Regarding Statues: Whiteness,Space,and the Postcolonial European Imagination

Abstract

In recent years, there have been renewed calls to remove colonial statues in many European cities. The increased politicization of colonial heritage has become a matter of concern to urban planning as heritage disputes have erupted over the presence of specific statues and other monuments. In this paper, I argue that the retention of colonial statues is a racially charged political act that reinforces the white domination of space. I draw on critical phenomenology to demonstrate the power of material artifacts within public culture.

In the summer of 2020 protests erupted over the presence of statues commemorating colonialism in European cities. There were calls to remove statues of figures who had glorified or directly benefited from the trade in enslaved people and colonial violence, along with demands to rename buildings, streets, and public spaces. After this brief period of reflection there has been a strong backlash that is intent on the re-valorization of these figures and a shielding of colonial history from closer scrutiny. This paper seeks to make a critical intervention at this historical juncture that is of particular significance for heritage planning, place making, and attempts to foster greater public understanding of the past.

The focus of this paper is on the role of statues as a distinctive form of public heritage that glorifies colonialism. Arguments for the retention of colonial statues in European cities are routinely underpinned by claims that their value as objects with material heritage precludes their removal or relocation. While there is a significant literature on these topics in a variety of global postcolonial contexts, there has thus far been only a limited engagement with the legacy of colonialism and urban planning as a racialized colonial practice within European cities (see Ha and Picker 2022; McClymont 2021; Winkler 2018). My paper builds on recent calls to decolonize the planning profession and its epistemological frameworks (see Ortiz 2023; Porter 2023; Sweet 2021; Winkler 2018) and to further examine how whiteness is systematically protected within urban planning (see Dantzler 2021; Goetz, Williams, and Damiano 2020; Kwon and Nguyen 2023; Sweet and Etienne 2011; Williams 2020).

I argue that state protections of colonial statues sustain a fertile ground for the continuation of a celebratory pro-colonial narrative centered around white European history and identity. There is an urgent need for the planning discipline to consider how national material heritage has been extensively co-opted as part of a populist attempt to rehabilitate imperial histories (Griffini 2023). Colonial statues have been reactivated as an important terrain of racial power. Violent episodes from the past have been enlisted à la Maurice Halbwachs’s classic account of collective memory in the service of a contested present to reaffirm the visible presence of white privilege in public space. The challenge for a decolonial planning discourse is the articulation of how colonial statues serve as valorized objects that create a distinctive form of legibility between the past and present as part of the ongoing epistemological project that refuses any engagement with the cultural and historical origins of racism.

Colonial Statues and European Heritage Imaginaries

The protection of colonial statues has often relied on problematic claims that these monuments reflect a public consensus extending to the veneration of individual historical figures. Engaging with the specificities of “statue politics” opens up a more nuanced approach to understanding how contemporary pro-colonial political perspectives are attempting to protect physical commemoration of specific facets of the past within the urban fabric. The insistence on a public consensus hides the degree of objection toward individual statues and the glorification of colonialism, including contemporaneous public criticism of their construction (see, for example, Desmarest 2018; Drayton 2019). The historian Idesbald Goddeeris (2015), for instance, notes a series of engagements with colonial monuments from the 1960s, including the toppling of statues by activists, as well as the re-dedication of colonial monuments to anti-colonialism. Responses to statues of Belgium’s King Leopold II, for example, have been to cover them with red paint or in one instance remove a hand as a direct reference to the mutilations carried out on Congolese people. Yet, instead of being considered ways to speak of colonial histories, these interventions are generally categorized as criminal damage. A pervasive lack of critical reflexivity as to the processes of meaning-making reveals the limitations of situating colonial statues as part of a generalized heritage culture. In the European context, a focus on heritage has become increasingly pivotal to the mobilization of Far Right anti-migrant discourse and the articulation of white Christian identity. In this paper, however, I argue that despite the pathbreaking work of Stuart Hall (1999), there has been a notable absence of engagement with the wider debates around heritage values within European planning scholarship, despite the burgeoning field of work in the wider urban sociological field (see, for example, Kølvraa and Knudsen 2020).

