First Nations foundations: cities and the infrastructuring of settler colonisation

The infrastructuring of First Nations land into cities is a central project of settler colonisation. In the lands now known as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, settler-colonial myths of ‘uncultivated’ territory justified English invasion and settlement. These myths continue to inform contemporary infrastructure development and discourse which resist First Nations’ sovereignties and self-determination even as the latter unsettles settler-colonial infrastructuring. Analysing how settler permanence is infra/structured discloses the settler-colonial dynamics of urbanisation. This chapter offers a predominantly theoretical account of how urban infrastructuring is a constitutive feature of settler colonisation and how settler-colonial urban imaginaries construct both urbanisation and infrastructure as non-Indigenous. The chapter uses the case study of Sydney, situated in the Eora Nation, to illustrate the relations between urban infrastructure, settler colonisation, and First Nations.