A global urban crisis

By the late 1940s the Ford Foundation was beginning to transform itself from a family tax haven into one of the most well-endowed philanthropic organizations in the world. ^{Footnote 14} One of the key documents of this transition was the blandly titled Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program (1949). Known simply as the ‘Gaither Report’ after its principal author, Rowan Gaither, its task was to survey both the domestic and the international scene for potential trouble spots ripe for Ford Foundation intervention. ^{Footnote 15} Infused throughout the report was what Karen Ferguson has described as a ‘developmentalist creed’, an embryonic iteration of modernization theory which rested on the belief that the principal root of unrest throughout the world was the difficulty of managing the transition from ‘backwardness’ to ‘modernity’. ^{Footnote 16} A problem of psychological and behavioural adjustment, the report noted how it could manifest itself anywhere – even in ostensibly ‘developed’ nations such as the United States. The difference was that throughout the Global South the site of these transitional strains were presented as occurring primarily in the rural areas, while in the United States they were understood to be coalescing around its decaying urban cores. ^{Footnote 17}

Initially, therefore, Foundation programming during the early 1950s bifurcated between the predominantly rural projects undertaken abroad and the urban interventions at home. These domestic efforts – some of which strayed dangerously close to the highly charged issues of racism and segregation – quickly became embroiled in a series of McCarthyite congressional investigations in the early 1950s. With opportunities at home circumscribed by these controversies, Ford opted to dramatically expand its programming overseas. As numerous historians have shown, this involved initiating pilot projects in rural community development, funding the establishment of universities, and participating in the industrial planning efforts of postcolonial governments. ^{Footnote 18} Far less commented upon, however, was the fact that the Foundation also began to engage with the field of ‘international urbanism’, acquainting itself with the problems and programmes of metropolitan development taking place around the world. ^{Footnote 19}

As Ford Foundation field offices sprung up around the globe, its central headquarters in New York was transformed into a clearing house for developmental knowledge. This was an institutional structure which encouraged transnational comparisons, as well as the collapsing of foreign and domestic problems into a single analytical frame. And, in sharp contrast to its work in rural development, the urban problems encountered throughout the Global South appeared to share distinct similarities with those plaguing the metro regions of the United States. In particular, officials began detecting parallels between the process of urbanization occurring throughout the ‘underdeveloped world’ and the migration of African American and Puerto Rican people to the cities of the United States. ^{Footnote 20} Both were understood to be part of a global process of ‘marginal’ communities drifting into the cities, a trend which was generating analogous problems of crime, underemployment, inadequate housing, and poor sanitation. ^{Footnote 21}

This focus on rural–urban migration ensured that the global urban crisis was conceptualized as a developmental problem which required the psychological modernization of these recent arrivals. Foundation reports from the field throughout the Global South regularly characterized urban newcomers as ‘backward’ and ‘marginal’, with their ‘culturally deprived backgrounds’ ensuring they remained isolated from ‘mainstream society’. ^{Footnote 22} Writing from Delhi, Marshall Clinard bemoaned the ‘feeling of apathy and futility [that] is all too common’ among migrants from rural areas, which, he argued, greatly exacerbated the ‘degraded’ state of India’s cities. ^{Footnote 23} As he later wrote, ‘The Indian slum is far more complex than the mere aggregate of these appalling surroundings suggests. It is a way of life’, and one which was being imported from the countryside into the city. ^{Footnote 24}

It was understood to be a way of life in America’s ‘ghettos’, too, a view succinctly outlined in 1962 by the Foundation vice-president Dyke Brown during a high-profile speech in St Louis. For more than a hundred years, Brown told his audience, the rural poor had drifted into America’s cities from Europe’s overpopulated countryside, finding a felicitous combination of unskilled jobs and social mobility. Since the Second World War, however, rural migrants were increasingly coming from within the borders of the United States. Moreover, Brown argued that, in contrast to the ‘hardy’ European pioneers who preceded them, these new migrants were the ‘culturally disadvantaged … Negroes and Puerto Ricans, Spanish Americans and Indians, marginal farmers and hillbillies’, who struggled to bridge the chasm between rural and urban life. ^{Footnote 25}

Remarkably, then, a combination of the Great Northward Migration and America’s overseas colonial entanglements seemed to have created a developmental problem within the United States itself, one which closely mirrored the situation in the Global South. ^{Footnote 26} As one official Ford Foundation history of this period makes clear, for many of its officials there ‘were quite obvious similarities between the migration of rural Southern blacks to become mostly poor populations in American cities, and the remarkable growth of Third World cities’. ^{Footnote 27}

