Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History [1 ed.] 2017012497, 9780812249545

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MAKING CITIES GLOBAL

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MAKING CITIES GLOBAL THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN URBAN HISTORY

EDITED BY

A. K. SANDOVAL-­S TRAUSZ AND NANCY H. KWAK

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

This volume was published with the support of the Prince­ton University–­A ndrew W. Mellon Foundation Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities and the University of California–­San Diego. Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104​-­4 112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Sandoval-Strausz, A. K., editor. | Kwak, Nancy, 1973– editor. Title: Making cities global : the transnational turn in urban history /   edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press,   [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017012497 | ISBN 9780812249545 (hardcover : alk.  paper) Subjects: LCSH: Transnationalism—History—20th century—Case studies. |   Urbanization—America—History—20th century—Case studies. |   Urbanization—India—History—20th century—Case studies. | Cities and   towns—America—History—20th century—Case studies. | Cities and   towns—India—History—20th century—Case studies. | Globalization—   Political aspects—Case studies. Classification: LCC JZ1320 .M35 2017 | DDC 303.48/270091732—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012497

Contents

Foreword vii Thomas J. Sugrue

Introduction. Why Transnationalize Urban History?

1

A. K. Sandoval-­Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak

PART I. GLOBALIZATION AND GOVERNANCE Chapter 1. Silicon Dreams: States, Markets, and the Transnational High-­Tech Suburb

17

Margaret O’Mara

Chapter 2. Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas: Ciudad Kennedy as a Midcentury Crossroads

47

Amy C. Offner

Chapter 3. Building the Alliance for Pro­gress: Local and Transnational Encounters in a Low-­Income Housing Program in Rio de Janeiro, 1962–67

71

Leandro Benmergui

Chapter 4. Slum Clearance as a Transnational Pro­cess in Globalizing Manila

98

Nancy H. Kwak

Chapter 5. Crossing Bound­aries: The Global Exchange of Planning Ideas Carola Hein

114

vi C o nt ents

PART II. PLACE, CULTURE, AND POWER Chapter 6. Condos in the Mall: Suburban Transnational Typological Transformations in Markham, Ontario

133

Erica Allen-­Kim

Chapter 7. Requiem for a Barrio: Race, Space, and Gentrification in Southern California

166

Matt Garcia

Chapter 8. Transnational Per­for­mances in Chicago’s In­de­pen­dence Day Parade

191

Arijit Sen

Chapter 9. Transnational Urban Meanings: The Passage of “Suburb” to India and Its Rough Reception

223

Richard Harris

Chapter 10. Suburbanization and Urban Practice in India

241

Nikhil Rao

Chapter 11. ­Will the Transnational City Be Digitized? The Dialectics of Diversified Spatial Media and Expanded Spatial Scopes

252

Carl H. Nightingale

Notes 265 List of Contributors

321

Index 325 Acknowl­edgments

339

Foreword T h oma s   J. S ug ru e

It has been nearly two de­cades since the Organ­ization of American Historians released its La Pietra Report, an influential call for the creation of a transnational or global approach to the nation’s history. The report, drafted by distinguished intellectual and urban historian Thomas Bender in consultation with nearly one hundred major scholars, offered this exhortation: “The lived and experienced connections in transnational space need to be explored—­ both the channels that facilitate movement and the ruptures, discontinuities, and disarticulations that structure inequalities and constitute the basis for national and other forms of differentiation.” Coming a­ fter years of scholarship dominated by place-­based case studies in social and cultural history, La Pietra issued a radical historiographical challenge, calling on Americanists “to rethink the scales, temporalities, and networks of historical transformation.”1 La Pietra marked a watershed in the field. In recent years, major history departments have conducted searches for faculty specializing in the “United States and the world.” Gradu­ate programs regularly offer transnational or global history tracks, reflecting a re­orientation of the profession. Intellectual historians, following Daniel Rod­gers, traced Atlantic crossings of ideas of social reform. Scholars of region, immigration, and ethnicity, fields that enjoyed a revival in the early twenty-­first c­ entury, turned their attention to borderlands and diasporas, rejecting old notions of assimilation and Americanization. Questions of imperialism, colonization, and decolonization moved to the cutting edge of cultural studies. But, with a handful of noteworthy exceptions, urban historians came late to the transnational wave. Urban history as a field has long been concerned with “scales, temporalities, and networks,” three keywords in the La Pietra Report. But for the majority of American urbanists, the scale was intensely local. For good reasons,

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T ho m a s  J . Su g ru e

many of the most influential books in urban history have been place-­based case studies, a tradition in American urbanism across the social sciences. Sam Bass Warner wrote about the public and private in Philadelphia, Sean Wilentz about working-­class New York, Lizabeth Cohen on consumerism and working-­ class life in New Deal–­era Chicago, and George Sánchez on Mexican American politics and culture in Los Angeles.2 It was not hard to make a case for the case study: an intense focus on a single city or, more broadly, a w ­ hole metropolis, allowed for a close observation of social pro­cesses, po­liti­cal movements, and economic dynamics that ­were invisible at larger scales. In 2003, it was still pathbreaking for Robert Self to argue that race and po­liti­cal economy in Oakland could not be understood without putting the suburban East Bay in the picture, in the pro­cess leading newer scholars to call for a “new suburban history” or a “metropolitan history” that breached the po­liti­c al bound­aries between city and suburb.3 Meanwhile, innovative historians, following the lead of environmental historian William Cronon, pushed further outward, linking urbanization to regional economic development, bridging the artificial divide between rural and urban. Ellen Stroud showed how urbanization went hand in hand with the reforestation of the Northeast; Andrew Needham tied the rise of metropolitan Phoenix to the exploitation of resources in Navajo country.4 They made it impossible to think about urbanism simply at the local level. But despite calls for a transnational turn, only a handful of urbanists stepped outside the bound­aries of the nation-­state altogether to lay the groundwork for a new, expansive global urban history. Pioneers like Sven Beckert considered the networks of capital and commodities that connected cities as diverse as Liverpool, Mumbai, and New Orleans; Christopher Klemek followed the flow of ideas about urban renewal and city planning that traveled from Paris to New York, from Berlin to Toronto to Boston; and Carl Nightingale traced the “segregation mania” that linked the histories of places as far-­ flung as New Delhi, Cape Town, and Baltimore.5 The authors in this volume represent cutting-­edge work in urban history throughout the Amer­i­cas and across the Pacific. Some, like Nightingale (who was part of the La Pietra working group) have been involved in transnational, multiarchival, multilingual research for de­c ades. ­Others, like its coeditors, have just recently published field-­defining books and articles that explode the scales and temporalities that have long ­shaped urban historiography.6 Each of ­t hese essays builds on the best of urban historiography, deeply researching places, attentive to the built environment, spatialized public policies, and

Foreword ix

local politics. But each also opens up new ave­nues for interrogating the local, ­whether tracing economic planning in Colombia and the Philippines or showing how immigrants and ideas reshaped American and Asian cities and suburbs, their storefronts and sidewalks and dwellings, into something that reflected the architecture and aesthetics of their places of origin. The authors offer a power­ful reminder that cities are often ­shaped by economic decisions made thousands of miles away, through networks that transcend single places, by ­people whose identities and politics defy s­ imple categorization. The result is an extraordinary collection of essays, one that brings the promise of La Pietra to fruition and sets a new direction for the next generation of American historians who think, research, and write globally and locally and at e­ very scale in between.

