Reading urban bali: Untold history, unwanted urbanism

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of socio-spatial characteristics of urban Bali through a reading of the island's historical urban architectural landscape. Focusing on the islandprovince's capital city of Denpasar, it considers the interplay between formations of urban built environments and urban social dynamics. These dynamics have been largely unexposed to tourists, thus less constrained by the dominant twentieth-century framing of an exotic Balinese otherness. The paper revisits studies and visual recordings of Denpasar during precolonial and colonial times and traces the physical and social characteristics of the city's urban environments. The paper concludes that, although the city's urban..