Nuno Grancho examines colonial urbanism under Portuguese, French, and Danish rule in India, offering a critical decolonial approach to architecture through material and spatial analysis

Nuno Grancho, Integrated Researcher at DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte, has published the chapter 'Public Shared Places and Private Absent Divides. Identity and Space of Colonial Urbanism under Portuguese, French, and Danish Rules: Diu, Pondicherry and Tranquebar' in The Routledge Companion to Art and Challenges to Empire.

The chapter advances a decolonial framework for the study of architecture, urbanism, and empire, drawing on postcolonial, critical race, and feminist theories to examine how built environments materialize and negotiate imperial power. It privileges close engagement with artworks, buildings, and urban spaces, while also foregrounding questions of sustainability and environmental justice in the afterlives of empire.

At the methodological level, the chapter proposes a flexible, skills-based approach that rejects static, universal models in favor of iterative, context-specific configurations of tools and methods. Attentive to language, archives, and fieldwork practices, this framework understands research as a process of continuous reconfiguration in response to the particularities of each site and set of questions. Architectural and urban analysis thus becomes an open, reflexive practice that remains sensitive to local histories, social formations, and positionalities.

This proposal is tested through a case study of three non-British colonial cities in India: Diu (Portuguese), Pondicherry (French), and Tranquebar (Danish). By decentering British-centered narratives of South Asian urbanism, the chapter foregrounds how different European empires produced distinct configurations of public and private spaces and how these spatial regimes shaped identities, boundaries, and everyday life. In doing so, it highlights the enduring “public shared places” and “private absent divides” that structure contemporary urban experiences and debates on heritage, memory, and decolonization, providing readers with a robust toolkit for critically engaging with colonial urban legacies today.

The publication is available here.