Architecture in Development

Systems and the Emergence of the Global South

Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000543544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

This extensive text investigates how architects, planners, and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of "development" after World War II. Development theory did not manifest itself in tracts of economic and political theory alone. It manifested itself in every sphere of expression where economic predicaments might be seen to impinge on cultural factors. Architecture appears in development discourse as a terrain between culture and economics, in that practitioners took on the mantle of modernist expression while also acquiring government contracts and immersing themselves in bureaucratic processes. This book considers how, for a brief period, architects, planners, structural engineers, and various practitioners of the built environment employed themselves in designing all the intimate spheres of life, but from a consolidated space of expertise. Seen in these terms, development was, to cite Arturo Escobar, an immense design project itself, one that requires radical disassembly and rethinking beyond the umbrella terms of "global modernism" and "colonial modernities, " which risk erasing the sinews of conflict encountered in globalizing and modernizing architecture.

Encompassing countries as diverse as Israel, Ghana, Greece, Belgium, France, India, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela, the Philippines, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, Zambia, and Canada, the set of essays in this book cannot be considered exhaustive, nor a "field guide" in the traditional sense. Instead, it offers theoretical reflections "from the field, " based on extensive archival research. This book sets out to examine the arrays of power, resources, technologies, networking, and knowledge that cluster around the term "development, " and the manner in which architects and planners negotiated these thickets in their multiple capacities—as knowledge experts, as technicians, as negotiators, and as occasional authorities on settlements, space, domesticity, education, health, and every other field where arguments for development were made.

Part I Developmental time

1 Incompletion On more than a certain tendency in postwar architecture and planning

Arindam Dutta

DOI: 10.4324/9781003193654-3

This chapter compares two otherwise unrelated planning projects of the early 1960s. Both projects represent “failures” of some kind. The projects are Candilis-Josic-Woods’s (CJW’s) propositions for a new township, Le Mirail, on the outskirts of Toulouse, France, and the Ford Foundation’s Basic Development Plan for the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. I say otherwise unrelated because the two projects do not share any dramatis personae, and although initiated in the same year, 1961, they would have no influence on each other. Much separates the two projects in terms of scope, geography, governmental and institutional frameworks, and the nature of capital formation in the two countries, not to rule out of course social composition and culture. Le Mirail was a much smaller project, a mixed-use development conceptualized for 100,000 people, one piece in a broader regional development plan for the Toulouse region. By contrast, the Calcutta plan catered to a population of some 7 million people, projected to double in twenty years. The territory covered by the plan encompassed 200 square miles, and the economies surveyed were linked to a hinter-land of 150 million people.¹ This scalar discrepancy also entailed a difference in planning type: unlike the “physical” propositions of the CJW plan, Ford’s Calcutta “plan,” such as it was, can be described more as an attempt at administrative reform, incorporating massive infrastructural inputs, the economics of rural-urban linkages, market operations, and so on.

What I focus on in these two projects is the emphasis on time-modeling as the central feature of their approach: hence the “incompletion” of my title. Narratives of political and economic transition after the Second World War can be succinctly measured by the shift in fortunes of a particular type of global—and globalizing—document that by the mid-1960s appeared to be at a low ebb. This was the master plan, a genre defined by large, brightly colored and color-coded maps and drawings, covering large tracts of territory—cities, regions, or even whole countries—packed thick with symbols—arrows, legends, diagrams, indices—that correlated them with demographic and economic data of various sorts.

Visually, these plans appear to have to do with the placement of objects—population concentrations, logistics, infrastructure, economic zones—in space. In actuality what they mapped were expectations, sequences unfolding in time, concatenations of causes and effects, whose totality was encapsulated in the plan’s claim to represent the future. The incompletion I describe in this chapter is therefore of a double kind. It refers in the first instance to the deportment of the master plan document as a teleological apparatus. The modernizing crux of these master plans, and planning in general, lay not in professions of ruling out uncertainty and unpredictability in the future but in their claims of bringing uncertainty within a viable range of calculability and rationality. Master plans are by definition incomplete.

In the two decades after the Second World War, these plans would embark on what was literally a downward journey: from tops of tables, the cynosure of heads of states and ministers with their bevy of technical consultants, to bottom drawers in dusty plan chests in planning offices. The actual abandonment of these plans comprises, in our study, incompletion in the second instance. If incompletion in the genre of the master plan represented a warranty against failure, this would prove to be no warranty at all. Plans would fail nevertheless, but not on the terms that the master-planners had anticipated. Incompletion in the first instance would provide the stimulus for massive expansion in the modernizing frames and claims of knowledge; in the second, it would entail a cauterization and a forced closure of these claims, opening up a dispiriting void in the place where expertise had once been.

We started by noting differences between the scope of the CJW and the Ford projects. Much also lay in common between them, as observers noted at the time.² Both France and India, like many other countries, had adopted so-called “mixed economy” approaches. Both emphasized the necessity of strong state intervention in the realm of public goods—in Albert Hirschman’s terms “social overhead capital,” contents of which varied from country to country—with the anticipation that eventually the bulk of economic activity would be carried by a vigorous private sector defined by market principles of competition and entrepreneurship.³ Both countries were signatories to the Bretton Woods Agreement, ostensibly aimed at securing free trade in goods and services but in effect an arrangement that subjected their economies and governments to the writ of the United States Treasury. Both countries balked at this dependence, countering this by adopting the fiscal strategies of what came to be called dirigisme or the command economy, where the state retained the prerogative of defining long-term sectoral priorities, shaped by the temporal structure of “five-year plans,” inspired by the socialist world.

