Tony (his preferred address) and I came from opposite directions: He was a sociologist and historian interested in the social production of buildings and the built environment. I was an architect and urban planner, and advocate for social justice, interested in the social dimensions of buildings and cities. Complementing each other, we met at a common point: the social production of space. Many of my colleagues (his students) including Abidin Kusno and Greig Chrysler shared a similar meeting point with him.

Tony’s work does not fit within any conventional category of scholarship. He did not even engage a particular interdisciplinary field, but created his own area of study: colonial urban development which was later extended to a global scale. One of the major breakthroughs in Tony’s intellectual life occurred at his encounter with India where he taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1965-70). Despite being a socially powerful white man, he was culturally alien in India. In his own words, “I learned that I was everything I thought I was not.” I got the impression that, as a kid growing up in the small manufacturing town of Darwen, he “rebelled” against mainstream values of his own society in the UK that defined him. In India, he realized that he was very different and largely British. He used the metaphor of ‘incomplete greeting’ to illustrate this powerful encounter: It was like when he extended his hand for a handshake the other greeted by folding the palms together, saying namaste.

As he embraced the new and unfamiliar world that India opened up, his experience began to question himself. He saw this conflict as a great asset and accepted the challenge; he dropped the PhD that he was doing and questioned his own values. He resorted to reflection. Building upon this conflict, and beginning with colonial New Delhi, he developed his groundbreaking work on Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (Routledge 1976).

Despite the unfamiliarity, Tony felt great familiarity in New Delhi. Most Indians did not fully fathom the city produced by the British, he observed. Delhi was a city divided by race, based on power relations, and defined by its colonial nomenclature. He observed how all power institutions such as the Governor’s office, the military, the courts, and the legislature were located in the spacious well-serviced white city. He saw that New Delhi was a male city that consisted of male institutions and spaces such as men’s clubs, chummeries to house unmarried British officials, and playgrounds for men to sap their energy instead of going after native women. He figured out that many colonial spaces such as the bungalow and the compound were British productions in India as part of what he called the colonial third culture, the British culture adapted to India and the colonial environment. His Colonial Urban Development radically transformed the way European colonial cities were understood. It politicized the extant understandings of colonial urbanism, providing a workable theory to understand the physical-spatial structures in colonial cities.

Drawing on anthropology, architecture, geography, history, sociology, and urban studies, his work took a broader cross-cultural interdisciplinary approach than what was common at the time. The byproduct of his above research, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (1984), exposed how the British adapted a Bengali house form in creating a dwelling form for British colonial officers with verandahs, gardens, and servants quarters, incorporating activities such as tea parties on the lawn, developed as part of colonial third culture, contextualized in the power and comforts of the colonial environment. Taking a step further, he mapped the global transfer of this dwelling from India to England and back to other parts of the empire and the world, long before the globalization discourse. He used a component of this work for his PhD.

Exploring the relationships between society and the built environment, in between the two monographs, he edited a volume on Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment (1980). It asks: “What can we understand about a society from its buildings? [and] What can we understand about buildings and environments by examining the society in which they exist?” He brought together a set of scholars who were working on the subject to address the questions. They, including Amos Rapoport (the cultural determinants of vernacular house forms) and Francis Duffy (the organizational changes in office buildings) to address the questions from a number of different angles approached from a number of different angles. Focusing on the colonial vacation home, King himself delved into the issue of time for space and space for time. He, thus, brought the society and the built environment together under the notion of social production of buildings and the built environment. This work appeared the same time when David Harvey attempted to connect physical and human geographies from a Marxist perspective.

Tony was a keen learner. In addition to making sharp observations, he was constantly looking for new developments in the area of knowledge production. He was in the supportive environment of a very radical Department of Art History which was highly update with the developments in the area of cultural studies and discourses on race, gender, and ethnicity. It was one of the best departments anywhere for critical thinking. He was also a member of the Braudel Center directed by Immanuel Wallerstein. He continuously updated his own position with the developments in the academy, including marxist urban studies, cultural studies, post colonialism, postmodernism, capitalist world-system, and new cultural geography.