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Introduction Why Transnationalize Urban History? A. K. S a n dova l- S­ t raus z a n d Na n c y   H . K wa k

Cities ­today are growing faster and in more places than ever before, and the ­future looks to be unpre­ce­dentedly urban. In 1900, only about 13 ­percent of the world’s population lived in cities; in 1950, that proportion had grown to ­ eople in urban areas reached parity with the num30 ­percent. The number of p ber in rural areas in 2007, and the most recent figures suggest that humanity is now 54 ­percent urbanized. The regions that are most urban at pres­ent are Northern Amer­i­ca, Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean, and Eu­rope, but the fastest rates of urbanization are now seen in Asia and Africa, which together account for more than half of the planet’s urban population. Current estimates indicate that by 2050, two-­thirds of the global population ­will be city dwellers.1 This pro­cess of urbanization has critical transnational dimensions. ­Human migration has accelerated over recent de­cades, and as individuals and groups relocate from rural areas to cities, many of them cross national bound­aries. According to the latest estimates, the number of p ­ eople on the move has increased by nearly 60 ­percent since 1990, and the world’s mi­grant population is now approximately a quarter billion ­people. Cities are also ­shaped by the flow of investments and other forms of money, which move with unpre­ce­ dented speed and volume, changing markets for food, ser­vices, and especially housing—­and in the pro­cess generating greater inequalities from person to person and place to place. Environmental effects, meanwhile, are indifferent to national borders. ­Human activity is altering climates and impacting ecosystems around the world, in turn potentially setting off further movements of ­people and capital and leaving some populations more vulnerable than ­others.2

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Making Cities Global explores the connections between urbanization and globalization by focusing on their intertwined historical development. Cities have long served as critical transnational spaces, functioning as key points of articulation between and among dif­fer­ent ­peoples, economies, and cultures. As urbanists, the contributors to this volume locate transnationalism in specific places, grounding the study of globalization in the built environments ­ eople, inand everyday interactions of the city. We also show how flows of p formation, and goods can tie metropolitan areas together into cir­cuits that span g­ reat distances. Equally impor­tant to our approach is the methodology of history. While urbanization and globalization are proceeding with an intensity that seems unpre­ce­dented, ­these are only the most recent iterations of long-­standing transformations. Historians recognize transnational pro­cesses as highly contingent and plural, with multiple variants ­shaped by their creators’ time and place. Furthermore, we understand that globalization has not involved per­sis­tent flows and exchanges; it has coexisted with profoundly lo­ eople as likely to resist or reject outcal, embedded tendencies, with many p side connections as to establish or embrace them. For ­these reasons, we believe ­ ill open up that the combination of urban history and transnational studies w new and generative lines of inquiry into a subject ­matter that has moved to the center of both public and scholarly debate throughout the world. The dramatic transformations of recent de­cades have generated tremendous scholarly interest. In a number of academic disciplines, researchers took up the banner of transnationalism a quarter c­ entury ago, investigating a tremendous variety of subjects—­including the changing fortunes of the nation-­ state, the globalization of capitalism, the diasporic condition, the proliferation of nonstate actors and activities, everyday practices of cross-­border work and ­family relations, the pursuit of politics across borders, the transformation of personal and community identities, the discursive meanings of nationalism, and the many new forms of culture that result from an age of rapid mobility. Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and literary scholars raised questions that often transcended the bound­aries of their fields, and ­were joined by po­ liti­cal scientists, ethnic studies scholars, historians, and ­others, some of whom had been studying transnational phenomena for quite some time ­under dif­fer­ ent intellectual rubrics.3 Cities and metropolitan pro­cesses have been central to the lit­er­a­ture on transnationalism and globalization. Some of the most influential lines of research have involved conceptualizations and theories—­particularly ­those formulated by sociologists, geographers, and economists—in which urban areas

Introduction 3

play a leading role. ­There are varying emphases among ­these frameworks: some proceed from cities’ function as nodes of command and coordination in the global economy; ­others define metropolitan spaces by their flows of ­people and goods; still o­ thers approach urbanized areas as sites of cultural exchange, conflict, and hybridity. But what­ever their methodological or interpretive differences, ­these frameworks all share a foundational assumption that cities are at the forefront of transnationalism.4 Where does the discipline of history fit into ­t hese debates? Historians’ sense of deep time has put us in an excellent position to fully contextualize transnationalism. We can offer reminders that most of recorded history tran­ spired before the rise of nation-­states, and point out many border-­crossing pro­cesses that have operated during the two centuries since the rise of nationalism. Historical inquiry is fundamentally concerned with the intricacies of change over time, and its prac­ti­tion­ers recognize transnational pro­cesses as socially produced and subject to constant revision—­especially given history’s close focus on ­human agency and the contexts that structured ­people’s choices. Historians have emphasized the existence of many transnationalisms, each with its own time-­bound features: for example, the kinds of connections forged during the age of empire ­were not necessarily continuous with the modernization-­driven networks of the mid-­t wentieth c­ entury, which in turn displayed significant disjunctures with the neoliberal transnationalism of recent de­c ades. This approach has allowed prac­ti­tion­ers of history to address some of the intellectual prob­lems of globalization theory. Historians have urged scholars in other fields to avoid discussing transnationalism as if it ­were completely new and unpre­ce­dented, and have cautioned against oversimplified narratives centered only on state building, economic development, or Eu­ro­pean expansion. Many have also warned against the tendency to read the pres­ent backward into the past in a way that yields teleological accounts of globalization. ­A fter all, the transnational pres­ent is rooted in some trans­ n­ational pasts and disconnected from ­others. Networks and flows are omnipresent in history, but they are also uneven, and the global aspect may not always be the most relevant or impor­tant framework in a specific moment or for a set of historical questions. Historians can contextualize transnationalism in a macronarrative that does not presuppose a world in which connections are ­established and strengthened without interruption; we can properly pres­ent past transnationalisms not as all-­encompassing, but as competing with local imperatives that must be considered on their own terms. Simply put, the long view of history can show where, when, and how transnationalism has mattered.5