The discovery of pockets of ‘backwardness’ in cities around the world served to destabilize one of the most influential theories of development – modernization theory. This was because, in this schema, development was supposed to be synonymous with urbanization. ‘[T]he core process of modernization’ was how urban growth was described in Emerging Nations (1961), a collaborative MIT study whose star-studded list of contributors – Walt Rostow, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Lucian Pye, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan – reads like a Who’s Who of modernization theory. ^{Footnote 28} For these figures, urbanization was not only symptomatic of development but fundamental to its continuance; cities were the crucibles of modernity, acting as ‘advanced enclaves in societies still predominately rural and primitive’. ^{Footnote 29} Yet, if urbanization was supposed to lead inexorably to modernization, then the location of underdeveloped communities within the city presented something of a problem. The global urban crisis tugged at the edges of modernization theory by severing the causal link between urbanity and modernity. The Ford Foundation itself was well aware of this; as one of its global surveys pointed out, ‘the “urban crisis” is all the more distressing in light of the generally held view that urban centers are important arenas for the process of social development and change within less developed regions of the world’. ^{Footnote 30}

The Foundation also challenged the exceptionalizing narratives which lay at the heart of modernization theory, undercutting previously rigid dichotomies between the ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ world. ^{Footnote 31} This was vividly demonstrated by the proceedings of the 1956 conference held at the Ford Foundation’s New York offices. In contrast to the likes of Rostow and Lerner, the urbanists who attended this conference did not assume that the United States was perched at the pinnacle of the developmental ladder. ^{Footnote 32} Rather, they acknowledged that the dire state of US cities ensured that they had as much to learn from ‘underdeveloped’ countries as they had to teach. It is this which meant that Robert Mitchell encouraged the Foundation to utilize the lessons of it had gleaned from its urban programming for use back home: ‘It could throw into sharp relief the situation of the city in the United States’, he argued. ^{Footnote 33} Marshall Clinard agreed, noting at a separate symposium in Ahmedabad that ‘the philosophy and techniques of urban community development programmes may become one of the most exportable contributions of underdeveloped countries to their ostensibly more highly developed brethren’. ^{Footnote 34}

Developing communities

As this speech from Clinard indicated, it was at the level of the ‘community’ that the most innovative strategies for combatting the global urban crisis had emerged – and did so largely outside the borders of the United States. Strands of this approach were certainly present within the US: as Alice O’Connor has shown, there has been a long tradition of ameliorating the strains of city living by focusing on the block or neighbourhood level. ^{Footnote 35} Yet the impulse to leverage the urban community as a solution to problems of ‘underdevelopment’ drew force from the rapidly urbanizing economies of the Global South. This was particularly the case in India, where these trends were generating a lively internal debate surrounding the cluster of issues of rural–urban migration, development, and crime and delinquency.

These debates among India’s elites centred on the place of the city in the nation’s modernization strategy. Discussions of the metropolitan dimensions of development infused the early publications of India’s Planning Commission. Its First Five Year Plan (1953) expressed concern that growth was leading to the ‘overcrowding of industrial centers’, with ‘large sections of their populations’ forced to ‘live in slums, huddled together in jerry-built houses or mud-huts, without water and electricity’. ^{Footnote 36} By 1956 the problem had become particularly acute, with the Commission warning that, ‘unless there is adequate forethought and planning, industrial progress will be accompanied by serious social and other problems in urban areas which could become increasingly difficult to manage’. ^{Footnote 37} Early efforts by the Government of India to tackle the problem focused on top-down strategies of clearance and physical regeneration. The centrepiece of this was the Slum Areas Act of 1956, which empowered municipal authorities to demolish settlements ‘unfit for human habitation’ and sell the land to private developers. ^{Footnote 38}

Yet many argued that this approach was failing to tackle the underlying ‘cultural’ dimension of India’s urban crisis. Sociological studies of India’s ‘slums’ not only catalogued their physical problems but also pathologized their inhabitants, delineating a host of behavioural deficiencies that underpinned the disordered metropolitan environment. K. N. Venkatarayappa’s survey of Mysore depicted its inhabitants as ‘socially maladjusted’, plagued by ‘family disorganisation’ and ‘the rise of prostitution, delinquency, gambling and gangsterism’. ^{Footnote 39} Scholars attributed these trends to the deleterious impact of urbanization on village associations, with the loosening of informal social controls spurring an epidemic of urban delinquency throughout the Global South. ^{Footnote 40} This conception of the urban crisis led many Indian officials to the conclusion that without transforming the attitudes of slum residents themselves – enlisting their pride and participation in the process of urban revitalization – all other measures would ultimately be rendered ineffective. As Nehru put it in 1958, slum improvements ‘can only be achieved with the co-operation of the people concerned. This means that every attempt should be made to interest these people, to educate them and to rely upon their help.’ ^{Footnote 41}

India’s metropolitan problems were understood to extend beyond the built environment to the ‘disordered’ communities of its residents. This closely mirrored debates unfolding within the United States, where the ‘bricks-and-mortar’ emphasis of urban renewal was coming under criticism for neglecting the ‘human dimension’ of city development. ^{Footnote 42} Both Foundation officials and Indian elites, therefore, were moving towards a strategy of bottom-up ‘community development’. Yet transferring this technique from its rural locale in Etawah to the cities of Delhi and Calcutta would be far from straightforward. Indeed, the point was precisely that India’s urban centres had lost the organic communal bonds that the rural programmes had built upon. If the Foundation’s Etawah project sought to leverage existing village associations towards the process of social change, its urban counterpart set itself a far more ambitious aim: developing entire communities from scratch.

