Inland Empire

Inland Empire shows how British urban planning has operated as an inherently racialized practice. Colonial practices of spatial segregation, underpinned by racial imaginaries of European superiority, did not disappear during formal decolonization but became absorbed and reformulated within post-war Britain. Drawing on a wealth of primary materials, Yasminah Beebeejaun explores how spatial planning served as a key tool in attempts to manage New Commonwealth immigration and resettlement through a series of political and policy responses to urban riots, state-sponsored multiculturalism, and ongoing forms of racialized disadvantage in housing, health, and employment. Indeed, many immigrants were steered toward areas of industrial decline and blighted neighborhoods known as "twilight zones." Beebeejaun argues that the gradual unraveling of the UK’s post-war planning model stemmed in part from a mix of colonial antecedents and underlying contradictions. Beginning with the immediate challenges of the early post-war period and concluding with the imposition of a neocolonial planning model on the London Docklands from the 1980s onward, Beebeejaun charts how Britain replicated aspects of empire within the metropole.