| Abstract: | The Dutch East and West India Companies established colonies in the Caribbean, Brazil and at the Cape of Good Hope. The resulting townscapes can be read as artefacts of domination ‐ attempts to stamp order on the chaos of newly‐colonized lands. But at the same time, such built forms incorporated knowledge of the “low‐other” ‐ the underclasses in highly hierarchical colonial worlds. As a result, the experience of resistance (rarely directly visible in such public constructions as street grids and building fagades) was incorporated into the symbolic language of dominance, setting up a dialectical relationship between the High and the Low. |