When I met him at the end-1980s, he was both involved in the globalization and global cities discourses. He was interested in exploring deeper and just ways of thinking and producing knowledge. In the 1980-90s, he took part in almost all small group conferences on global/world cities participated by the leaders of the idea, constantly looking for ways to better understand this phenomena. I had the privilege of following him to various conferences on globalization and, especially, global cities where I was exposed to the big names at the time, including John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, and Peter Taylor. While he was inspired by all these intellectual developments, he hardly subscribed to any single ideology or a discourse. He admired and drew on the work of, for example, Patha Chatterjee, David Harvey, Gayatri Spivak, and the likes. He was trying to draw on the cultural studies of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the likes and new developments in the study of social space, new cultural geography, and landscape interpretation.

As most global-cities scholars focused on the restructuring of the world economy and the (re)organization of cities somewhat independently of nation states, Tony wished to ground his work in their historical production and larger space, bringing in the peripheries (global hinterlands) that sustained such cities. His book, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (Routledge 1990) examines the internationalization of London, particularly its urbanization process propelled by British policies of economic liberalization and privatization, but well grounded in its imperial history and post-imperial space. In this volume, he brings colonial urban development right back home, turning his gaze on the metropolis, demonstrating that European metropolises cannot be understood without their imperial and post-imperial spatial and temporal contexts.

Tony was highly analytical and it was fun to go to conferences with him. At almost every conference, he asked presenters about the time and space of their studies, questioning the projected universality. He also asked questions like whether “postmodernism” predated “modernism” in colonial cities of European empires. He was well aware of the fact that, as they study and spoke of globalization and world-cities, the scholars were also constructing the same. It was a “grand” view that most scholars missed.

Tony constantly updated his understanding of colonial urbanism. Incorporating the world-system’s perspective, social production of space, cultural studies, and other recent developments into his approach, he wrote Urbanism, Colonialism and the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (Routledge 1990). Further linking world-systems analysis with the study of culture and space, he edited two volumes: Culture, Globalization and the World-System Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (1991) and Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis (1996). Based on his previous work, these volumes focus on the present and the future of urbanism, based on conferences.

Capping his scholarly life, at the turn of the century, Tony published Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004) in which he included an autobiographical chapter. His last book: Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban (2016) is a collection of essays from various times that represent his lifelong exploration of ways of thinking about the global city.

Tony was conscious of the fact that his work is largely approached from the metropole (or the core of the world-system) and was highly interested in indigenous voices. At Binghamton, beginning with me—his first PhD student, he promoted thinking from “indigenous” vantage points. All of his students were fortunate to have such room for exploration. Besides, he was a compassionate teacher and mentor. The impact of his mentoring is evident in almost all of his PhD students who are doing extremely well in their own areas of research, teaching, and practice. It is from him that I learned that compassion is the most significant aspect of an impactful teacher and my whole teaching career was impacted by it.

Extending his support beyond the ring of his own students, and helping emerging scholars in general, in 1998, Tony (with Thomas Markus) initiated and co-edited a book series: the Architext Series. Its mission was to expand the field of architectural history and theory to engage “gender, race, sexuality and the body, questions of identity and place, the cultural politics of representation and language, and the global and postcolonial contexts in which these are addressed.” The series ran over 20 years producing more than 30 titles.

He was a very kind person. When I first arrived Binghamton without my suitcase (which got lost somewhere), he brought a whole bunch of clothes to wear until I found my bag or bought some. During my visits to see him, I was very fortunate to get tours of Bristol, a key port in the triangular trade network. He was happy as a child to show the colonial/imperial environment of the city, including the statues of slave owners and traders (some of which were demolished during Black Lives Matter protests), connecting our work to the metropole. As we were in Clifton Down, he introduced the statue of Sir William Draper whose forces captured Manila in 1762 and the nearby road named, Manilla Road. Most exciting was to learn the way select colonial events that happened in far away places like Manila are written into Bristol’s not-so-well-known landscapes. Despite his scholarship and the magnitude of his contribution to the fields of global urban studies, architecture and urban planning, what his friends, colleagues, and students would miss the most is his thoughtfulness, generosity, and kindness.