A second difference lay in the cluster of issues that the urban development projects were designed to deal with. While the rural community development project in Etawah tackled low crop yields, disease, and high birth rates, in the cities the key targets were crime and delinquency. It was envisioned that by successfully engineering communal bonds in urban areas the programme could revitalize the informal social controls that operated in the villages. The resulting nexus of community approval/disapproval could then act as the mechanism for the transmission of ‘modern’ cultural values, replacing the previously ‘apathetic’ social environment – tolerant of delinquency and disorder – with a modernizing ethos conducive to order and development. ^{Footnote 43} To an extent quite unlike the previous Ford projects, then, crime prevention was baked into its developmental mission from the outset.

Indeed, this explains why the Ford Foundation chose a criminologist, Marshal Clinard, to head the proposed pilot project in Delhi. Clinard had received his doctoral training at the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology during the late 1930s, at the height of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s Chicago Area Project, which sought to combat delinquency through active citizen involvement in the process of local development. ^{Footnote 44} He envisioned his role in India as analogous to this kind of work, once again dealing with the social problems generated by high levels of rural newcomers to the city. Clinard’s work for the Foundation in India, as well as his travels to ‘slum-improvement projects’ in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, ultimately led him to see the problem of slums as a ‘world-wide phenomenon’. ^{Footnote 45} As he put it in 1966, ‘Bombay has its packed multistoried chawls, New York its Harlem and its Lower East Side, Chicago its Black Belt, and London its well-known East End … Then there are the tin shacks, bamboo huts, and straw hovels along the small lanes of Calcutta, Dacca, and Lagos.’ ^{Footnote 46}

The Delhi pilot project

In early 1954 India’s health minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, contacted Ford’s India representative, Douglas Ensminger, regarding the possibility of developing a regional plan for Delhi. The two began formulating a foreign assistance programme, eventually agreeing that a team of foreign specialists would be brought to India to assist in the drawing up of a masterplan. It was also decided that the Foundation would ‘start helping to create … pilot Urban Community Development projects’. ^{Footnote 47} In September 1958 this scheme was launched in Delhi, funded by an initial $25,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and a subsequent grant for $155,539 to assure the continuation of the programme until at least March 1962. It was overseen by Bimalananda Chatterjee, who headed up the newly created Department of Urban Community Development (DUCD), while Marshall Clinard was appointed as the Foundation’s chief consultant. ^{Footnote 48}

The key issue that the project was designed to tackle was rural-to-urban migration to Delhi from the surrounding countryside. According to Chatterjee, the rapid and unplanned nature of this demographic shift was preventing the city from performing its appropriate function in the development process. Instead of modernizing under the pressure of city living, rural newcomers seemed to be merely carrying their ‘backward’ habits with them into the city. As he observed in a 1962 field report, ‘People in the cities find themselves in a vortex of change and yet, pathetically, cling to old ideas, associations, habits and customs.’ He concluded that this was a problem rooted in the ‘heterogeneity of the urban complex’, an absence of community which mitigated against the transmission of modern values by providing anonymity for those holding onto old habits. ^{Footnote 49} By engineering fresh communities out of this mass of recent arrivals – fractured by various caste-based and religious solidarities – one could generate a mechanism for infusing ‘modern’ values throughout the city.

In order to create these communities, the DUCD established a pyramid-like democratic structure which sought to ensure the participation of all segments of Delhi society. In each of the project areas, local organizers were sent to conduct a survey of the neighbourhoods, detailing their physical features (schools, playgrounds, temples) as well as their social fractures according to caste, occupation, and religion. ^{Footnote 50} This necessitated each community organizer going door to door, canvassing residents on their problems and encouraging them to think about changes which could be made within the community. ^{Footnote 51} The area was then divided into sub-blocks of around fifteen to twenty-five families, each of which were formed into ‘citizen discussion groups’ to encourage them to swap local grievances and elect a representative to serve on the citizens’ development council (vikas mandal). Acting as ‘the cornerstone of the urban community development project’, each vikas mandal was made up of ten to fifteen representatives from the sub-blocks and had authority over 250–400 families. ^{Footnote 52} It was here that most of the self-help projects were to be initiated. By March 1960 there were around two hundred of these playing out across the six vikas mandals. These ranged from neighbourhood beautification campaigns and immunization drives to weekly sewing classes for women and the establishment of local cricket teams. ^{Footnote 53}

