DOC 234—34/2
REX-13: 978-0882681/283
The study of American planning activity abroad offers us insight into the development of the profession. India is a particularly notable and well-researched site of American planning activity, at the time a young nation described as the world’s largest democracy. The inaugural Indian government was seeking new models for the development of India’s cities, and this aligned with an American interest in sharpening the planning profession as a technology of the state. Drawings of Indian cities, generated from this decades-long engagement, are primary sources of the socio-spatial philosophies that would influence urban renewal in the U.S. American planning efforts in India cannot be characterized as a neutral academic exercise, but rather an experiment for the burgeoning profession of planning, whose results would have political implications for both India and the US. Master plans for the cities of Chandigarh and Delhi can be historically situated within America’s early Cold War outlook, as well as domestic uncertainty about urban identity. In analyzing these planning efforts, we may better contextualize American planning projects of the postwar and today.
To organize my thinking about this decades-long collaboration, I have divided the era of American planning in India into two periods. The first period begins with the the initial political engagements of architect Albert Mayer, up to the Ford Foundation's arrival. The rise of communism in China, seen as a loss for American foreign policy, galvanized America’s foreign policy, beginning an era which would see the U.S. add institutional might to planning in India. This forms the second period of my analysis. Ironically, as the scope of American planning efforts in India expanded, the less successful the seprojects would become.
Social Engineering a New Nation (1940-1952)
“We need to tie these submerged citizens into our corporate and civic life, give them a sense of a stake in living and performing”
- Albert Mayer
Upon the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947, India was still overwhelmingly rural.2 Indian nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi upheld villages as a solution to social ills of British colonialism, and an alternative of the industrial, capitalist urbanisms forming in the West. 3
Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister-to-be, held an immense respect for Gandhi’s teachings. However, he was skeptical about the feasibility of the village unit to achieve the rapid modernization he felt was necessary for India.3 Nehru was aware of the fact that, like the United States, India was experiencing a large migration of rural villagers to urban areas. This uncertainty would prove an opportune moment for his introduction to Albert Mayer, an American architect stationed in Bengal to build airstrips for the U.S. military.
Though Mayer had no prior experience working with rural communities, he was enthusiastic about studying Indian rural life, and his experience in slum redevelopment aligned with Nehru’s interests for the young nation. Mayer's interest in rural India stemmed partly from his disillusion of American urban forms. A proponent of Howard’s Garden City movement, the ideology of Mayer’s work in the United States aligned with anti-urban attitudes at the time that rejected industrial sprawl.4 Mayer’s Garden City ideals dovetailed closely with Nehru’s ideals about the Indian village. Both men were eager to create communities whose proximity to industry wouldn’t compromise their insular, utopian quality. The work produced by this collaboration can be seen as an attempt to establish a distinctly Indian strand of modernity, navigating between traditional Indian community dynamics and imported Western planning regimes.
