Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines [Hardcover]

During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. InConcrete Colonialism, Diana Jean S. Martinez examines the motivations for and lasting effects of this forgotten colonial policy. Arguing that the pervasive use of reinforced concrete technologies revolutionized techniques of imperial conquest, Martinez shows how concrete reshaped colonialism as a project that sought durable change through the reformation of environments, colonial society, and racialized biologies. Martinez locates the origins of this material revolution in the development of Chicago, highlighting how building this urban center atop exceptionally challenging geology made it possible to transform diverse global ecologies. She details how the material’s stability, plasticity, strength, and other qualities served the shifting imperatives of the US colonial regime, playing a central role in defending territory, controlling disease, and constructing monuments to nation and empire. By describing a world irreversibly remade, Martinez urges readers to consider how colonialism persists—in concrete forms—despite claims of its conclusion.USDiana Jean S. Martinez examines the US colonial project in the Philippines through the innovative use of reinforced concrete, a technology that dominated early twentieth-century construction.Diana Jean S. Martinez is Assistant Professor of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.“In this brilliant book, Diana Jean S. Martinez casts the architectural logic of the American empire in an entirely new light, stressing how it differed from its Spanish predecessor while drawing useful comparisons to the urbanizing projects of the US mainland. Martinez’s enlightening approach to the infrastructure of empire fills many holes in our knowledge of the US colonization of the Philippines and shows howl3,