[Extract …] The last decade has seen an explosion of scholarly works dealing with colonial architecture and town planning, a domain previously marginal in the historiography. In any case it has aroused the attention of ever more numerous researchers, a fact that has stimulated this attempt to take stock of it, by drawing on cases studied by this author in his own work. The exploration of colonialism now constitutes a significant field of doctoral research, of studies associated with the identification and protection of built heritage, and tends to mould new images in the history of architecture from the last few centuries. In actual fact, the innumerable works on the twentieth century – the subject here – comprise only a fraction of all the studies concerning nearly five centuries of colonization, if the beginning of the colonial era is identified with the discovery of America and the establishment of the first European trading posts in Africa.

This explosion of research might be seen as resulting from a series of factors. First, there is evidently independence, a process now pursued since some sixty years ago, and the emancipated nations' recovery of their own histories, which has passed through the stage of creating institutions and programmes for research and for heritage protection. Second, there is the expansion of historical research through ever more numerous doctoral training programmes. Third, there is the development of research strategies establishing colonial and post-colonial experiences and discourse as objects for theoretical consideration. Last but not least, there is the powerful force of nostalgia for empires, which takes hold not only of people in previously colonizing nations, but often also those in previously colonized ones, a force that often comes about with tourism's turning of the whole world into entertainment.

The combined mass of this ever-increasing quantity of analyses might thus, in itself, be viewed from the standpoint of sociology of sciences or of intellectual history. Those fields already have their own established and layered histories, as is shown by the bibliography of research, which must often include works from the colonial period, which despite ideological biases being unquestionably apparent, are often indispensable given their empirical content. By any reckoning, the convergence of work by researchers coming from countries previously colonized and from those in the metropolitan states has brought about the creation of new regional or national histories, which pinpoint the ways in which power, knowledge and forms circulated.