The most obvious dimension of this cross-cultural dialectic is Colonialism where Western urbanisms becoming nothing less than forceful insignias of conquest: Panaji becomes the first gridded city in India. Galle replicates the bastide town in the tropical landscape of Sri Lanka, and the plan of Manila manifests the Law of the Indies town-making principles laid down by King Phillip II of Spain.

  
There are two contrasting readings of such patterns. One sees colonial cities embodying a subaltern attitude towards indigenous habitats. The new “European city” is not only formally alien, but physically disconnected from the supposedly unhygienic native habitat: New Delhi is planned and built as a City Beautiful model of radiating streets physically disconnected the medieval labyrinthine grid of Shahjahanabad by a cordon sanitaire.

The other observes how colonial efforts never failed to embrace climatic and tectonic vernaculars within their urbanisms for both practical and political reasons. Galle and Panaji reveal upon closer look, the creative and successful amalgamation of native spatial concepts and construction techniques in both dwellings and monuments, creating hybridities found in neither worlds. Colonialism, in this sense, is as much about the imposition of the conqueror, as the resilience of the conquered.
The second dimension of this East-West dialectic happens between the 1930s-60s under the converse rubric of post-independence nation-building. After decades of colonization, new sovereign domains are (re)searching their identities, and seeking their place on the world stage. Ironically, the very European powers they had revolted against now become their torch-bearers for new industrial and modern futures. The native political elite seems convinced that Westernization will suppress colonization and pave the way to a brighter future. Asia becomes the canvas for the most eminent Modern Western architects and planners, with entire cities designed to embody the latent desires of these new-born nations.

But these modernist utopias are in many ways echoes of their colonial pasts. As questionable investments in new-born countries with few economic resources and large illiterate demographics, they affirm their inability or indifference towards the informal vitality of traditional habitat. Thus, while many may see colonialism and modernism as separate phenomena, they can also be read from the standpoint of the Asian city today, as a continuing legacy of the same syndrome of the new utopian city that suppresses the old. Both however different are born out of a premeditated dominance and control over the indigene, never subject to the litmus test of the native public. Both have a profound effect on Asian cities, introducing infrastructural and institutional reform on the one hand, but disrupting traditional patterns and widening socio-economic polarizations on the other.