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Urban historians have been of two minds in their engagement with transnationalism. ­Those studying areas ­shaped by long-­term pro­cesses of Eu­ro­pean colonization as it extended across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans have been connecting urbanism with globalization for some time. Imperialism has served as the key point of articulation between the two: a­ fter all, empires ­were very clearly transnational formations, and cities played impor­tant economic, administrative, military, po­liti­cal, and symbolic roles in Eu­ro­pean overseas expansion. Some of the earliest overtly global studies of urbanism ­were Anthony King’s architectural history The Bungalow and his synthetic work Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy; since then, architectural and urban historians from Gwendolyn Wright to Zeynep Çelik to Swati Chattopadhyay have elaborated an extensive lit­er­a­ture on colonial urbanism. Planning history has been another source of border-­crossing urban scholarship: Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow involved urban networks and comparative models that stretched across Eu­rope, the Amer­i­cas, Asia, Latin Amer­i­ca, and, briefly, Africa, and was ­ ese efforts have followed by numerous other influential works in the field. Th continued into the very recent past in the form of edited volumes explic­itly built around the notion of urbanism and transnationalism.6 U.S. urban historians have been more hesitant to engage with transnationalism. Research in the field has mostly been bounded by the nation-­ state, and has given primary explanatory power to ­factors operating within national borders, such as federal urban, transportation, and housing policy; automobile production and adoption; and the structural legacy of racism. Likewise, ­interventions in other historical fields have mainly involved the role of ­metropolitan areas in national politics, the economy, and other spheres that stop at national borders. More recently, urban historians have produced monographs based on case studies in multiple nations and the interactions among them—an impor­tant contribution to the lit­er­a­ture and a promising portent for a more transnational history of cities—­but ­these have appeared only in the past several years. Making Cities Global is to our knowledge the first volume of essays on transnational urban history published in the United States.7 This relatively slow pace of engagement is surprising, considering that the foundations of U.S. urban history, one of its best-­developed subfields, and some of its most influential books ­were all framed in terms that reached beyond the nation. The Chicago school of urban sociology was consistently focused on immigration, which served as its theoretical model for the arrival of all newcomers to urban areas, including domestic mi­grants. And its most renowned concept, the concentric model of urban development, was predicated

Introduction 5

on the ongoing arrival of ­people from overseas as a basic feature of its morphology, with the classic diagram mentioning “immigrant settlement,” “Chinatown,” “Kleindeutschland,” and “­Little Italy.” The historical lit­er­a­ture on immigration history similarly emphasized the arrival and incorporation of the foreign-­born in the urban areas to which they mostly flowed. As its specialists developed concepts like ethnicization and return migration, they moved ­toward explic­itly transnational formulations; for example, Donna Gabaccia, ­ ouse­holds in the who as early as 1984 had studied the coevolution of urban h United States and Sicily, has been particularly active in the framing of transnational history. And even in urban historiographies not directly concerned with transnationalism, scholars have used global comparisons to set up their claims and track influences across borders: Kenneth T. Jackson, for example, framed U.S. suburbia as internationally distinctive, and Robert Fishman emphasized En­glish landscape ideas as helping determine the form of peripheral development.8 But t­ hese tendencies have been overwhelmed by other ­factors favoring a predominantly domestic orientation in the field. The histories of imperialism that formed the leading edge of interest in transnational formations elsewhere ­were far less impor­tant to U.S. historiography. This owed in large part to Americans’ willful effort to avoid seeing their nation as a colonial power. Perhaps more impor­tant, though, was methodology: the field’s national bounded­ ness was a product of urban historians’ close focus on localities. Urban history’s subject ­matter has first and foremost been place, and the basic unit of research has been the community study, ­whether at the level of neighborhood, city, metropolitan area, or region.9 The contributions in this collection are intended to show how urban history can think beyond the nation-­state, especially by continuing to modify its methodological traditions to encompass a broader, transnational framework. One of the long-­standing strengths of urban historians has been their close attention to the relationships between physical space and the construction of social, po­liti­cal, and economic meaning. The research presented in this volume involves detailed analy­sis of localities, and is undergirded by the sense that local conditions build and shape transnationalism—­that, in fact, local imperatives influence cross-­border movements even as transnational flows transform the local. Connective tissues bind metropolis with metropolis, city with region, and urban with suburban; but t­ hese networks also reach beyond nations, and demand explicit investigation as cross-­border formations. The historical study of transnational urbanism thus acknowledges the experiences of

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each node in a network while also emphasizing connections and flows; it moves readily between local and translocal registers, paying attention to place-­specific iterations of transnationalism—­for example, immigrant neighborhoods, imported theories of city planning, or émigré politics—­and, for that ­matter, rejections of such transnationalisms. We also believe that an urban-­historical perspective can improve the ­lit­er­a­ture on transnationalism by revealing just how complex and varied ­metropolitan pro­cesses have been across time, and how much further we can go in scrutinizing transnationalism before the most recent era of globalization. ­W hether in the premodern, colonial, or postcolonial era, the pro­cess of urbanization has revealed complex connections among cultures, empires, religions, and ideologies. Moreover, the development of cities has exemplified how multiple scales—­from the domestic and local to the regional and global—­ can ­operate in overlapping and simultaneous ways. Urbanites established connections to each other and to their expanding hinterlands by an increasing number of linkages over longer distances and with greater frequency; as a result, ­people, money, goods, information, politics, culture, military force, energy, and other ­factors influenced places and ­people thousands of miles away. Understanding the historical development of urban networks is thus highly relevant to analyzing city spaces that are constituted both in par­tic­u­lar localities and in social fields that encompass or move among multiple places; other examples involve organ­izations, identities, and imperatives that neither originate nor identify with any nation-­state or territorially defined entity. ­These intellectual commitments are a useful corrective to some of the potential pitfalls of the study of globalization: a tendency to make claims about chronology and causality that are based on the exigencies of model building or theory rather than empirical inquiry, teleological thinking that emplots events into a predetermined ­grand narrative, and ahistorical or schematic frameworks that posit relationships (between capital and governance or technology and culture, for example) as being automatic or inherent rather than conditional and transitory.10 This globalization studies approach to worldwide urbanization has ­great potential, but it must not be the only response to the question of how to write a history of cities that transcends national borders. Rather, transnational urban histories add critical dimensions to allied approaches: global histories that pursue the origins of planetary interconnectedness, world histories that narrate pro­cesses on the largest geographic scale, and international histories that scrutinize relationships among nations. At its best, transnational urban history should sharpen understandings of cause

Introduction 7

and effect and help scholars better interrogate the relationships between local and global.11

Defining Our Approach This collection of essays explores transnational urbanism from a range of perspectives. The contributors represent vari­ous scholarly approaches, including urban history, architectural history, historical geography, planning history, and architectural studies. Our intention is not to offer a comprehensive or representative collection of historically oriented scholarship on transnational urbanism. Rather, we focus on par­tic­u­lar places and times, and have done so for strategic and intellectual reasons. One of the intended contributions of this volume is to continue re­orienting the field of transnational history ­toward a truly global context by emphasizing the broader geography of places that engaged with the United States. While the Atlantic world has generated vibrant debates and garnered much scholarly attention, we argue that other “worlds”—­including the Pacific Rim, the Amer­i­cas, and the Indian Ocean—­deserve equally widespread interest. Transnational histories that are built too firmly on the foundations of expansion and domination by commercial and industrial nation-­states may simply reiterate long-­standing ­grand narratives that place Western Eu­rope and the United States at the center of both conceptualization and causation. Some aspects of this approach are understandable. The eventual dominance of ­these areas has long invited historical explanation (sometimes yielding insight, at other points defensive self-­congratulation). At key historical moments, ­there was indeed a very high level of economic, environmental, interimperial, and, ­later, transnational interaction among ­these nations, which certainly developed within symbiotic or parasitic relationships.12 But rethinking history for a more global age necessarily means looking at dif­fer­ent geographies and chronologies. The urbanizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Amer­i­cas have been distinct pro­cesses while also being interwoven with global affairs. Focusing on ­t hese regions means exploring multiple transnationalisms, considering how they interacted with each other, and scrutinizing the inequalities of power and wealth that ­shaped metropolitan areas. City building in Latin Amer­i­ca and Asia took place ­under the influence of formal imperialism, decolonization, and expansive capitalism, and our contributors are attentive to the va­ri­e­ties of coercion and suasion exercised