The racial lacunae that exist within European planning perspectives have worked to hinder the sustained integration of racial justice within planning considerations. For all the physical inscription of colonialism within European cities, and the ongoing highly urbanized racial inequalities, race remains a peripheral issue within European planning textbooks (see, for example, Dühr, Colomb, and Nadin 2010) or more problematically when race is addressed the discussion can resort to racialized stereotypes (see, for example, P.Hall 2014). The sidelining of race, or its misrepresentation within planning, has been a subject of close attention for some scholars (J. M.Thomas 1994; H.Thomas 2004; J. M.Thomas and Ritzdorf 1997). But it is only recently that authors such as Noa K. Ha and Giovanni Picker turn to the absence of meaningful integration of race in European urban studies and how this neglect of colonialism has distorted the field. The centrality of race to the construction of urban space and the historical development of planning can only be denied through the ways in which European urban space has been viewed as a study that is distinct from colonial territories. European colonialism and its ongoing legacy of racial hierarchies remain poorly understood or engaged with as central to the development of disciplines such as urban sociology or planning (Beebeejaun 2022; Bhambra 2007; Njoh 2009).

The emphasis of heritage protection on listed designations underpins the claim that removing statues is a form of what I will term here “historical subtraction.” These statue protections may pertain to the importance of the individual, the setting, the sculptor, or some form of architectural merit but they deem that the retention of the object represents a kind of public interest. ¹ However, the recourse to these protections over an object is extended to argue that they require a permanent place in the particular urban space in which they are situated. The absence of engagement is puzzling given the value determinations made through heritage planning. The technical field of heritage planning itself has emerged from an ad hoc set of interests concerned with preservation of historical built form in the face of industrialization in the nineteenth century, widespread war-time destruction, and the impact of postwar modernist planning initiatives (Hosagrahar 2017). Consequently, heritage planners have always worked within tensions between the preservation or conservation of historic buildings in the face of an economic growth–oriented and development-led planning system (Larkham 2002).

The planner John Pendlebury, for example, has illuminated the ways in which diverse actors have attempted to gain control of heritage narratives. For Pendlebury (2013, 714), it is clear that heritage values can be considered to be “culturally and historically constructed.” Despite the acknowledgment that “heritage often has ugly and regressive sides” (Pendlebury and Veldpaus 2018, 450), there has been limited engagement with how this might be understood and engaged with in a racially diverse and postcolonial Europe (see Boyd 2000; Hodder 1999; McClelland et al. 2013).

Within Europe, the Faro convention of 2005 emphasized the prioritization of community perspectives in deciding what can be considered heritage (see Schofield 2014). While these aspirations may have positive dimensions through expanding the conceptualization of heritage away from elite perspectives, there are clearly tensions given the absence of an understanding of heritage’s role in racialized historical narratives. The preservation of colonial statues has instead been pitted as “matters of fact” in the historical record versus contemporary value judgments that are considered to be an inappropriate mechanism to evaluate statues of these figures. Yet, these assertions do not recognize the processes in which heritage becomes enrolled into a form of authorized history (see also Smith 2006). The cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1999, 6) notes, for example, the deep politicization of heritage in the context of postcolonial Britain in an argument that could equally apply to many other European nations:

The Heritage inevitably reflects the governing assumptions of its time and context. It is always inflected by the power and authority of those who have colonised the past, whose versions of history matter . . . who is the Heritage for? In the British case the answer is clear. It is intended for those who “belong”—a society which is imagined as, in broad terms, culturally homogeneous and unified.

Hall (1999, 7) notes that “when it [imperial history] does appear, it is largely narrated from the viewpoint of the colonisers” One of the key arguments for the retention of statues has been focused on the claim that to remove them is to adversely judge our ancestors and the historic values of “our nation.” For example, a statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French statesman who served under Louis XIV, and is located at the front of the Palais Bourbon in Paris, was sprayed with red paint in June 2020. ² Protestors pointed to Colbert’s involvement in the trade in enslaved people as author of the Code Noir, a set of regulations that “recognized slavery in the colonies as ‘necessary and authorized.’ This degree defined African slaves as property” (Chatman 2000, 145). The Code Noir also ordered the expulsion of all Jewish people from the French colonies. However, this statue was unveiled in 1810, well over one hundred years after Colbert’s death in 1683. The veneration of Colbert occurred during a period when France’s participation in enslavement was even more heavily politically contested having been abolished in 1794 but reinstated under Napoleon in 1802. In response to this controversy, however, a furious President Macron, in a live TV address to the nation in summer 2020, declared that “the Republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history.” ³ The statue was subsequently given twenty-four-hour police protection for a time.

