Summary

Repair is increasingly associated with care, resilience, and recovery. However, it can also be a selective, exclusionary, and deeply political practice. This session examines repair in colonial contexts, both as a material practice and a political technology through which colonial urbanism was sustained.

Colonial urbanism depended on continuous regimes of maintenance and repair as much as on planning and construction. Roads, drainage systems, bridges, public buildings, ports, and other infrastructures required constant upkeep to sustain everyday urban life and colonial governance. Decisions about what was repaired, when, how, and by whom were never impartial. They directed labour, technical expertise, and financial resources towards particular spaces while neglecting others, reinforcing unequal urban landscapes and reproducing colonial dynamics.

The session proposes repair not simply as an object of historical enquiry but as an analytical prism through which to rethink colonial urbanism in terms of its materiality, narratives, and representations. It welcomes papers from different empires, regions, and historical periods that explore the relationships between repair, labour, infrastructure, governance, technology, and the production of urban space. Contributions may examine the organisation of maintenance work, public works administrations, municipal services, repair economies, technical knowledge, material practices and re-use, or the discourses of improvement, sanitation, rehabilitation, and maintenance through which colonial interventions were justified and contested.

What does repair make visible that histories of planning and construction leave out? By bringing workers, routines, materials, failures, improvisations, and decisions about neglect into the history of urban design, the session seeks to reconsider where and when urban design takes place. It asks whether the colonial city might be understood not only through the spaces that were conceived and built, but through the unequal processes that determined what was kept functioning, what was altered, and what was allowed to deteriorate.

Abstracts for papers must be submitted online by 11:59 pm GMT, on Friday, 18th December 2026.

Click here to submit your proposal and learn more about SUDHT.

Image credit: Major repairs to the Luanda–Dondo road: spreading and levelling of bituminous rock (AHU, OP5200, 1945).