The actual process of developing communities was more important than the specific content of these projects. ‘The crucial aspect of the program is the involvement of the people themselves in neighborhood organizations’, one Foundation review put it: ‘the specific nature of the problem is relatively unimportant’. ^{Footnote 54} The Commissioner of Delhi agreed, arguing that the programme’s principal objective was that of ‘giving form to an urban community which has been drawn from backgrounds varying from one another’. ^{Footnote 55} It was in the crucible of local engagement that communities would be forged, melded together through the face-to-face deliberation that came with paving a street, combating delinquency, or lobbying local authorities to install streetlights and water taps. ^{Footnote 56} Such efforts were designed to encourage the psychological integration of rural newcomers, a process tightly linked to the goal of modernization; by identifying with the newly formed community centred around the vikas mandal, in-migrants would shed their previous adherence to ‘backward’ caste-based and religious solidarities. ^{Footnote 57}

The participation of Delhi’s most impoverished residents was therefore the key component of the project, playing a therapeutic role in the engineering of ‘well-adjusted’ urban citizens. A 1964 internal summary for the DUCD noted that the programme’s ‘underlying objective’ was ‘to educate public opinion about the importance of community work through citizen participation’, thus achieving ‘the economic, social, cultural and moral uplift of the residents’. ^{Footnote 58} Because those deemed most in need of this economic and psychological development were the urban poor, encouraging their involvement in neighbourhood projects was crucial. Chatterjee, after acknowledging that some saw problems with promoting self-help among the poor, counselled that experience had shown the exact opposite: ‘the poorer a person, the more easily [sic] it is to motivate him to share with others’. ^{Footnote 59} And reports from community organizers in the field frequently stressed how the blocks they worked with were ‘inhabited by very low income groups’. ^{Footnote 60}

The participatory emphasis of the programme was particularly visible in the increasing – though still limited – role that women were expected to play in projects. In each sub-block two of the community organizers were usually women. These were tasked with organizing the election of women’s auxiliaries (mahila samitis), from whom two representatives were sent to serve on the executive committee of the vikas mandals. ^{Footnote 61} This engagement was justified with reference to the social development and psychological adjustment of the community. Because women were thought to be the main transmitter of values to the next generation, it was ‘necessary to involve them effectively in the process of social change’, Chatterjee argued, who also observed that women were ‘by and large more motivated to seek toward change than men’. ^{Footnote 62} The reports of community organizers were more ambivalent. While some stressed women’s ‘great interest’ in the programme, others noted their high levels of reluctance; when one community worker suggested that the women of a katra pool their resources to make repairs they demurred, replying that ‘it would not be possible for them as they could not pay even a single penny unless their husbands agree’. ^{Footnote 63}

Aside from the therapeutic benefits provided by community participation, the other salient aspect of the programme was its low cost for the government. With the scale of India’s urban problems apparently outrunning the level of assistance its government could feasibly provide, the mantra of ‘self-help’ in urban development took on a particular resonance. ^{Footnote 64} The DUCD’s 1962 review noted how the ‘social integration’ of the local community was essential in order to make ‘maximum use of community resources’ for urban regeneration. ^{Footnote 65} The repairing and construction of drains, the installation of water taps, and the painting of houses were all projects undertaken by vikas mandals, carried out by local residents and paid for by their subscriptions. ^{Footnote 66} Family planning and health classes were sponsored by the mahila samitis, which sought to inculcate ‘modern’ practices by involving the community in group discussions. ^{Footnote 67} Self-help schools, community reading rooms, and neighbourhood immunization campaigns were all part of a coordinated attack on urban ‘underdevelopment’ which required minimal government spending.

This is partly why the experiment appealed to Nehru’s government. A national programme was rolled out in 1965 of twenty community development projects, with matching grants from the Ministry of Health to state and municipal governments. ^{Footnote 68} This was explicitly based on the two projects that the Ford Foundation had pioneered in Delhi and Ahmedabad. ^{Footnote 69} A particularly notable experiment was that begun in Hyderabad in 1967, which was expanded to include the entire city over the next twenty years. Financed with support from UNICEF during the 1970s, the Hyderabad municipal corporation collaborated with representative committees to deliver improved social services, rehabilitated amenities, and housing- and business-related loans. ^{Footnote 70} One 1979 review concluded that the project demonstrated how ‘any neighborhood, no matter how poor, can do something to improve itself by its own efforts [through] a gradual process of education, community action and self help’. ^{Footnote 71}

It was not just in India where the lessons of the Delhi pilot project would be applied. Its methods were deemed to be applicable around the world, and the programme evoked a considerable amount of international interest. The DUCD was inundated with requests for literature from the planning commissions of foreign governments. In 1962, the government of Hong Kong sent members of its Social Welfare Department to Delhi to undertake a study of the programme, following in the footsteps of a host of town planners and social workers who visited from all over the world. That same year, the UN requested that the DUCD set up on-the-ground training facilities for government officials from Somaliland for a period of eight weeks. ^{Footnote 72} Articles from Chatterjee and Clinard outlining the project also featured in self-consciously global journals such as Ekistics and the International Review of Community Development. ^{Footnote 73} An issue of the Journal of Housing published in the United States devoted a considerable portion to the Delhi experiment. This was entirely appropriate: as the following section will show, it was in America that its lessons would be most thoroughly applied.