Colbert is an example of one of the many European figures who form part of a key strand of nation building facilitated through rapid industrialization, city expansion, and urban planning (Moody 2021). The role, in part, of these efforts was to help to create nationalist narratives as well as to erase or obscure former involvement in the trade of enslaved people and attempts to bolster waning imperialism (Nasar 2020). Similarly, in Belgian cities, multiple statues of King Leopold have been constructed as part of a legacy of veneration. The city of Leuven decided to relocate their Leopold statue to the city hall basement. Yet in Ostend, by contrast, a highly controversial equestrian statue which has depictions of kneeling enslaved Congolese people at the base remains. And in the town of Namur, a statue of Leopold provides a meeting point for those who continue to celebrate his legacy (Stanard 2011).

Another controversial and highly publicized recent case is that of Edward Colston (1636–1721) whose commemorative statue was constructed in Bristol in 1895 some 170 years after his death and nearly ninety years after the British abolition of slavery act of 1807. Colston’s centrality to the trade in enslaved people is well documented but nineteenth-century Bristolian elites developed the legacy to promote a myth of Colston as philanthropist as part of an effort to suppress working-class dissent (Nasar 2020). The historian David Olusoga (2020) notes that the main surprise for many international observers was not the toppling of the statue but the fact that Bristol still had a public statue of a high-profile trader in enslaved people. In parallel with the veneration of colonial figures, historians have pointed to how elite control of colonial cultural legacies helped to ensure that individuals and communities that participated in the anti-slavery Abolition movement and that had popular support in domestic politics were neglected (see Drescher 1994; Midgley 1996; Nasar 2020; Oldfield 2012). At the time such statues were being erected, for example, women and children were actively involved in abstention movements that boycotted West Indian sugar and sought to emphasize the inhumanity of Britain’s trade in enslaved people during the 1780s and 1820s (see Gleadle and Hanley 2020; Midgley 1996).

The historian Matthew Stanard (2011) argues that the role of colonial statues is more ambiguous as not every observer engages with or has knowledge of colonial history. But the capacity to be disengaged from the history of European colonialism or to venerate it offers a form of white privilege that extends through space, enabling a form of “white innocence” toward colonial genocide and violence. The claim that calls to topple these statues are based on a harshly judgmental set of values or views that could be ameliorated with more historical information has led to policies of “retain and explain,” contending that it is possible to reconcile or clarify deeply divergent positions. For example, the legal scholar Richard Harwood’s (2020, 334) useful discussion of the planning framework for statue protection comments in relation to statues of individuals who benefited from the trade in enslaved people that “[t]he special interest in such a statue is more likely to derive from the physical characteristics of that statue, its own history and its contribution to location. It is less likely that disapproval of a historic figure would justify delisting of a statue of them.” The claim that the problem is a form of contingent “disapproval” minimizes the ways in which colonialism is inscribed within urban space and in which the protection of whiteness is part of wider racial politics of amnesia.

Although an effort to engage with the complexity of disputes can be productive, under current legislative frameworks these viewpoints emphasize the problematic of participation within current dominant historical discourses (Kanobana 2023). A “community voice” is important yet unable to break free from the inadequate evaluative framework which obscures the protection of whiteness within space. In the next section, I turn to other ways of engaging with the statues controversy that more fully center on the urban realm. I examine work at the intersection of critical phenomenology and critical race studies to explore how whiteness is protected in urban space and the implications this has for a more complex engagement with heritage planning issues. The urban provides an essential realm not only in the emplacement of statues and monuments but in thinking about how these impact social relations of urban dwellers and their sense of belonging and non-belonging.