Before being tasked with planning Chandigarh in 1949, Mayer collaborated with the young Indian government in developing the rural Etawah Pilot Project. Mayer’s engagement with rural villagers in this project would significantly influence his plan for Chandigarh, as well as the school of thought surrounding America’s interaction with developing nations.5 The project resists easy classification, but in essence sought to create model villages resilient against food insecurity, engaging with subjects of agriculture, animal husbandry, and generating structures that support the self-sufficiency of villages. The University of Richmond’s Nicole Sackley explains how Etawah molded the social values of Mayer's practice: “For [him], the essence of Etawah was its potential to democratize India through informal human relations, in which “the highest officer invited advice of all those below him, and the lowest worker feels free to give it frankly.””3
Thinking about the urban repercussions of Etawah, Mayer noted that rural villagers would likely struggle to become “urbanized”. He argued that “social science operations” would be required to solve the “shock or strangeness or misunderstandings” rural Indians would have in an urban environment.5 In the plan for Chandigarh, we can see how Mayer and his collaborators formed space to engender community: via informal social interactions in a spatial concept he called the superblock. The superblock is a neighborhood unit with defined borders and a singular focus, a concept also found in Clarence Stein’s Radburn, New Jersey. Superblocks sought to recreate the insular quality of village life within the urban area. Rural housing densities were mimicked, and arterial roadways were pushed to the premier of the block. Only slow moving traffic, separated from pedestrian networks, was allowed to remain. In a plan of the superblock (Figure A), we can see how Mayer prioritized developing a matrix of informal social interaction, which he believed reinforced the values of democratic life. Mayer located public buildings equidistant from housing, establishing pedestrian circulation patterns that would allow for repeated social encounters. Mayer felt that with the superblock, the Indian village unit could find a place in a modern city. In a letter he wrote to British architect Maxwell Fry:
Even more than in the West, the neighbourhood unit has validity in India. Most people are village-based,and even tho [sic] they work in the city, their roots and relatives are in the village, to which they fre-quently return. So a pretty self-contained neighbourhood in the city accords with the people’s social habits and roots, as we in the West have only begun to re-discover. It is the heart of the whole Chandigarh plan.6
Unfortunately, Mayer’s plans would never be implemented. In 1950, he was faced with the sudden loss of his collaborator Matthew Nowicki in a plane crash. Mayer would step away from the project, and Indian officials sought Le Corbusier to complete the work. Le Corbusier would heavily revise Mayer’s plans and essentially eliminate the concept of the superblock. Though Mayer’s plan influenced aspects of the redesign, it's hard to imagine him feeling that Le Corbusier accounted for his careful study of the Indian village. Mayer would return to the United States after his decommissioning. When he next returns to India in 1956, to assist the Ford Foundation in their planning of New Delhi, Cold War tensions will have heightened, and the implications of his findings would become of great national interest.
It is noticeable that the administrative complex has been pushed towards the northern end of the plan, as sites of authority had traditionally occupied the center of Indian cities.4
Rather than orient the city to a singular focus,roadways acted as the stitching between the superblocks, resisting the centric sprawl that characterized American urban development.(Figure B)
Unfortunately, Mayer’s plans would never be implemented. In 1950, he was faced with the sudden loss of his collaborator Matthew Nowicki in a plane crash. Mayer would step away from the project, and Indian officials sought Le Corbusier to complete the work. Le Corbusier would heavily revise Mayer’s plans and essentially eliminate the concept of the superblock. Though Mayer’s plan influenced aspects of the redesign, it's hard to imagine him feeling that Le Corbusier accounted for his careful study of the Indian village. Mayer would return to the United States after his decommissioning. When he next returns to India in 1956, to assist the Ford Foundation in their planning of New Delhi, Cold War tensions will have heightened, and the implications of his findings would become of great national interest.
To the Truman administration, the young Indian government represented the best ally for halting communism across Asia. This became even more pronounced after the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. The American government saw India as being in a similar position to pre-communist China, noting that food insecurity was directly correlated to “dangerous” political movements.3 Figures such as Elenor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy would take interest in the Etawah Pilot Project, which U.S. officials would reframe as a success story of the Four Points Doctrine. Stories about the project made headlines in New York Times and Life magazine (Figure C). Says Sackley: “As news of the pilot project and its accomplishments spread, it would become increasingly difficult to imagine Etawah outside of a Cold War frame.”
The decade following the Chinese Revolution would see an increased American institutional presence in India’s development. The Ford Foundation became an important part of this mechanism, continuing work in Etawah and entering discussions on consulting the new plan for Delhi. The renewed urge to counter communist expansion added a new layer of interest to planning as a technology, and Delhi would become a key experiment for the Ford Foundation.
It was no surprise when the Ford Foundation brought back Albert Mayer as the head of the planning team. Once again, Mayer and his colleagues were confronted with a city undergoing great social change: the University of Michigan’s Matthew Hull remarks that population studies read like "flash flood warnings", describing "waves” and "floods" of migrants "pouring into", "bloating," "swamping," "inundating," and "drowning" fragile urban areas.5 It wasn’t just recent migrants who were being characterized as incompatible with urbanity: some citizens of Delhi who had lived there for generations were now deemed culturally "rural" by the Ford Foundation.