Maximum feasible participation

The community action approach was central to the Ford Foundation’s pioneering efforts to deal with America’s declining inner cities. At the turn of the 1960s, it began funding a number of projects – most importantly its ‘Gray Areas’ programme – which sought to harness the participation of impoverished residents themselves in the process of city development. ^{Footnote 74} Like the Indian project, the core goal of these measures was the social development and cultural assimilation of recent rural migrants to the cities. As they shared a transnational culture of ‘underdevelopment’ with their Indian counterparts, it was thought that these ‘newcomers’ to America’s cities – from Puerto Rico, the US South, Mexico, and Appalachia – could similarly be forged into modern citizens through the process of expert-assisted community building. ^{Footnote 75}

The Ford Foundation’s emphasis on the problem of rural-to-urban migration was largely down to the influence of Paul Ylvisaker. Hired to the Public Affairs division in 1955, Ylvisaker pulled the Foundation in the direction of his own intellectual evolution. This had shifted away from his desire to reform metropolitan governance structures – better integrating the interests of the suburbs and the inner city – and towards a tighter focus on the ‘human problems’ of so-called ‘gray areas’. ^{Footnote 76} These were the decaying residential zones which ringed the central business district, separating it from the more affluent suburbs. ^{Footnote 77} For Ylvisaker, these neighbourhoods had traditionally played the role of ‘citifying our in-migrant populations’, acting as places of ‘transition’ for ‘the immigrant from abroad, for the rural uprooted, for a wide assortment of human beings who are at the bottom of their life’s ambitions’. ^{Footnote 78} Yet with the flight of industry to the suburbs these modernizing zones had congealed into stagnant backwaters, pockets of underdevelopment permanently inhabited by ‘those who are even more rural and backwards in culture’, Ylvisaker argued: ‘Negroes from the rural South; mountain folk from the Ozarks and Appalachians, Puerto Ricans from their island villages’. ^{Footnote 79}

Ylvisaker saw America’s urban crisis as rooted in the ‘backward’ cultures which migrants were carrying with them into the city. It was therefore identical to the situation described in Bimalananda Chatterjee’s field reports from India, leading to the same cluster of problems of delinquency, blighted housing, and unemployment. ^{Footnote 80} Specificities in the American case were collapsed into a transnational nexus of problems coalescing around the ‘backward’ cultural habits of rural migrants and the ‘disordered’ community structures that underpinned them – a conception of America’s urban crisis that elided the profoundly structural reasons for the entrapment of people of colour in the inner cities. This was the conceptual alchemy which allowed Ylvisaker to transform domestic deprivation into a global developmental problem whose solution lay in the psychological modernization of its residents.

In these circumstances the Ford Foundation acted as an institutional bridge, facilitating the transnational cycling of techniques between India and the United States. This dynamic was illustrated starkly in one exchange which took place in 1959. After holding a conference on the importance of ‘citizen participation’ in urban renewal, the Foundation consultant Bernard Loshbough sent the proceedings to George Gant, programme representative in Pakistan. ^{Footnote 81} Gant was out of town, but his secretary replied informing Loshbough that he had forwarded the report on to Douglas Ensminger, ‘who will, I know, be interested in it in connection with a pilot project in urban community development which the Ford Foundation is helping to support in India’. ^{Footnote 82} ‘I guess nobody told you I was formerly Deputy Representative in India for the Ford Foundation’, Loshbough replied, who had already sent several copies of the report to Ensminger a few days earlier. ^{Footnote 83} It was during his stint in India between 1953 and 1956 that Loshbough had first formulated his ideas on community development, ‘develop[ing] the notion that this approach could be adapted to the urban areas of the United States’. ^{Footnote 84} The same was true for Ylvisaker, who could also be found shuttling between New York and India during the early 1960s. ^{Footnote 85}