Whiteness and Urban Space

The neglect of race within urban planning has been emphasized through a series of important contributions in the late 1980s and 1990s from North American scholars and practitioners. Robert Mier (1994), for instance, who worked within Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s administration, turned to the contradictions between the marginalization of race from the urban agenda despite its clear centrality to understanding planning and the urban realm (see also Grigsby 1994). Teresa Córdova (1994) goes further through her challenge to the inherent coloniality of planning and calls for greater understanding of the pitfalls of presuming that participation ameliorates these inequalities if we are not attentive to modes of epistemic silencing.

In recent years, there has been a renewed focus on racial capitalism along with questions of whiteness and white supremacy. The urban studies scholar Ed Goetz and colleagues, Rashad Williams and Anthony Damiano (2020, 143) have written compellingly in the U.S. context that “Systems of racial oppression are undertheorized in urban planning despite the large literature in the field that focuses on race, segregation, and the urban impact of racial discrimination.” They set out an agenda for uncovering how planning preserves white urban space while at same time rendering whiteness invisible (see also Dantzler 2021; Williams 2020). While this literature’s principal concerns turn on forms of Black exclusion from white spaces and access to wealth and housing in the American context, they also offer an important framework that demands we interrogate the “invisibility” of Whiteness and calls for “examining the ways in which racial exclusion is practiced and maintained, the means by which racial practices create and preserve the value of whiteness and how racial hierarchies are sustained over time” (Goetz, Williams, and Damiano 2020, 143, emphasis in original). The planning theorist Anna Livia Brand (2022, 277), for example, urges us to “unearth” how planning has been a mechanism to allow racial domination in space and calls for us to examine further how “whiteness acts through space and is constituted spatially through a sedimentary process that obscures the very nature of white supremacy and white privilege as a spatialized praxis.”

The role of planning to effect racial ordering and the usages of monuments and civic architecture to promote European power and claims of civilization has been explored in postcolonial scholarship (Bhandar 2018; Porter 2013, 2023; Wright 1991). Despite these interventions into how planning emphasized dominant systems, values, and meanings preserve and valorize whiteness, these insights remain neglected within the former imperial European metropoles (see Ha and Picker 2022).

The ostensible absence of a racial analysis surrounding statues and monuments that commemorate or glorify colonialism currently prevents an unpacking of planning and preservation narratives. Arguably, the concept of heritage renders them more sympathetic, decentering their construction away from pro-colonial stances to one of familiar and valued presence. Local opposition points to the ways in which removal becomes framed as an attack on white identity, flattened into ideas of community and history, rather than markers of white power in urban space (Contested Heritage Initiative 2022). Indeed, even scholars engaging with the complexity of the statues debate have argued that their removal emboldens and sustains racism and should not necessarily be considered a viable pathway to counter the rising political strength of the Far Right (Burch-Brown 2022).

The caution expressed toward removal or even contextualization is based on how the invisibility of whiteness works to conceal racial advantage within the European postcolonial context. Thus, notions of reconciling or balancing differing viewpoints deny racial inequality amid the ongoing devaluation of people of color (Bhambra 2017). The neo-Lefebvrian turn has emphasized the social construction of space and how it is experienced and made differentially through social relations with others (Kinkaid 2020; Purcell 2014). The critical geographer Eden Kinkaid draws upon Lefebvre’s analysis of the operation of social difference within space and his recognition of this as an embodied experience. However, Kinkaid (2020, 169) emphasizes how differences are not preexisting within space but “rather ‘differences’ are formed through lived practices: sedimentations of experience.”. For Kinkaid, the insights of Lefebvre can be developed through linking his appreciation of space with critical phenomenology. The field of critical phenomenology engages with difference through its exploration of the limitations of classic phenomenology. Critical phenomenology challenges assumptions about the universal human subject and turns to gendered and raced subjectivities, thereby opening up a greater understanding of how differences and forms of exclusion are spatially produced and felt. Critical phenomenology highlights a more differentiated human subject and set of experiences but also opens up understandings of how power operates in our affective engagement with the material world.

Critical phenomenology helps us to understand the role of monuments and statues in the racialized production of space. The urban geographer Shanti Sumartojo (2021, 2), for example, argues that we must understand memorials as active revisions of the past:

[G]eographies of commemoration are implicitly concerned with futurity. This is because a core project of state remembrance is to stake a claim for what is most important to remember in order to reinforce national identity for coming generations.

