Colonial Domesticity and the Modern City: Bandung in the Early Twentieth-Century Netherlands Indies

Abstract

The article shows that the expansion of modern colonial cities in the first half of twentieth-century Netherlands Indies was a result of changing colonial domesticity. The rise of European families along with the modernized middle-class Indonesian and Indonesian-Chinese families opened the market for a new kind of urban living space. Decentralization of municipalities made possible stronger relationship between local government and city boosters, who had connection with the real estate and tourism industries. This changing class and economic relations in the city resulted in the formation of an urban institution that linked local governance, the real estate industry, and the production of urban colonial imaginaries that were modern and predicated on a fetish of white, European urban spaces. Such a phenomenon has not yet been fully explored in the context of colonial cities.