The Foundation’s international development efforts overseas encouraged the organization to utilize a bottom-up, community-orientated approach in its response to America’s urban crisis. This was reflected in its Gray Areas programme undertaken at the turn of the 1960s, which sought to institutionalize community responses to the interlinked problems of poverty and delinquency. As Alice O’Connor has shown, this project drew on the work of the sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, whose Delinquency and Opportunity (1961) had argued that delinquent subcultures were the consequence of blocked opportunities for legitimate advancement. ^{Footnote 86} Yet they also employed the urban community development strategies that Ford were pioneering overseas, where its Delhi pilot project sought to deal with a similar cluster of problems around rural in-migration, poverty, and delinquency. An analogous process of community reintegration as that performed in the ‘slums’ of India was required in order to restore America’s ‘gray areas’ to their role as modernizing enclaves. ^{Footnote 87}

Community building through local participation lay at the heart of the Gray Areas programme. Between 1961 and 1967 a series of community action grants were made to five cities – Boston, Philadelphia, New Haven, Washington, DC, and Oakland – as well as the state of North Carolina. In each city an independent, non-profit corporation was established, tasked with utilizing Ford grants to formulate a coordinated response to poverty and delinquency. ^{Footnote 88} The central function of these corporations was to democratize the planning and provision of social services, encouraging the ‘active participation’ of the neighbourhood by allowing its residents to express ‘their own felt needs’. ^{Footnote 89} In the Oakland project, for instance, a citizens advisory committee of community leaders was set up to review the proposals formulated by the Interagency Project. ^{Footnote 90} Both the New Haven and the Washington corporations established neighbourhood service teams which were tasked with ‘stimulating self-help activities’ and helping residents ‘identify local problems’. ^{Footnote 91} Like the Delhi project, this participatory emphasis was intimately linked to the process of social development. As one Foundation review put it, the Gray Areas corporations ‘ seek to encourage urban communities to fashion more effective ways to speed the transition of the urban in-migrant and slum residents of low educational achievement and inadequate work skills to full economic, social and cultural participation in the urban community’. ^{Footnote 92}

This analysis indicates the ways in which structural and cultural explanations for poverty could bleed into one another. While the Ohlin–Cloward thesis of urban deprivation stressed the importance of racial discrimination and capital flight, these factors were routinely collapsed into a ‘cycle of poverty’ argument whereby the cultural pathologies bred by these structural disadvantages took on a life of their own. ^{Footnote 93} This trend was compounded at Ford by Ylvisaker’s emphasis on achieving the cultural integration of recent urban in-migrants, as well as racist assumptions regrading the ‘less assimilable’ nature of African American and Puerto Rican people. ^{Footnote 94} Cultural enrichment was one solution, with Gray Areas corporations undertaking a series of educational, health, and recreational programmes. ^{Footnote 95} As one review noted, the primary purpose of these programmes was ‘to shorten the period of acculturation for successive groups of migrants into the city’. This was underpinned by ‘the notion that the urban Negro is culturally deprived’. ^{Footnote 96}

This cultural backwardness was understood to be the root cause not only of poverty but also of crime in America’s urban cores. Indeed, Ford’s urban community development projects were underpinned by a conceptual linkage between development and ‘law and order’. ^{Footnote 97} As the programme officer David Hunter explained, violence and disorder thrived in ‘backward’ communities. The Gray Areas programme had ‘to change the climate of the neighborhood from one of frustration to one of hope’, which could be achieved by ensuring the residents be made to ‘feel that they too have a stake in making things better’. ^{Footnote 98} Mobilization in one area was to have ripple effects elsewhere, restoring pride in the neighbourhood and re-energizing the informal social controls that acted to both prevent crime and encourage psychological acculturation. In a similar fashion to many US aid programmes overseas, therefore, the development of US urbanites was tightly linked to the pacification of their turbulent communities. ^{Footnote 99}

Maximum feasible misunderstanding

In theory, developing communities through a process of ‘maximum feasible participation’ was supposed to bring order and modernization to the urban space. Yet in practice the Ford Foundation found that this technique worked to mobilize urban residents in quite unexpected ways. As the projects unfolded in both India and the United States, Ford’s efforts appeared to mobilize and radicalize the very residents they were attempting to modernize and pacify. This pointed to a fundamental disjuncture between the Ford Foundation and the communities they encountered; while Ford envisioned the projects as engineering a consensual process of social change, many urban residents sought to utilize the participatory structures they put in place to push for more fundamental shifts in the local balance of power.