Given statues’ centrality to narratives of the nation-state, they are enmeshed in networks of nationalist pride and belonging that are by their very nature exclusionary if one is not incorporated within assumed forms of national identity. The idea of a singular or foreclosed historical narrative of the nation-state, emphasizing key individuals to be commemorated, silences alternative futures and forecloses the futurity of other epistemic and racialized communities alongside different ways of knowing (see Harjo 2019 in relation to Indigenous communities). The increasing tolerance of Far Right viewpoints within mainstream government and policy-making has strengthened an insufficiently problematized narrative that places racial and ethnic minorities as outside of European identity and values. The foreclosure of the historical narrative supports the ongoing positive representation of contentious individuals.

I am not arguing that planning should attempt to adjudicate on historical disputes, although heritage planning could do more to illuminate its own subjectivities. But if we are to better understand how racial difference is produced within space, then phenomenology, moves beyond the claim that the statues debate reflects differences in opinion and turns to how certain viewpoints are produced and sustained while other views are marginalized. The planning theorist Andrew Whittemore (2014) has made important connections between planning and phenomenology, and in so doing he challenges the discipline’s preoccupation with communicative and collaborative planning (see Foroughi et al. 2023; Healey 2020; Legacy 2012). A substantive critique of Habermasian ideal speech exists within planning (see Huxley and Yiftachel 2000; Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger 1998). Critics have questioned the operation of power and the capacity for aspirations of ideal speech to reconcile structural inequalities (Huxley and Yiftachel 2000). Despite communicative action theorists emphasizing the limitations of these practices of ideal speech in the real world, there are deeper questions regarding the assumptions or aspirations that, even if they could be achieved, modes of participation can convey the embodied experiences of racialized and other minorities or that forms of persuasion will destabilize inequality (Huxley 2000). However, the problematic of human subject formation in relation to urban space remains relatively unexplored. Whittemore’s engagement with phenomenology emphasizes the limitation of a desire for consensus or mutual understanding developed through Habermasian conceptions of communicative rationality. Whittemore (2014, 304) emphasizes how phenomenology provides a different mode through which to illuminate questions of knowledge and evidence and to engage the diverse experiences that mediate the lives of different groups of people beyond participation:

A phenomenological theory of planning procedure would encourage planners to note what objects in their community have meaning, and how different frames of reference give different meanings to each object.

Whittemore (2014, 306) does not seek to set out a road map for participatory action but his work suggests that our response to differing perspectives might be radically altered if we engage with an understanding “that all knowledge is variably contrived—reality does not transcend consciousness, but only enters it distorted by our preexisting experience and knowledge.” If community perspectives are considered amenable to change through forms of communicative action or the application of different forms of knowledge then we miss the relationship between our embodied self and structures of knowledge and power. Feminist insights extend understandings by complicating the relationship between our bodies and the world to engage with how “consciousness is embodied and being in the world is necessarily situated, contextual, and relational” (McGregor 2020, 509).

A critical phenomenological perspective moves beyond some notion that balance or reconciliation can be achieved as it complicates the relationship between our perceptive consciousness, and our relationship to the world as necessarily one of “entanglements” whereby “the phenomenological account is one of a lived, gendered, raced, classed, positioned body encountering world shaped by discursive and structural forces” (McGregor 2020, 509). Participation or public engagement cannot resolve deeply problematic issues because they are unable to adequately uncover the ways in which whiteness is sustained. In contrast, critical phenomenology can reveal the embodied operation of racialized spaces. The emphasis of critical phenomenology on the differentiated human subject challenges ideas of universal experiences or understandings. Rather than the idea that there is a sense of an inherent and mutually agreeable value in specific objects, the field of critical phenomenology rejects the notion that divergent opinions are problematically subjective and instead turns to how structures of power, including racism and colonialism, have proliferated in the realm of everyday experience.

Sara Ahmed’s (2006, 121) elaboration of the field of critical phenomenology turns to how “Whiteness becomes what is ‘here,’ a line from which the world unfolds,” or whiteness acts as a vantage point from which an assumed collective orientation emerges. Ahmed (2006, 121) notes how “The alignment of race and space is crucial to how they materialize as givens, as if each ‘extends’ the other.” Objects do not exist in space without meaning and the ways they are differently experienced are rooted within histories of power. Ahmed’s phenomenological approach sheds light on different ongoing engagements with the legacy of colonialism whereby statues provide a memorialized sedimentation of history for the present and connect pro-colonial perspectives on history and space that mute alternative understandings.

