, the political economy of urbanisation and studies of the world system.”[3] He turned his PhD thesis into the groundbreaking book, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (1984).
From his first book in 1976, to his last collection of essays, Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban, published forty years later, Tony King worked tirelessly to establish colonial urbanism as a field of inquiry, and taught all of us how to think of empire contrapuntally—moving between metropole and colony—and notice the imprints of colonialism in everyday material culture.
His interest in the relationship between architecture and colonialism was sparked when he lived in Delhi. He noticed in cities in the subcontinent a distinctive urban pattern of segregation by race and class shaped by colonial occupation. The everyday language of urbanism in South Asia was suffused with colonial ideas and ideology. He thereafter set himself to understand why and how language (nomenclature), social organization and urban form were connected. This gave him entrée to the logic of segregated cities and the structure of authority that enabled their formation and functioning. In 1974 he wrote a paper enumerating the terms peculiar to the built environment produced by colonialism: cantonment, civil lines, compound, bungalow, circuit house, verandah, godown, gymkhana, dak, coolie, etc.—most of them derived from militarized occupation.[4] And notwithstanding the many political projects of decolonization, the terms and forms continued to prevail in the postcolonial era.
King’s scholarship was informed by a close-reading of the cultural milieu. As he wrote thinking back to his own scholarly turns:
It was on our return from India that I increasingly became aware of how deeply the traces of colonialism, and particularly, the colonial connection with India, were inscribed on the culture and identity of Britain, less through reading books and more through everyday practices.[5]
Everyday life and the ordinary urban resident remained the touchstones of his scholarship. Concluding a 1995 review of six major works on colonial urbanism published between 1989 and 1991, he wondered why the Indigenous, “native,” voice is so absent? Why is race, class and gender given a small presence in colonial histories? Why is there so little discussion of economy? Who is the subject of our scholarship?:
The historic colonial city (in its various forms) probably prefigures the urban future in both East and West rather better than does the contemporary Western city. Yet the important unresolved issue of all concerns the question of polysemicity and the meaning of these environments, whether colonial or postcolonial, for indigenous subjects.
In Paris, staring across the square to the Invalides where Lyautey's elaborate marble tomb rests not far from that of Napoleon, stand two bronze statues of Lyautey and Gallieni, the latter, a diminutive figure supported on the heads and shoulders of four female figures symbolizing the African and Asian colonies of France. What do the Parisian Algerians, Moroccans, Vietnamese, and other postcolonials make of these representations today, if anything?[6]
We met Tony at Berkeley, in the first year of our doctoral studies in the Department of Architecture where he was a visiting faculty. His Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (1990) had just been published to great acclaim. We were toying with the idea of pursuing work on modern cities. To our delight we found him not only approachable, but generous with his time and advice. He liked speaking to students and knew through his own experience that serendipity—the chance meeting and conversation—could be formative:
Depending on the pasts, presents and futures of the places and societies in which we live, of the languages (and accents) we learn and speak, we are presented with opportunities and constraints, opening up as well as closing off our options. And living in some parts of the world rather than others, and at particular historical conjunctures is, for most of its people, the factor which governs what these options are.
These histories and geographies, large and small. . . construct our subjectivities, our multiple identities, both social and intellectual. The circumstances and locations of our personal lives are therefore important in helping to explain, what as academics, we investigate and pursue.[7]
Figure 5: Anthony King in Vancouver. Photograph courtesy Abidin Kusno.
We were certainly fortunate to have met Tony at a formative stage of our careers, and for his good advice, sound critique, and encouragement in later years. His scholarly range and influence will continue to reverberate, informing the work of newer scholars, and his generosity, kindness, and wry humor will stay with us (Figure 5).
Citation
Swati Chattopadhyay and Zeynep Kezer, "Remembering Tony: Anthony Douglas King (1931-2022)," PLATFORM, Dec 12, 2022.
Notes
[1] Anthony D. King, “Ways of Seeing: Serendipity, Visuality, Experience,” Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (London: Routledge, 2004), 217.
[2] Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1976), xii.
[3] Anthony Douglas King, “The Bungalow, 1600-1980: A study of the cultural, social, political and economic factors in the production of a global house type,” PhD Thesis, School of Social Science, Brunel University (May 1982), 2.
[4] Anthony D. King, “The Language of Colonial Urbanization,” Sociology 8, no.4 (1974): 81-110.
[5] King, “Ways of Seeing,” 202.
[6] Anthony D. King, “Writing Colonial Space,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (July 1995), 553.
[7] King, “Ways of Seeing,” 189.