In both countries, the prerogative of devising the five-year plans went to what were in fact extra-constitutional bodies: in France the Commissariat général du plan de modernisation et d’équipement, and in India the Planning Commission.⁴ Both bodies lacked executive authority and occupied strictly “advisory” positions. Throughout their careers, the where-withal of these expert bodies would remain wholly reliant on their charismatic patrons, Charles de Gaulle and Jawaharlal Nehru, who in turn used them to concentrate decision-making powers against political contenders in their own cabinets. The careers of both expert bodies were consequently defined by intrinsically inimical relationships to their finance ministries, tensions that then undergirded every proposition or project launched under their auspices. Ford’s leadership in India understood this well and sought to use intragovernmental divisions to their advantage:

During the decade following India’s emergence as a nation in 1947, “father figures” like Prime Minister Nehru, at the national level, and [West Bengal] Chief Minister B. C. Roy, at the state level, dominated political life. Their power stemmed in part from the inherited paternal governmental mantle of their colonial predecessors and in part from their leadership during the struggle for Independence. When these men took up “pet projects”—as Nehru apparently had done with the urban plan for Delhi—those projects were almost certain to be carried out.⁵

Both the Toulouse and Calcutta projects thus also substantially benefitted from powerful regional patrons: Roy in West Bengal and in Toulouse, the socialist mayor Louis Bazerque. Both cities would see a significant influx in civil war refugees, producing what would be perceived as large-scale demographic “imbalances.” In the case of Toulouse, some 27,000 pied-noirs would move there from Algeria. Calcutta had received a staggering 2 million people during the partition of India, the world’s largest human migration to date. An additional million people would arrive in 1971, with the onset of the Bangladesh War. Both cities boasted a sizeable communist/socialist left, which would lend both projects a regional complexity with regard to reigning political dispensations in Paris and New Delhi. Against the background of the Cold War, these ideological and political tensions—between experts over dirigisme and in politics between non-communist and communist adversaries—would cast both projects as international cause célèbres in their own right. Le Mirail would be broadcast as “the most important urban project in Europe,” meriting a visit from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, amongst others.⁶ Likewise, Ford consultants, in keeping with the ineluctable self-promotion demanded of their profession, drummed up the immensity of the challenges involved. Calcutta, they declared, was the “toughest planning job in the world in operation” and the “biggest and most important [job] that would ever engage [the] minds” of its participants.⁷ The city would become a vital pit stop for a range of luminaries, from World Bank head Robert McNamara, Harvard and MIT presidents Nathan Pusey and Julius Stratton, US Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, and MIT political scientist Myron Weiner to the veritable circus of architects and planners eyeing the global development market. Charles Abrams stopped by, as did Catherine W. Bauer and Gordon Cullen (engaged by Ford for both the Calcutta and the New Delhi projects). Each came riding their hobbyhorse into town: Cullen argued for the urban design approaches espoused by the British townscape movement; more ludicrously, Julian H. Whittlesey, an ex-associate of Albert Mayer and part of the Ford team, proposed that Buckminster Fuller-type geodesic domes be mass-manufactured and deployed to address the pressing challenges of Calcutta’s slums.

Both projects benefitted from the regional importance accorded to these cities by their federal governments. Toulouse and the midi-Pyrénées would be designated as an essential node in the Fifth Republic’s plans for an économie concertée, one of eight métropoles d’équilibres et grandes agglomérations by the Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale (DATAR). This distributional “physical planning” strategy was given further impetus by the decision to nominate Toulouse as the new hub of the French aircraft (and eventually electronics) industry, with the objective of enticing technical and scientific expertise away from the lopsided primacy that the Paris metropolitan region enjoyed in all matters economic, cultural, scientific, and political. Pursuant to this policy of l’aménagement, Paris’s propositions to vest a large number of ancillary research labs and institutes in Toulouse conjured up prospects of the imminent migration of technocratic elites to what was still a small medieval city. Toulouse’s socialist mayor, Bazerque, deeming his urban charge as unprepared and little equipped with the modern amenities suited to the approaching surge of metropolitan intellects, sought to requisition large federal outlays toward a conurbation plan equipped with large transportation and infrastructural networks. New zoning ordinances were introduced outlining new industrial and residential zones supported by a system of green belts. The exotic, newfangled modernist propositions of Le Mirail, designed by an architectural consultancy (CJW) whose reputation as “experts” was on the upswing—it would win two other comparable public works projects across Europe, Caen Hérouville (40,000 inhabitants) and Bilbao Val d’Asua (80,000 inhabitants) in the same period—would be the lynchpin of this regional plan. For Bazerque, CJW’s drawings and renderings would serve as both visual totem and marketing billboards for his urban ambitions. Le Mirail was designated a zone à urbaniser par priorité (or ZUP), representing the keystone in a bid by the Toulouse municipality to attract key national and regional subsidies, not to rule out investments by developers and commercial partners (with the requisite abetments and enticements) in what was in essence—portentous pronouncements on “le habitat pour le plus grand nombre” aside—a suburban residential enclave.

Calcutta, once Britain’s imperial capital in Asia, would appear on Ford’s radar for quite the opposite narratives than the ones of upward mobility being written in Toulouse. In 1960, the city was still one of the largest conurbations in the world. Mid-century shifts in global commodity supply chains—notably the shift of packaging industries from jute to plastic—as well as the loss of its hinterland during partition set what was hitherto India’s largest industrial center on a steady path to deindustrialization. Soaring unemployment, the growing pressures of population and large slum areas—housing an excess of h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Developmental time
• Part II Expertise
• Part III Bureaucratic organization
• Part IV Technological transfer
• Part V Designing the rural
• Part VI Land
• Index