In the United States, these controversies were thrust into mainstream consciousness after community action agencies began clashing with established municipal authorities over issues of housing, welfare, and policing. With the War on Poverty’s strategy of ‘maximum feasible participation’ consequently coming under fire, the Ford Foundation’s role in democratizing urban planning was subjected to intense scrutiny. As the most visible edge of the social scientific ‘expertise’ that Daniel Patrick Moynihan would so excoriate in his Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (1969), it was thrust into a contentious national debate over racism, poverty, and democracy. ^{Footnote 100}

Ylvisaker referred to the Gray Areas programme as ‘a revolution within the establishment’. ^{Footnote 101} This awkward phrasing reflected the difficulties that the Foundation had in balancing its goal of community mobilization with its desire to work with established city governance structures. As one early assessment of the project pointed out, there were ‘complicated political stresses’ generated by the fact that Gray Area corporations existed ‘outside the central power structure’. ‘The opportunities for conflict are legion’, it concluded presciently. ^{Footnote 102}

In Boston, these frictions quickly emerged after the board of Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) was gradually expanded to include lower-income residents. Neighbourhood organizations were also established to help locals express their ‘felt needs’ to city authorities. Soon complaints were being made through these bodies regarding segregated educational structures, inadequate housing, and poor municipal services, culminating in a series of highly publicized confrontations with City Hall. ^{Footnote 103} At the prompting of the embarrassed Ford Foundation, ABCD gradually abandoned its community organization role, a move which mollified the mayor but came at the price of ‘the agency’s prestige in low-income communities’. ^{Footnote 104}

A similar pattern of conflict followed by retreat characterized the other projects. In New Haven the Gray Area corporation, Community Progress Inc. (CPI), became embroiled in a controversial rape trial after one of its staff lawyers, Jean Cahn, opted to represent one of the three African American men accused. A young African American graduate of Yale Law School raised in a Baltimore household frequented by Paul Robeson and Thurgood Marshall, Cahn was deeply committed to the civil rights struggle. ^{Footnote 105} Her involvement in the case drew the ire of Mitchell Sviridoff, director of CPI and future vice-president at the Ford Foundation. For Sviridoff, maintaining good relations with Mayor Richard Lee was more important than encouraging the participation of New Haven’s African American community. With public outrage over Cahn’s involvement putting pressure on Lee, Sviridoff refused to publicly identify the CPI with her defence. Shortly after losing the case, Cahn resigned in protest. ^{Footnote 106} The pressure points of this particular saga – with its entangling of community participation with the fraught issue of racism – were a harbinger of things to come.

Nowhere was conflict quite so intense as over Mobilization for Youth (MFY), a Foundation-funded community action group located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. ^{Footnote 107} Begun as a traditional social service programme, by 1962 it had shifted in emphasis towards a particularly militant form of community action, seeking to organize the poor as an independent source of power. Its local organizers played a critical role in establishing Mobilization of Mothers, a group of largely Puerto Rican women which pressed complaints about the standards of their children’s education to local superintendents. The radical edge of MFY only intensified with the cresting of the northern civil rights movement by the middle of the decade, after which it began coordinating a series of rent strikes, boycotts, and protests. ^{Footnote 108} By 1964 these activities had come under intense criticism, with local publications charging that MFY was littered was communist sympathizers and behind the Harlem riots that summer. ^{Footnote 109}

The Ford Foundation balked at the negative publicity generated by the scandal. Ylvisaker dismissed the programme as ‘too radical’, while Sviridoff complained that the anti-poverty movement had become ‘more concerned with the process of participation than with … substantive results’. ^{Footnote 110} By 1965 the Foundation were already reducing their support. This heralded a broader shift in their urban programming, which began downplaying the participatory aspects of their Gray Areas projects and emphasizing instead ‘concrete outputs, rather than protest and advocacy’. ^{Footnote 111} Sviridoff’s New Haven project became the model in this regard. Since the Jean Cahn controversy, the CPI had abandoned its community organization function and tightened its links with Mayor Lee. While early reports had criticized this ‘executive-centred’ structure, it was soon being pinpointed as the central reason for CPI’s success: ‘Unlike several other Gray Areas programs,’ one report approvingly noted, ‘CPI never succumbed to the centrifugal forces unleashed by the push to achieve “maximum feasible participation”.’ ^{Footnote 112}

These shifts in Ford programming dovetailed with a broader move away from ‘maximum feasible participation’ after 1966 throughout the United States. As Stuart Schrader has argued, this was a shift not necessarily replicated in US development projects abroad: the Foreign Assistance Act (1966) embedded community participation even more closely into overseas development projects, particularly in the case of America’s ‘pacification’ efforts in Vietnam. ^{Footnote 113} The evolution of Ford’s programmes in India, however, reveals an alternative genealogy, whereby the difficulties of encouraging participation overseas appeared be unfolding in tandem with the crises of the War on Poverty at home. Indeed, a look at Ford’s progress reports – as well as field notes of the community organizers on the ground in India – shows how the projects were plagued by strikingly similar problems to those in US cities.