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by power­ful nations and international institutions. At the same time, however, they take seriously the limits placed on this kind of power by ­people acting at the regional, municipal, and neighborhood levels. In a very real sense, our goal involves provincializing the United States by contextualizing its metropolitan areas within—­a nd not always at the ­center of—­global pro­cesses of urbanization and suburbanization. We hope to provoke new ways of thinking by reconsidering places like Manila, Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, and Bogotá, and asking dif­fer­ent kinds of questions. For instance, how did city builders in Latin Amer­i­ca draw U.S. experts and resources into local strug­gles over the built environment? In what ways did the needs and aspirations of ­people in and from India produce transnational urban spaces? And how should we understand the role of mi­grants and immigrants in the transformation of social spaces? Our subjects also reflect the fact that so many of us are based in North Amer­i­ca, where it has become easy to see the intensive interaction with the ­people and economies of Latin Amer­i­ca, East Asia, and South Asia. This has also helped determine the chronology of our essays, which tend ­toward the twentieth ­century, and especially the postwar period, precisely b­ ecause of the heightened transnational interaction among ­these regions.13 The second defining feature of our approach is a close focus on the built environment. The individual chapters of Making Cities Global are or­ga­nized more than anything by specific categories of geographic and architectural space: cities, suburbs, neighborhoods, development proj­ects, dwellings, workplaces, stores, streets, and sidewalks. ­These spaces are in one sense a manifestation of the kinds of economic, po­liti­cal, social, and cultural pro­cesses at work in the socie­ties in which cities exist, and some of our research emphasizes this aspect. But in even more cases, we focus on deliberate efforts to make, remake, or demolish par­tic­u­lar spaces and places; in some instances, the built environment becomes the subject of politics and statecraft; in ­others, that material environment is the in­de­pen­dent variable—it actually engenders par­tic­u­lar kinds of po­liti­c al and economic activity. On a related note, the enacted environment—­the way ­people behave in space—is an aspect of urban life that also clearly reveals the distinctiveness of urban settings. We therefore attend in our work to the way that the city milieu shapes identities, fosters certain kinds of politics, and exhibits the myriad cultural influences carried by its inhabitants; and it is ­here that we see clearly the ­human agency that is so ­essential to the idea of the “production of space” that has so profoundly influenced urban theory.14

Introduction 9

This focus on the materiality of the city is essential to our analy­sis ­because it identifies transnationalism in physical space, at the level of the street, the neighborhood, and the community—­thereby placing human-­scale mobility and flow at the conceptual center. Transnational pro­cesses cannot be properly understood solely through abstraction and generalization; they involve ­great distances, but are necessarily instantiated in specific locations. Our essays demonstrate how transnationalism has been constituted in par­tic­u­lar geographies, how it has varied from place to place, and how it has tied places together in complex and contradictory ways. Instead of arguing for a transnationalism that floats above the nation-­state, or limiting ourselves to the intricacies of local negotiation, we underscore the mutually constitutive character of macro-­, meso-­, and micropro­cesses that unfold over time, as well as attending to the imperfectly overlapping scales of time and space.15 Making Cities Global is clearly focused on urbanism, but given the capaciousness of signifiers like “urban” and “city,” it makes sense to define our terms. Inhabited areas are developing in very dif­fer­ent ways and in many dif­ fer­ent places, and indeed, perhaps we should emphasize the pro­cess of urbanization as the true commonality among all our research agendas. As we look around the world, we can see g­ reat diversity in the experiences of urban residents and the evolving structures of cities themselves. ­A fter all, “urban” can mean heavi­ly built-up, high-­rise cities with densities of over twenty thousand ­people per square mile; it can also indicate low-­rise, sprawling metropolitan areas or even microcities. Thus, when we use terms like “city,” “urban,” and “suburb,” we do so with a full awareness of the pro­cesses involved in defining them.16 Even as we dwell on the specifics of place, we must also attend to the way that places and place-­making practices are embedded in transnational cir­cuits. If transnational history emphasizes flows and movement, then it is equally impor­tant to observe how “circulations define a space of their own,” to borrow Pierre-­Yves Saunier’s phrase. Cir­cuits do not necessarily occur in straightforwardly empirical, mea­sur­able, and objective spaces; rather, our contributors demonstrate that places are continually remade by the kinds of flows and per­ for­mances that bring the city to life. Urban centers fundamentally involve cir­cuits—­whether of information, goods, money, or ­people—­that form new contexts, challenging urbanists to more carefully examine pro­cesses of de-­and reterritorialization. This “space of flows” can be understood as a complex web of urban and rural, often defying hierarchical spatial relations. Expanding the field of urban history means accounting for ­these complexities, and the essays

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in this collection are attentive to ­these intellectual currents. Accordingly, their authors move nimbly between the local, metropolitan, national, regional, and global scales, ever mindful of the pro­cess by which meaning is created by real ­people in real spaces. For them, transnational urbanism is as much about cir­ cuits of ­human beings, knowledge, culture, and memory as about goods or capital.17 The third commonality among the articles in this collection is a fundamental concern with the role of governance and politics within transnationalism. Although the field of transnational history was initially defined by an effort to displace the nation-­state or nation as the automatic subject and ­container for scholarly inquiry into the past, it has become increasingly apparent that we cannot study transnationalism without considering government action. Some scholars have emphasized the gradual weakening of state power, while ­others have underscored the ongoing relevance of governance in shaping cross-­border activity, ­whether by way of facilitating it or restricting it. What­ever the approach to the instrumentalities of empires and nations, it seems undeniable that ­these have been constitutive of many forms of transnationalism. Indeed, even the most recent variant of transnationalism—­ often characterized as the uninhibited global pursuit of profit—­emerged out of the mid-­twentieth c­ entury, the heyday of the most power­ful and active nation-­states the world has ever seen; and, according to some theorists, this transnationalism remains heavi­ly dependent on state support.18 Turning our attention to the specifically urban aspects of governance in transnationalism, we identify vari­ous ways that states have influenced cross-­ border activity. At the most general level, they have s­ haped the flows that have come to define cities and metropolitan areas by attempting to control migration, wooing international capital, manipulating the availability of goods, and commodifying local cultures for consumers worldwide. Governments at vari­ ous levels have also directly ­shaped urban landscapes: they have instituted policies of racial segregation, arranged for the operation of public marketplaces and tourist attractions, instituted zoning codes that define what may or may not be built on the landscape, distributed or withheld funding for development-­ oriented construction, and established special zones for commerce, manufacturing, and banking. In ­these and many other ways, state action has conditioned the way that travelers, investments, and ideas have ­shaped the urban. Po­liti­cal activity is indivisible from the ways that transnationalism is governed. ­Because state power is impor­tant in shaping how forces operating on a broad geographic scale are iterated in localities, our analyses must incorporate

