Imagining the Settler-Colonial City: Introducing Urban Indigeneities and the Settler-Colonial City, a Special Issue of Urban History Review Lorenzo Veracini Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria, Australia ABSTRACT: Thisarticleintroducestheessayscollectedinthisspecialissueof UrbanHis- tory Review and sketches the urban imagination of settler-colonial political traditions. It focuses on the way settler cities are imagined, argues that the settler-colonial city may be seenasdistinctfromotherurbanformations,andsuggeststhattheurbanformisaconsti- tutive component of settler-colonial formations and their imaginaries. Settlers, the foun- ders of political orders in distant locales, have cities on their minds precisely because they are heading in the opposite direction. They focus on the city they will build and on the citiestheyareescaping.Theyareespeciallyconcernedwiththewaysinwhichtheformeris goingtodifferfromthelatter.Thisimaginationshouldbeconsideredwhenappraisingthe settlercolonialcity,anendeavourtowhichthisspecialissuecontributes. Keywords: displacement, Indigenousurbanism, settlercolonialism, urbanform RÉSUMÉ : [PLACEHOLDERFORFRENCHABSTRACTANDKEYWORDS] Mots-clés : [PLACEHOLDERFORFRENCHABSTRACTANDKEYWORDS] This special issue contributes to a vigorous and global scholarly debate about the settler-colonial city and its failed attempts to disavow the Indigenous histories and presences that characterise it. As this article’s first section sketches, recent globalscholarlydebateshavebroughtincreasedattentiontothecityundersettler- colonial conditions. It is a significant scholarly development: the settler cities, we now know, are also Indigenous cities, and scholars have debunked the supposi- tion that Indigenous peoples are absent from settler-colonial urban spaces, that they have only recently entered them, or that settler colonialism as a mode of domination was somehow superseded in the city. This cluster of suppositions is encapsulated by Glen Coulthard’s critical intuition that for settlers the cities are “urbs nullius” 1 —places that are entirely disconnected from Indigenous histories andpresences. Urbsnullius isasettler-colonialfantasy,evenifitisapowerfuland resilient fantasy: the settler cities are locales where settler-colonial dispossession happened historically and where Indigenous dispossession happens now. They are Indigenous cities: places where Indigenous peoples dwell and choose to orga- nisetheircollectiveIndigenouslife.Theyalwayswere,despitepersistentattempts UHR/RHU ▮.▮, p▮-▮ doi: 10.3138/uhr-2023-0018 © University of Toronto Press, 2023 Thisadvanceaccessversionmaydifferslightlyfromthefinalpublishedversion