In Delhi, the project struggled to reconcile its stated desire to achieve ‘the active cooperation of citizens’ with its aversion to antagonizing local power structures. ^{Footnote 114} For both Ford and local community organizers, the mobilization of sub-block residents was supposed to achieve consensus within the community, bringing together its various representatives in order to transcend the boundaries of class, caste, and even religion. As an early field report noted enthusiastically, while previously ‘members formed as hetrogenous [sic] groups’ based on ‘the professions & vocations they followed’, the sub-block meetings ensured that ‘from washermen to college professors, all were sitting together’. ^{Footnote 115} Convenors of vikas mandal meetings were explicitly instructed ‘not [to] say anything which might have a political implication’. ^{Footnote 116} They did so by focusing the agenda on relatively anodyne issues such as whitewashing houses, purchasing common dustbins, and neighbourhood inoculation campaigns. ^{Footnote 117}

Some issues, however, proved beyond the consensus-building efforts of the community workers. Particularly intractable were the fraught issues surrounding housing and tenant–landlord relations. While notably absent from Clinard’s published account of the project, these conflicts litter the pages of field reports from community organizers in Delhi. Reports often began by pointing to the ‘very strained’ nature of the relations between tenants and landlords, with residents complaining of landlords living outside the area and consequently being ‘the least bothered by the inconveniences to the tenants’. ^{Footnote 118} Yet when these harassed tenants took their complaints to the vikas mandal, the organization’s attempts to get both sides to ‘merge their differences’ through a series of mediative meetings invariably ran up against the entrenched positions of each. ^{Footnote 119} After reaching this impasse, the vikas mandal usually recoiled from pushing the matter any further, citing their determination to avoid ‘such disputes which were impossible to solve except through a court of law, or where some violence would be an easy outcome’. ^{Footnote 120}

This hardly satisfied the residents. They often shunned the mediative efforts of the vikas mandal and took matters into their own hands. In Project Area II of the Shora Kothi neighbourhood, the vikas mandals sought to broker a dispute in one of the katras by getting both the tenants and the landlord to contribute equally for repairs. While initially agreeable, the residents scuppered the deal at the last minute, demanding instead that the landlord pay the full amount. According to the community organizer’s exasperated report, the tenants had been ‘incited’ into action by ‘people living close to this katra’ – an ominous reference to an earlier accusation that its local millworkers were affiliated with the Community Party. ^{Footnote 121} In Project Area IV of the same neighbourhood, the community organizer bemoaned ‘the dominant tendency in the people to fight out lawsuits rather than deciding things peacefully’. He conceptualized his role as restraining the radicalism of the tenants, channelling it into more ‘productive’ and less confrontational avenues, concluding after one particularly fiery meeting, ‘the residents of the area need a very gradual nursing along’. ^{Footnote 122}

By 1962, these conflicts had begun to surface in Chatterjee’s reports back to the Ford Foundation. There was an acute ‘problem of rising expectations’, he complained in February 1963. ^{Footnote 123} Once ‘a group organised for cooperative action’, Chatterjee observed, ‘a stage is likely to be reached when they will demand fundamental alterations rather than minor structural changes in their community life’. ^{Footnote 124} What is more, these demands were not only more radical than either the vikas mandals or the Ford Foundation could stomach, but were also made outside ‘traditional administrative procedures or policies’. ^{Footnote 125} This was much to the ire of established neighbourhood organizations, local councillors, and existing municipal authorities, many of whom began to resent the disruptive presence of the vikas mandals within the community.

According to the official Ford review of the project conducted in 1966, the nature of the problem was clear. Because the professional worker was supposed to be a ‘catalytic agent who helps the community by awakening its discontent about conditions in the area’, it was bound to run head on into more established authorities. ^{Footnote 126} The same report noted the difficulty of ensuring that ‘discontent, once it has been aroused, is focused and channelled into organization, planning and action’, noting that a failure to do so led to ‘increased frustration, apathy and bitterness’. ^{Footnote 127} In Ahmedabad these concerns interacted with suspicion of local authorities towards the Ford Foundation’s presence within the country. After a new coalition came to power in 1965, they swiftly closed down the programme owing to ‘their antagonism to a foreign foundation’. ^{Footnote 128}

The urban projects which continued to operate in India began increasingly circumscribing the extent of citizen participation. This was particularly the case after the national programme was introduced after 1966. ^{Footnote 129} As in the United States, ‘programmatic’ objectives such the building of physical improvements (toilet blocks or newly paved streets) began to be prioritized over ‘participatory’ processes of community action. A 1971 survey of seven of the national projects begun in the year 1966–67, including those in Hyderabad, Kanpur, and Sarat, found that only 17.9% of the residents of each area were found to have ‘high’ levels of participation, compared to 61.9% of residents whose engagement was said to be ‘peripheral’ or ‘non-existent’. ^{Footnote 130} In an assessment of the project in Baroda, one author approvingly noted how its planners had ‘recognised the danger of creating an exaggerated image of what self-help can achieve’. This was because ‘the neighborhood problems are of such a wide variety’ that it was clear that the resources and expertise of ‘citizens outside the project areas is needed’. ^{Footnote 131}