Introduction 11

electoral outcomes, popu­lar movements, and other forms of mobilization. Ac­ istake contingent counts of transnationalism that neglect politics tend to m pro­cesses for inevitable trends: in some forms, this involves libertarian perspectives that promote neoliberal ideologies in much the same way that meta­ phors of nature and naturalness served as justifications for laissez-­faire economics in the past; in ­others, it entails a form of historical materialism that is critical of globalization but offers ­little or no hope that we can influence its ­ eople’s lives.19 But the fact is that transnational pro­ path and its impact on p cesses have almost invariably led to po­liti­cal responses such as popu­lar movements against allegedly encroaching immigrants or infidels, or initiatives to remove po­liti­cal oversight from cross-­border economic activities through trade pacts or deregulation. In addition, transnational flows have sometimes become sources of po­liti­cal authority, as when government officials seek public ­favor by bringing in foreign investment, capturing international aid, or facilitating participation by members of national diasporas. Notably, this has happened at multiple and overlapping levels, including, for example, the transnational cultural politics of religion, the national electoral politics of tariffs, and the local politics of how to respond to immigrants. ­These and other kinds of po­ liti­cal contests have strongly ­shaped both the terms of cross-­border exchange and the ­human experience of being part of a guest community or a host culture. While the contributors to this volume share t­ hese and other intellectual commitments, our approach is avowedly ecumenical. Our vision is broad and, we hope, generative. Histories of transnational urbanism should not comprise a single narrative, nor should they be smoothly wrought with a clear roster of participants, actions, and consequences. We therefore expect and even welcome narrative and analytical roughness—­the breaks, fissures, erasures, and exclusions that must exist within transnational urban history. This emphasis on breaks is, on the one hand, a broader statement about the contingency and unevenness of exchange and flow; on the other hand, it inevitably emerges from grassroots, local approaches. If analytical concepts only find precise meaning in historically specific settings, then ­these fissures should likewise inform our understanding of transnational urbanism more broadly. This collection suggests that individuals, communities, and even states can behave in ways that are unpredictable, at odds with their own long-­term interests, and productive of unexpected results for all involved. Transnational exchanges might facilitate movement across borders, but the detailed, local histories of ­these movements reveal just how challenging it is to extract broad princi­ples

12

A . K . Sa ndova l - ­S t r au sz a nd Na ncy H. Kwak

or generalizable models. A ­ fter all, historical fissures, cracks, and exceptions are more than mere anomalies—­they can reveal significant countercurrents that challenge us to rethink our very premises about the broad character and impact of globalization and the experience of actually existing examples of transnational urbanism.20

This Collection Making Cities Global is divided into two parts, each of which addresses specific themes within transnational urban history. The essays in Part I consider how cities have been s­ haped by the interaction among parties with geopo­liti­ cal influence, economic power, and local governance, showing what happens at the point of contact between economic advisers, development specialists, po­liti­cal figures, and local residents. The contributors in this section demonstrate the importance of local politics in transnational pro­cesses, thereby complicating narratives of globalization that overstate the autonomy of capital and underplay the ongoing relevance of state actors at a variety of levels. ­These essays also examine the diffusion of ideas about the built environment, focusing on how ­people and texts work together to propagate notions of what kinds of spaces are pleasant, profitable, strategic, or other­wise desirable. In Part II, we focus more closely on space, culture, and power. The section begins with contributions about the transnational movement of p ­ eople and ideas and the kinds of spaces they create, with an emphasis on the connections between personal and collective identity and the built environment. Looking at immigrants and mi­grants from East Asia, Latin Amer­i­ca, South Asia, and Eu­rope, the scholars in this section show how identity and place are mutually and transnationally constitutive. Our contributors also deal with the exercise of cultural power across borders and within cities. As transnational communities grow, their members engage in an elaborate negotiation: mi­ grants emphasize both local and transnational belonging, drawing on vari­ous vocabularies and histories to make claims to urban space; their hosts, meanwhile, leverage newly arrived ­people and ideas as a way to foster urban revitalization, preserve spatial privilege, draw tourists to the city, and gain electoral advantage. But as t­ hese scholars show, claims on power and prestige often involve contestation, erasure, and sometimes even rejection by the host country. Transnational urban history is essential to understanding the worlds of both past and pres­ent. We hope that the essays in this collection ­will help foster

Introduction 13

a deeper scholarly effort to juxtapose instantiations of city life as they have developed over time so that our thinking about present-­day urbanization is informed by the history of long-­established trade networks; so that our re­ uman migration considers more profoundly global histories of dissearch on h placement and diaspora; so that our attention to transnational corporations and nongovernmental organ­izations incorporates a knowledge of colonial administrations and religious ­orders; and so that our ideas about the relevance of urban areas within nation-­states accounts for the many pro­cesses by which cities have become parts of nations. For if we are to find success in managing the cities of the pres­ent and ­future, we ­will need to understand ­every aspect of their historical origins and evolution.

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PA RT I

Globalization and Governance

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chapter 1

Silicon Dreams States, Markets, and the Transnational High-­Tech Suburb Ma rg a ret O’ Ma r a

Introduction: A World in a Park The International Technology Park Bangalore (ITPB) sits about twenty kilo­ meters east of the center of the southern Indian city of Bangalore, inhabiting seventy well-­appointed acres filled with modern, glass-­clad buildings emblazoned with names like Discoverer, Innovator, and Inventor. Connecting t­ hese structures are grounds so meticulously tended that they won the Best Ornamental Garden Award from the Mysore Horticultural Society two years in a row. The park boasts amenities like a cricket ground, badminton, and t­able tennis. Special shut­tle buses transport its workers between home and office, and a private security force and a battalion of closed-­circuit cameras and alarms provide protection and safety from the world outside. In a city where electrical outages are common, the power stays on in the park throughout the day and night thanks to its private electrical grid and backup generators. The park management sponsors regular social events, outdoor concerts, and even an American Idol–­style singing contest. “Life at ITPB,” notes one of its promotional brochures, “is a unique lifestyle statement.” About thirty thousand ­people work in the park, mostly for multinational firms in the business of computer software and support ser­vices, a sector that has grown exponentially in the city since the 1980s. While most f­ aces in the park are Indian, many

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Figure 1.1. Similar to the high-­amenity environments of corporate campuses in the original Silicon Valley, International Tech Park Bangalore features sports leagues, concerts, and other ser­vices that encourage employees to play and socialize where they work. 2016. Courtesy of International Tech Park Bangalore.