Similarly, Thomas E. Beaumont (2020, 188) considers war memorials from a phenomenological perspective, examining the problematic of a structure designed to produce a particular set of feelings:

This production works as constraints on memory, social institutions, discourses, and habits that facilitate a moving forward in a specific manner and direction. The role of the monument is to demonstrate an understanding, a narrative surrounding the cultural memory of an event as finality, as closed.

Beaumont extends Ahmed’s insights into thinking about how certain objects are placed in the “foreground” to demand our attention as a form a cultural and spatial discipline. The philosopher Helen Ngo argues that forms of racism can be considered as a type of habit that is actively practiced. Where “the analysis of racialized perception shows us that these ‘things’ are not simply ‘themselves’ but are already shaped by, and participate in, discursive practices” (Ngo 2012, 30). Ngo (2017, 68) illuminates the barriers that directly affect the bodies of racialized subjects as they move through space “in the mundane goings about where race is not otherwise at issue.” We can consider how Ngo’s argument incorporates both other people and objects in their circulation through urban space. If racism is an actively practiced habit, then contemporary arguments to retain colonial statues are layered over historical practices and existing grids of racialization.

The presence of statues as actually existing objects within an urban space oriented around whiteness forecloses possibilities for other racial relationships or historical representations. What is at stake is the continuing valorization of a landscape that emerges from celebratory narratives of racial domination. While pro-statue arguments contend their removal is an erasure of history, their existence perpetuates a narrative that erases and denigrates other ways of being in relation to colonial history. As Ahmed (2006, 132) notes, “The white body in this way expands; objects, tools, instruments and even ‘others’ allow that body to inhabit space by extending that body and what it can reach.” If heritage is aligned with a particular construction of colonial history, then how does it foreclose other possibilities of seeing the past or envisioning the future? Colonial statues record or mark a particularized version of the past as well as engaging with specific claims of differential racial worth that speak of the present and future. The colonial monument is not a static form of history but part of the glorification of the successes of European racial power to create metropoles and subjugate colonies. These forms of memorialization can only be regarded as unproblematic within a phenomenological approach centered around whiteness that assumes an unproblematic consensus around colonialism as a vantage point to the world.

The Protection of White Space

Scholars working in a U.S. context have articulated how Confederate statues were erected as part of a white supremacist racist narrative. The bulk of them were constructed during the waning of this racist power and were put there to terrorize and intimidate Black Americans in the Reconstruction era through their imposition in the public realm (see Henderson et al. 2021). As Timmerman notes, many additional Confederate statues were erected during the Civil Rights era facilitated by new forms of mass production. Daniel Butler’s exploration of efforts to preserve Confederate monuments draws upon the phenomenological affective relationships that create white dominance in space. Places are infused with what Butler (2019, 151) terms a “phantasy” that links racialized histories to a continuing public presence that “splinters” the Other:

Institutions of slavery and colonialism endure as onto-political structures at the heart of the nation, and insofar as such institutions are manifest in the national setting (e.g., the “streets,” Confederate statues, etc.), racialized bodies are necessarily splintered by a White imaginary.

Butler examines differential registers of feeling within space. For Butler (2019, 147), this is phenomenologically experienced and sensed as “ephemeral and enigmatic feeling” but that these affective registers produce:

Exclusion by place creates a felt sense of what we might call visceral nonbelonging, while feeling included would generate its opposite (visceral belonging).

Butler’s engagement with visceral belonging or non-belonging along racial lines and how it interplays between body and place, to return to Ahmed and the notion of an extending vantage point. Elizabeth Sweet and Sara Ortiz Escalante (2015, 1828) have similarly turned to these notions of visceral (non)belonging as overlooked dimensions of planning as part of a wider neglect of the emotional spaces of planning and those bodies which are excluded:

Visceral geography validates the need to understand how bodies feel internally—sensations, moods and physical states of being—in relation with material social space.