The Ford team, lead by Mayer, again employed the superblock concept to mediate “unurbanized” Indians into a modern Indian context. Hull refers to the basis of the Delhi concept as the “neighborhood unit”, more or less synonymous with Mayer’s earlier superblock. The neighborhood socialization was to happen on the interior of the blocks, which were given clear boundaries by wide, tree-lined streets. Communal spaces within housing units were limited, so “face-to-face” interactions would occur within well-defined public spaces.5 The branching and amorphous character of Delhi’s older sections were seen as an obstruction against a new understanding of a modern Indian urban stewardship. The Ford Team was interested whether the plan for Delhi would prove useful for anti-communist efforts. They would never get a complete answer: the Delhi master plan, as finalized in 1962, would never come to fruition.
American planners blamed the lack of implementation on the fractured nature of Delhi's metropolitan jurisdictions, while Indian officials noted the plans were not responsive to the needs of Delhi's residents.4 In the parts of Delhi that were rebuilt, Indian urbanites would not respond to the superblock forms as the Ford team had hoped. For example, residents in Delhi resisted the integrated nature of the block in favor of city-wide movement. Better-off residents would send their children to schools in other superblocks.5 Perhaps the approach the Ford Team took was too academic: it is important to note that civic participation in planning was limited. Despite the media praise of projects like Etawah, contemporary academics such as Tridib Banerjee characterize America’s urban planning efforts in India as a failure:"“Mayer’s vision of Chandigarh as a collection of urban villages did not quite match Indian expectations… when the U.S. planners came to Delhi. . . experts could not deliver an inspiring vision.”
Although American planners took Indian social fabrics into consideration, they failed to help define a modern Indian planning regime that could diffuse to the rest of India’s cities. The legacy of American planning in India is nuanced- it is not neutral, but also not an imperialist mechanism. I want to identify two important American interests in developing Indian built geography. The first interest is for the young nation of India develop along lines of American-defined democratic participation, pushing away from Soviet influence. These are exemplified in the spatial philosophies observed in plans for Chandigarh and Delhi. The second interest is for the planning profession would sharpen as a tool to combat social dysfunction. The expanding U.S. interest in planning magnified the political impetus of Mayer’s beliefs, which attested that certain spatial forms could engender social patterns in their users. These beliefs are critical to contextualizing our understanding of the planning profession in America.
Although American planning technologies would not live up to their potential in India (as
inscribed by thinkers like Mayer), spatial principles espoused in the planning schemes of Chandigarh and Delhi would remain relevant to American planners. The influx of rural migrants to industrial cities paralleled that of Indian cities, with American planners facing new questions regarding housing, sanitation, and economic integration. For planners like Edward Logue, a member of the Ford Team in Delhi and a key player in American urban renewal, India provided a great opportunity to clarify the link between built space and social behavior: “when [Logue] was working in New Haven” writes Lizbeth Cohen, “the work of the Ford Foundation in Etawah would provide a model for the kind of integrated physical and social reconstruction he was promoting.”
It’s safe to say we are past the era of the planner-is-redeemer. It's probable that hubris on behalf of the American officials contributed to the lack of success in India. The image of the blue-jeaned American advisor, crouched alongside the eager-to-learn laborer, is incompatible with our current understanding of development. While acknowledging this, we can also mourn the loss of vision. The commonality between thinkers such as President Truman and Logue was that the US government held both a capability and responsibility to improve the material well-being of every citizen on earth via government programs. Since the rise of neoliberalism, the American planning profession has fractured along lines of private interest.1 Never again would it engage with aspirations so bold, though cities around the world continue to battle the same issues of inequality and social segregation. If planning is ever to be optimized as a technology in fighting “those ancient enemies”, a more comprehensive understanding of its history is necessary.