of the workers are not natives of Bangalore, but hail from larger cities like Delhi and Mumbai. A good portion of them spent chunks of their lives outside India in other technology hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle, or Boston. As its marketing tag­line proclaims, the fa­cil­i­t y is “A World in a Park.”1 Drive ten minutes south, and you arrive at the gates of a neighborhood designed for the managerial class working in places like ITPB: a serene and well-­manicured subdivision named Palm Meadows. Featuring tidy single-­ family homes, trim lawns, roads shaded with the eponymous palm trees, and a luxurious club­house and pool, the development looks like a slice of metropolitan California dropped into southern India. The only major difference is the presence of sidewalks throughout the subdivision, making it a place that is far more pedestrian friendly than the average American suburb. Palm Meadows is one of a number of similar high-­end subdivisions that provide a home for the man­ag­ers and executives who work in ITPB and other technology parks like it, albeit one located far enough away from work that it requires commuting by car. The neighborhood is a favored destination for expatriates, as well as nonresident Indians returning from the United States, and its denizens enjoy amenities that rival t­ hose found in Orange County or Sunnyvale, California. Its developer, the Indian luxury real estate g­ iant Ardash



Silicon Dreams 19

Figure 1.2. The Palm Meadows subdivision provides expatriates with California-­style suburban living on the outskirts of the rapidly growing Bangalore metropolis. 2006. Photo by author.

Properties, proclaims that it is in the business of building “beautiful homes for beautiful ­people.”2 In the vast urban sprawl of seven million ­people that is early twenty-­first-­ century Bangalore, both research park and subdivision are elite islands amid a larger urban landscape that is much more aesthetically diverse, denser, and far poorer. Despite more than a de­c ade of assiduous efforts to improve Bangalore’s urban infrastructure through new roads, transit systems, and e-­government platforms, the arterials between Palm Meadows and ITPB remain clogged with traffic, dotted with potholes, and subject to flash floods ­after a sudden rain. Landscapes of poverty exist immediately outside the gates of ­these landscapes of wealth, and stretch along the roadways linking them, a jarring contrast that underscores the highly uneven nature of Bangalore’s high-­ technology revolution. ITPB and Palm Meadows are typical examples of a strain of urbanism that spread globally in the wake of the computer revolution and the Internet

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age: the high-­tech suburb. Specifically, ­these are peri-­urban places designed to ­house the firms and white-­collar workers engaged in the design and development of computer software and hardware, telecommunications and Internet-­ based commercial enterprise, and the financial and ­legal ser­vice industries associated with t­hese sectors. ­These are places of management and marketing, not manufacturing. They are hubs of “knowledge work,” engaged in the production of ideas rather than physical t­ hings. As C. Ramachandraiah, A. C. M. van Western, and Sheela Prasad observe, t­ hese places “typically e­mploy a specific symbolical ‘language’ of architectural form and landscaping, emphasizing international styles, global linkages, ample space and generous greenery; in short, prestige and influence.”3 What their builders most certainly do not intend to proj­ect is a deep connection to the public sector or the public realm. In the idealized world of the high-­tech suburb, the government is absent, hidden, and an obstructive force rather than a constructive one.4 In this re­spect, high-­tech suburbs appear to be the apogee of neoliberal urbanism: privatized, corporate, and more connected to faraway financial capitals than to the cultures and histories of the cities next door. Scholarship on the topic of global cities has abetted this urban imaginary by emphasizing the instrumental nature of corporate capital rather than government intervention, and by focusing on globalizing rather than localizing forces.5 In ­t hese analyses, the ­people with agency are members of a globe-­ trotting elite who have scant personal ties or po­liti­cal accountability to a par­ tic­u­lar city, and whose actions deliberately smooth out the rough edges and quirks of region and culture. Media accounts have further contributed to the impression that local histories and path dependencies have become subsumed beneath the homogenizing tidal wave of global capital.6 However, recent work on the social and po­liti­cal landscapes of high-­tech spaces—in and around Indian cities, in particular—­has revealed a more complex interplay between the governmental and the corporate, and between local and national and multinational actors on both ends of the public-­private spectrum of interest. Using case study methodology to bring the world city hypothesis down to ground level, t­hese works emphasize the per­sis­tence of the local amid the global, the catalytic role of state institutions in making ­these corporate environments pos­si­ble, and the markedly peri-­urban nature and the aesthetic and infrastructural influence of North American suburbs. John Stallmeyer’s study of Bangalore explores not only the contrasts but also the interdependencies between the city’s information technology (IT) corridor and the older, much poorer neighborhoods on the other side of the metropolis,



Silicon Dreams 21

revealing the extent to which the latter make the former pos­si­ble. Michael Goldman has shown how local politicians and landowners have functioned as key actors in, and benefited greatly from, the pro­cess of land development involved in Bangalore’s IT boom, fueling what he terms a “speculative urbanism” that has vastly expanded the metropolitan bound­a ries and dispossessed the rural poor. At the same time, supranational entities like the World Bank and IMF continue as critical influences on infrastructure investment decisions, and models of urban growth and governance become appropriated from other places. Ananya Roy provides an even more stringent critique of Indian cities as places whose seeming “Third-­World chaos” and lack of planning are actually the result of deliberate choices made by actors locally and regionally in response to the profit-­making imperatives of global capitalism.7 As t­ hese analyses make clear, the tandem forces of economic liberalization and technological globalization have propelled the rise of a new set of parastatal actors: “in­de­pen­dent” entities made pos­si­ble by state action that abet the growth of the private economy. Not only are they neither fully public nor fully private, but they also transcend po­liti­cal boundary lines. They are rooted locally but engage globally; their purpose is to create world-­class cities, but they do so utilizing local resources and power structures. This echoes an earlier moment in the history of high-­tech places, in which the American Cold War state increased its national defense and research capacities through the funding and empowerment of universities and defense contractors. In the past as well as the pres­ent, high-­tech places are made pos­si­ble by the blurring of the lines between public and private, as well as being situated within and responding to po­liti­cal and market forces that extend beyond national borders.8 The high-­tech world thus becomes a particularly rich place to investigate the evolution and definition of transnational urbanism over the past sixty years. In it, we see global capital flows created and ­shaped by major public investments with geopo­liti­cal implications (Cold War defense spending, developmentalism and modernization, national economic liberalization and deregulation) and the development over time of very specific types of urban places that take aesthetic cues from foreign models, often are built by foreign actors, and benefit multinational corporations. But local actors and local conditions play a critical role in determining the ultimate “success” or “failure” of t­ hese sites. In global tech centers, transnational urbanism is a multidimensional phenomenon consisting of several interwoven threads of influence: the aesthetic and intellectual (via ideas and practices of architecture, planning,

