Abstract
French colonialization of Indochina, arguably the most tumultuous of all of France’s colonial projects, began in 1887 and ended in 1956. It had many objectives, three of which can be considered dominant. The first was to enhance the colony’s economic potential—often qualified in French as mise en valeur. The second was ‘assimilation’ or acculturating and assimilating the people of the region. Efforts to attain this latter objective yielded negative results, including the alienation of members of the native population. This led to the conception and implementation of policies to attain a third objective, namely ‘association’ or winning the hearts and minds of the people. This chapter identifies and discusses specific spatial and physical planning projects that French colonial authorities deployed in efforts to attain these projects.
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Notes
- 1.
The Louis Duc alluded by Arnauld Le Brusq above is Joseph-Louis Duc (1802–1879), the architect who was tasked with rebuilding the Supreme Court (Palais de Justice) in Paris in the nineteenth century. The monumental building was originally constructed in the thirteenth century.
- 2.
Da Lat was not the only Sanatorium developed by French colonial authorities in Indochina . They are credited with two more of these sanatoria, namely Bokkor in Cambodia (1925) and Tam-Dao in Tonkin (1905).
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Njoh, A.J. (2016). French Urbanism in Indochina. In: French Urbanism in Foreign Lands. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25298-8_5
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