1960s
Summary
Government as Planner
Rural poverty and urban squalor gives rise to international concern about development and long-term planning. The UN declares this the "Development Decade," the World Bank increases lending for infrastructure, regional development banks begin to grow, and bilateral assistance like the U.S. Alliance for Progress aims to improve living standards. The USAID Housing Guarantee program helps establish savings and loan systems in Latin America and the Caribbean, but development thinking, despite the start-up of urban development education programs, is largely directed to rural problems.
Planning agencies and Five-Year Development Plans with top-down ministries, development authorities, and parastatal implementing institutions become common in developing countries. Master planning, slum clearance, urban renewal, public housing, and infrastructure projects become principal approaches to urbanization.
Despite rural development programs, migration to the large economic centers continues unabated. Public housing and infrastructure programs cannot keep up, and the benefits of development planning do not seem to "trickle down" to the poor as expected. Poorly serviced informal settlements continue to grow within the cities.
Influences
- Space Race
- Vietnam War
- Moshe Safdie's "Habitat"
- Rural-urban migration to principal economic centers
- Expanding informal communities
- Emergence of literature critically assessing international concerns about housing, urbanization, and the environment
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Policies and Programs
- Post-colonial nation building: top-down planning; blueprints for society; 5- and 25-year plans
- Equity – "Classless society"
- U.S. Alliance for Progress: begins improving living standards in Latin America and the Caribbean, and expands worldwide
- USAID's Housing Guarantee program supports private U.S. lenders and builders to construct housing
- Slum clearance and urban renewal are common government policies
- Large infrastructure and subsidized public housing projects for civil servants and emerging middle class
- Development schizophrenia: regulated formal and unregulated informal sectors
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created by Act of Congress (1969)
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Institutional Roles
- Emerging national planning agencies, ministries, executing agencies, development authorities, and parastatals
- Birth of Asian Development Bank and other regional development banks
- Birth of U.S. Peace Corps: grassroots development initiatives
- Savings and Loans in Latin America and the Caribbean
- Development education program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Housing Studies, the Development Planning Unit, and the University of Birmingham
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Methods, Tools, and Practices
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Lessons and Outcomes
- Squatters sent back to the farm return to cities
- The "blueprint for society" left out the urban poor; centralized plans do not produce expected results
- Slum demolition, forced evictions, mass relocations do not work
- Large infrastructure and housing projects prove to be unsustainable
- Growing realization that Western standards and approaches may be inappropriate elsewhere
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