22

M a rg a ret O ’M a r a

and economic development strategy); the po­liti­cal (via supranational po­liti­c al institutions, bilateral and multilateral government actions, public-­private partnerships, and policy adaptation); and the individual (via migration and immigration, globalized higher education, popu­lar culture and consumption, and employment in multinational corporations). Importantly, in all of t­ hese dimensions, the line between public and private is blurred to the point of near erasure. Techie rhe­toric to the contrary, the government’s presence is everywhere in ­these places, but it also is combined in complex and surprising ways with market influences and actors. Further, not only does local culture persist amid the tide of global influence, but local history also serves as an impor­tant explanatory variable. We can see t­hese patterns in other “global cities” that are not explic­itly in the business of high technology, but the historic relationship of public financing and geopolitics to the industry’s development has made such traits perhaps more vis­i­ble in high-­tech places. When it comes to both global cities and high-­tech suburbs of the post1970 period, historians have been largely absent from the scholarly conversation, chiefly ­because so many of the phenomena they trace are so new that historical analy­sis of them would be akin to building an airplane when in flight. The same goes for the world cities lit­er­a­ture in general, which chiefly has been the province of geographers, sociologists, economists, and other social ­ iddle age and the Internet scientists. Now that the personal computer is in its m revolution is closing out its second de­cade, it seems a fair time for historians to get in the game and connect this variety of postindustrial urbanism—­a nd transnational urbanism—to the broader scholarship in the field. For example, impor­tant work in urban history has shown the degree to which the public-­ private binary not only is inadequate to describe con­temporary dynamics of urbanization, but also often fails to observe the fluid relationships between the two sectors in the urban past. ­Whether discussing nineteenth-­century streetcars or twentieth-­century mortgage interest deductions, urban historians have challenged and ruptured the binary interpretation in which a more equitable “public” city lost out to a neoliberal “private” city.9 Similarly, historians of the American state have shown the degree to which government action was incremental, indirect, and reliant on private-­sector implementation. This was the case well before the current “neoliberal” era of deregulation, tax cuts, and bold promises to shrink public spending.10 Historical analy­sis of the high-­tech suburb provides an opportunity to link ­these insights with the world cities lit­er­a­ture and further provides a path for historians to better articulate where transnational urbanism comes from



Silicon Dreams 23

and what it means. It also positions transnational urbanism as a product of the historically interdependent relationship between states and markets. To an even more pronounced degree than was seen in the twentieth-­century United States, the “private” suburban environments of post-1970 global high-­ tech suburbs became pos­si­ble ­because of im­mense public investment on the parts of national, provincial, and local governments—­and it is public investment that si­mul­ta­neously was rooted in very par­tic­u­lar places and that ben­ eople and foreign entities (corporations, governments). This efited foreign p pattern played out not only in South Asia, but also in East and Southeast Asia, Eu­rope, Australia, Latin Amer­i­ca, and even some places in Africa. From the 1970s forward, nearly any place touched by industrialization became home to a “Silicon Something” partly financed by public resources. And nearly all of ­t hese “Silicon Somethings” became marketed as free-­market spaces, where entrepreneurial energies could blossom unhindered by old conventions and bureaucracies. This chapter intends to get us thinking more about t­ hese connections and contradictions by sketching out the long, strange trip of the high-­tech suburb around the world via six de­cades of policy-­making discourse and action. ­There ­ ere to go into all the permutations of national industrial policy is not room h and economic liberalization mea­sures that form the backdrop to this story. Instead, I pull out certain strands and cases to interrogate why t­ here has been such a strong association between high-­tech industrial policy and custom-­ built, peri-­urban places. In this story, high-­tech suburbs emerge as state proj­ ects, rooted in local or national culture, propelled by intensive state investment and government-­sponsored social engineering. The statist nature of such proj­ ects endured even as the trappings and messaging changed from Keynesian ­ ere transliberalism to market-­driven neoliberalism. At the same time, they w national pro­cesses that si­mul­ta­neously expressed the needs and desires of leaders of a par­tic­u­lar state but also involved other nation-­states and foreign actors (who in turn expressed national desires and ambitions via city-­building ventures in places overseas). Ironically, ­these national proj­ects often benefited actors and interests from beyond the nation’s borders.

California to France, 1960–70 We begin with the day Charles de Gaulle took a tour of American suburbia. It was April 1960, and the French president was nearing the end of a successful

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state visit to the United States. Ticker-­tape parades and enthusiastic crowds of hundreds of thousands had been a refreshing contrast to the grim mood at home, where de Gaulle had been consumed by the ongoing Algerian strug­gle for in­de­pen­dence. Basking in the glow of what he termed an “extraordinary welcome” in San Francisco on April 27, the president asked to see one last t­ hing before he left California the following day: the research park that Stanford University had built next to its campus in the Bay Area suburbs.11 The park was a departure from other industrial developments in a number of re­spects, featuring low-­slung buildings and ample landscaping designed to blend into the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Its tenants ­were “light” industries, in the business of researching and developing advanced electronic devices, and employing a white-­collar, educated workforce.12 A scale model of the “attractive, clean, and healthy” suburban industrial park had been a feature of the American pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair two years earlier, and de Gaulle was curious about w ­ hether this new sort of complex might be a useful model for French companies.13 Postwar France ­a lready had a robust industrial policy in place that was designed to build ­national capacities in critical industries, including research-­intensive industry. As in the Cold War United States, this investment had involved public spending that deliberately relocated research facilities and defense-­related ­industries to the urban periphery and more remote départements.14 However, the Stanford Research Park was a dif­fer­ent twist on the idea. This was not a closed and isolated science city (à la the American “atomic cities” of Hanford and Los Alamos), nor was it populated by educational and government institutions. It was a business park, designed for private industry, set amid a wider suburban landscape.15 Thus, early on the morning of April 28, the president’s motorcade rolled south from San Francisco along Skyline Drive, the Pacific Ocean’s blue expanse to his right. Thirty-­five miles l­ ater, the pro­cession found itself in freshly built subdivisions that had been apricot orchards only a few years earlier. Residents came out and waved as the presidential car drove by their homes, tricolor flags flying, and continued on to the Stanford campus and the research park next door. Douglas Dillon, undersecretary of state and de Gaulle’s official host, reported ­later that his eminent guest was “much impressed.”16 De Gaulle’s visit gave an official endorsement to a rather audacious venture that was less than a de­cade old, but that already had helped seed the idea that American-­style suburbs could be ideal spaces for white-­collar work and production—­whether in California or the Côte d’Azur. Peri-­urban settlements



Silicon Dreams 25

Figure 1.3. Intrigued by Stanford University’s successful development of a high-­tech industrial park next door to its campus, French president Charles de Gaulle asked to take a tour during a visit to Northern California in the spring of 1960. He was the first of many foreign dignitaries to make a pilgrimage to the area that ­later became known as Silicon Valley. Courtesy Palo Alto Historical Association.

had been sites of manufacturing and other kinds of production ever since the Industrial Revolution. However, the Stanford Research Park presented a new and particularly alluring alternative to the smoke-­belching industrial district. While distinctive in being developed by a private university, the park was not alone. Across suburban Amer­i­ca, privately developed high-­tech facilities ringing Boston along Route 128, or nestled in affluent suburbs outside New York City, Chicago, and Detroit, showcased “clean” and modern industrial facilities, populated by white-­collar workers, representing an ascendant American technocracy.17 As de Gaulle and other po­liti­c al leaders who observed ­these places keenly understood, the proliferation of the research park was one economic manifestation of the huge sums of U.S. government money spent on defense-­ related research and development in the early Cold War years. The wave of spending triggered by the Korean War and followed by an even greater surge ­after Sputnik had funneled unpre­ce­dented sums of money to universities and

