This article focuses on the planned community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India, founded in 1968. Building on critical readings of the settlement that have drawn attention to the power imbalance in its relationships with surrounding villages, the article delineates the ways that a geographical imagination of cityness has been a key component of the settlement's development and the forms of neo-coloniality in which it has been implicated. Drawing on archival and published sources as well as ethnographic research, the article discusses three ways in which the settlement performs a sense of its own ‘cityness-to-come’: first, the architectural discourse and planning rationality central to Auroville's identity; second, its agonistic public sphere vis-à-vis architecture and planning, and third, its ethos of learning and evolution, and the settlement's developmental teleology. In so doing, the article shows how ‘the city’ conceived as a textual and spatial promise, as well as a utopian aspiration, works ideologically to constitute the settlement itself, but also to precipitate social effects and uneven power relationships with village communities in this region. To sum up, this article develops an argument about the neo-colonial social work done by ‘the city’ conceived as text.

中文翻译：

---

在即将到来的“城市”的阴影下：黎明之城、发展主义和城市性的社会影响

本文重点介绍了印度泰米尔纳德邦 Auroville 的规划社区，该社区成立于 1968 年。基于对定居点的批判性解读，人们注意到其与周围村庄的关系中的权力不平衡，本文描绘了地理想象的方式城市性一直是定居点发展的关键组成部分，也是它所涉及的新殖民主义形式的重要组成部分。借鉴档案和出版资源以及民族志研究，本文讨论了定居点表现出其自身“未来城市”意识的三种方式：首先，建筑话语和规划合理性是 Auroville 身份的核心；第二，它在建筑和规划方面的竞争性公共领域，第三，它的学习和进化精神，和定居点的发展目的论。通过这样做，文章展示了“城市”如何被构想为一种文本和空间承诺，以及一种乌托邦式的愿望，如何在意识形态上运作以构成定居点本身，同时也促成社会影响和与村庄社区的不平衡权力关系地区。总而言之，本文展开了一个关于被构想为文本的“城市”所做的新殖民社会工作的论证。