These sensations or emotions are not just fleeting individual experiences even if they are experienced by individuals. Rather, they indicate modes of visceral inclusion or exclusion that point to whiteness and its exclusions as operating at the level of embodied experience. If we are to understand statues as designed to invoke feelings, then they are entangled within the multiple ways that spaces are racially dominated. Engaging with the entanglement between historical legacies and ongoing “spatial trauma” is a key dimension to efforts to decolonize planning theory and practice (Sweet and Harper-Anderson 2023; see also Sletto, Novoa, and Vasudevan 2023). Their relative unmarkedness or their apparent lack of controversy, with exceptions, reflect the way the white body can travel through space. Colonial statues are not distinct from wider urban space but form part of the landscape of whiteness for urban denizens and it is this understanding of them as part of a visceral landscape which helps to uncover their meanings and the problems of existing approaches to their retention.

The phenomenological presence and material re-inscription of white imaginaries feed the contemporary politics of inequality through myth making as part of white superiority. In a similar fashion, Matthew Stannard’s study of Belgian colonial statues and memorials notes that construction efforts were ongoing until at least the 1960s, gaining increasing importance in both post-war periods as a way to sustain forms of patriotism and often partially funded by pro-colonial groups. In a striking recent example from Hamburg, a statue of the prominent trader in enslaved people Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–1782) was erected as recently as 2006, but after protests from Black community organizations it was removed two years later. Schimmelmann was so fervent in his proprietorial claim as an enslaver that he had had his own initials branded on enslaved people’s foreheads, yet these issues played no role in deliberations by the city government to commission a new statue.

Conclusions

Colonialism is an unfinished project marked by multiple material afterlives in the public spaces of European cities. Colonial statues are historic by virtue of staying in place. But the idea that this material and historical stasis generates neutral or ambiguous feelings or that being provoked in space is simply a dimension of urban life that belies the white-centered approach to space where moving easily through it, and engendering a sense of belonging, is sustained through forms of spatial practice and memorialized heritage.

What might constitute a more productive approach to understanding the role of statues in sustaining dominant modes of historical understanding? A first priority is to acknowledge that heritage planning is intrinsically political, polyvalent, and dynamic. A key contribution here is the geographer Karen Till’s (2005) thoughtful exploration of the active engagement between state and citizens around the politics of memory in post-reunification Berlin, enacted through multiple forms of remembrance, removal, and novel forms of memorialization. “Cultural practices of social memory,” notes Till (2005, 17), “take place and define a public space through which groups debate their understandings of the past and contemporary social relationships to the past.”

Centralizing specific figures again within wider legible histories, as worthy of preservation, imposes an idea that there is a collective memory of colonial veneration. Yet, the question of how collective memory might be actively sustained and what should be memorialized remains an open question. Current conceptualizations of heritage raise questions as to the ethics and practices of space-making through the desire to impose specific understandings of history by using statues as a uniform and univocal affirmation of a shared imperial past as beneficiaries of colonization. Although the role of statues and monuments in sustaining the whiteness of space is the focus of vibrant political and intellectual debate, this has yet to sufficiently filter through to planning theory and practice.

Who or what is represented in public space is thus not merely a question of prioritizing physically present material artifacts through recourse to a set of putatively objective criteria but speaks to the lived experience of the citizenry. If we are to take seriously the challenge to engage with the protection of whiteness in space, then it requires the engagement of planning with the affective realm as uncovered through critical phenomenological insights. A phenomenological approach to planning would of necessity consider the diverse ways in which space is experienced and created and more rigorously engage with the racialized production of space.

By revalorizing colonial statues as part of a shared past we become connected to a political project that conceives of a white Europe under threat from racial diversity. Colonial statues that celebrate racial imperialism are a critical terrain through which to promote particular forms of history as part of a shared or contested heritage. Calls to remove statues that glorify colonial violence serve to unsettle existing conceptions of history by making latent conflict both visible and legible. The ongoing “invisibility” of whiteness within a white supremacist racial and spatial ideology represents an unfolding political project in relation to the domination of urban space through racial ideology rather than an ethics of co-presence. We need a more sophisticated form of heritage planning that can engage with the power of objects to sustain racial inequalities in urban space.