This chapter traces the development of Bandung as a prototypical modern colonial city. Using biographies, local histories, and contemporary accounts, the chapter argues that the late-colonial development of Bandung was inseparable from the emergence of a new kind of governmentality, one based in bureaucratic authority and surveillance. The chapter shows how the bureaucratization of government in Bandung was accompanied by a step-by-step shift in the colonial gaze on urban spaces: from a view from the carriage, to a view from above, to a view in depth. Driven in part by capitalism, in part by fears about contagions, and in part by new technologies, these shifts in gaze reached their pinnacle in the colonial fantasy of an urban panopticon, an all-seeing gaze capable of establishing a kind remote control over the city.
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