In Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana, Joseph R. Hartman examines Havana's urbanization under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (in power 1925–33), focusing on the largely unrealized plans of French urbanist Forestier and his Franco-Cuban team of architects and planners. Scholars until now have focused on cataloguing the regime's extant monuments, while giving far less attention to Forestier's unbuilt urban works. The Machado regime's building campaign spoke to modern aspirations of Cuban independence and nationhood, but also to enduring colonial paradigms of race, power, and urban space. Interpreting the history of Havana's urbanization requires taking a critical view of Cuba's colonial heritage and the survival into modern times of local and imported colonialist practices. Revisiting this history lends new insights into the cultural stakes of urban restoration efforts ongoing in Havana today.

In Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana, Joseph R. Hartman examines Havana's urbanization under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (in power 1925–33), focusing on the largely unrealized plans of French urbanist Forestier and his Franco-Cuban team of architects and planners. Scholars until now have focused on cataloguing the regime's extant monuments, while giving far less attention to Forestier's unbuilt urban works. The Machado regime's building campaign spoke to modern aspirations of Cuban independence and nationhood, but also to enduring colonial paradigms of race, power, and urban space. Interpreting the history of Havana's urbanization requires taking a critical view of Cuba's colonial heritage and the survival into modern times of local and imported colonialist practices. Revisiting this history lends new insights into the cultural stakes of urban restoration efforts ongoing in Havana today.

In Centering the Chārbāgh : The Mughal Garden as Design Module for the Jaipur City Plan, Susan N. Johnson-Roehr argues that the privileging of a Hindu-Vedic worldview has had a significant effect on our understanding of Jaipur City’s history. Current interpretive approaches assume that the city’s patron, Sawai Jai Singh II, relied on the maṇḍala when shaping the city plan in the eighteenth century. The emphasis on the maṇḍala as governing device has encouraged historians to neglect other sources of Jaipur’s city plan. Specifically, scholars have not considered the role of the quadripartite Mughal paradise garden ( chahār bāgh , Persian; chārbāgh , Hindi) in the planning of the city. Johnson-Roehr suggests that Jaipur’s spatial organization was defined by the chārbāgh rather than the navagraha or vāstu puruṣa maṇḍala , and demonstrates that the plan was a response to a specific chārbāgh , Jai Niwas Bagh, built by Sawai Jai Singh in 1713. Combining a rereading of eighteenth-century documents with an analysis of the physical characteristics of Jai Niwas Bagh, the author concludes that the chārbāgh was the most important element in the development of the rectilinear boulevards, bazaars, and walls that characterize Jaipur today.