Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces – An Introduction to the Special Issue

The contributions presented here were written in late 2019 and finalized in the early months of 2020. What unfolded on the global stage while the special issue was making its way through the publication process – the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter as a global agenda and the reenergizing of protests against both material and ideological colonial heritage – seemed at times almost about to overtake it; to render it “preemptively anachronistic” as a consequence of a radical transformation of the stakes, forms and intensities of the decolonial struggle. Ultimately, however, we think that this new context has only further validated the importance and urgency of the work undertaken here: not only is the connection between issues of contemporary racism and the colonial past which those events highlighted here explicitly conceptualized, but also the various forms and content that the decolonial struggle can be invested with are revealed and examined in both European metropoles and their global counterparts.