Postcolonial theory, given a defining text in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and developed by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, examined how colonial power shaped knowledge, identity and representation. It exposed how the colonised world was constructed as the other of the West and how that framing outlived formal empire. Applied to cities, it analysed the colonial origins of segregated urban form, the imposition of foreign planning models, and the persistence of these patterns after independence. It also recovered indigenous and hybrid forms of urbanism obscured by colonial accounts.
It reframed the history of planning as in part an instrument of empire and prompted a critical rereading of segregated and imposed urban forms across the global South. Postcolonial critique reshaped how scholars understand the spread and legacy of Western planning.