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defense contractors alike. ­These, combined with major federal infrastructure programs around housing and highways, created ample resources and incentives for such developments to grow and flourish. However, as most of this was accomplished by indirect spending—­via tax expenditures, contracting and procurement, and higher education expenditures—­the true extent of government involvement in ­these landscapes remained hidden. Stanford Research Park, just like the suburbs around it, looked like a private space of profit-­ making enterprise. The indirect nature of federal Cold War spending in fact was a critical ingredient in making the American high-­tech enterprise work, and this was a lesson not always taken to heart by outside observers. The research park ­ ere not the product of economic planning; President Dwight landscapes w Eisenhower never declared the San Francisco Peninsula to be a science city. Instead, they ­were organic offshoots of a ­great deal of public money being channeled to certain regions of the country and certain sectors of the economy, expenditures made in the name of national security rather than for economic growth.18 To leaders of Western Eu­ro­pean nations, Amer­i­c a’s high-­tech parks became emblems of a growing “technological gap” between the United States and Eu­rope that was draining away Eu­ro­pean talent, lessening its business competitiveness, and potentially endangering fragile international alliances. Furthermore, the Eu­ro­pean Economic Community’s trade liberalization in the mid-1960s had spurred American corporate ­giants to expand their manufacturing and managerial operations in Eu­rope. Although associated with 1970s economic malaise, American private-­sector offshoring was well u ­ nder way by the time of oil shocks and stagflation. As early as 1965, more than 20 ­percent of American corporate investment occurred overseas. The postwar economies of Western Eu­rope ­were booming at last, but with U.S. brand names popping up all over the countryside, it seemed like a new sort of invasion was taking place.19 American dominance of the computer industry was particularly acute. In 1964, General Electric had acquired half owner­ship of the largest in­de­pen­dent French computer com­pany, Machines Bull. The U.S. government had promptly followed with an embargo on French importation of American supercomputers, on the grounds that their computing power might be used to advance the French nuclear program. Two years l­ater, the de Gaulle government announced a “Plan Calcul” to aggressively develop France’s national computer industry as part of a broader push to use state-­sponsored enterprise to grow an in­de­pen­dent



Silicon Dreams 27

French knowledge economy. Within this initiative, the French created a new research institute, “close to the private sector,” intended to generate cutting-­ edge research in computer science and encourage its commercialization by French firms.20 The anxiety spilled out into popu­lar culture. A 1967 French best seller titled Le défi Américain (The American challenge) argued that Eu­rope needed to become more like Amer­i­ca by investing heavi­ly in scientific research and development and adapting American management and marketing techniques. Le défi Américain sold over a million copies in Eu­rope and ultimately was translated into fifteen languages.21 Around the same time, Eu­ro­pean ministers had convened to discuss the possibility of a “technological ‘Marshall Plan.’ ” Eu­ro­pean alliances ­were critical, Le Monde observed, as “isolated efforts of one firm or one country have no chance of breaking the American grip.”22 Even the Lyndon Johnson administration established an interagency committee to assess how the United States might apply its technological might to rectify this imbalance. “­Unless ­we’re careful, our concept of the Atlantic partnership can be eroded by the fear and concern about the power of American capital and technology,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey remarked in an article that appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted more bluntly that Eu­ro­pe­ans’ “complaint is that we are so surpassing them in industrial development that we ­will eventually create a technological imperialism.”23 The idea that building global technological capacity was not only in other nations’ interests but also in the interest of the United States itself formed an impor­tant strand of American postwar liberalism well before this hand-­ wringing over Eu­rope began. Such concerns informed programs by the U.S. government and major American foundations to encourage international ­educational exchange, technical assistance and subsidy for higher education, and immigration liberalization. As a 1963 State Department report on the Fulbright Scholars program put it, such initiatives served the purpose of “what we as Americans feel are our common h ­ uman interests with ­people over the globe,” including “our passionate belief in education and the f­ ree inquiry of the ­human mind.”24 ­These policies proved foundational to the ­later globalization of high technology (and high-­tech spaces), as they set in motion transnational flows of highly educated p ­ eople who moved across countries and continents at dif­fer­ent moments in their ­careers.25 By the late 1960s, however, the global conversation had turned in a more pragmatic and profit-­d riven direction. In the United States, the po­liti­c al

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discord and financial drain precipitated by the Vietnam War had deflated the expansive postwar liberalism that had animated ideas like a high-­tech ­Marshall Plan for Eu­rope, as well as altering the domestic economy. Defense cutbacks battered the metropolitan hubs of the U.S. military-­industrial complex. ­A fter cancellation of government aerospace proj­ects prompted the Boeing Corporation to cut tens of thousands of jobs, the mood was so bleak in Boeing’s hometown of Seattle that some locals erected a sardonic billboard asking, “­Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?”26 The Cold War retrenchment had ­ripple effects throughout American high-­tech industry, revealing the degree to which the U.S. technology sector was a state-­sponsored proj­ect. Meanwhile, while some had been fretting about Le défi Américain, nation-­ states in East Asia had been building formidable industrial enterprises that started to eat away at American dominance of the worldwide electronics market. Japan was chief among ­these new rivals, and the secret to its success was what Peter Hall aptly characterized as “the systematic and ruthless partnership between the government . . . ​a nd private industry.”27 The government agency in this case was the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), which not only provided large subsidies to Japa­nese enterprises (including its burgeoning computer-­chip industry) but also built elaborate research park facilities that physically clustered higher education, research, and advanced scientific industry in modern, self-­contained, and peri-­urban environments. Tsukuba, founded in 1958, became the first of t­ hese high-­tech developments. As the Japa­nese economy continued on its upward trajectory through the 1960s and 1970s, MITI financed and designed even more elaborate parks and science cities throughout Japan.28 While private industry played a major role in Japa­nese efforts, the firms in question ­were very large, well established, and already mono­poly forces in the national economy. MITI, and the Japa­nese government more generally, was the major actor shaping high-­tech geographies. In a distinct departure from the decentralized, privatized, and rather haphazard way that American high-­tech suburbs had grown, the Japa­nese strategy centered on building entirely new places—­“technopoles”—­and then populating them with ­people and firms. The Japa­nese technopoles instead had more in common with the ­entirely new, purpose-­built modernist cities emerging around the world during the mid-­twentieth c­ entury, ranging from the Brazilian capital of Brasilia to the Le Corbusier–­designed Indian provincial capital of Chandigarh, as well as the massive urban renewal proj­ects ­under way in the cities of Eu­rope and North



Silicon Dreams 29

Amer­i­ca that ­were creating modernist campuses in the heart of older cities.29 Yet the technopoles also took design and functional cues from the research parks of California, Mas­sa­chu­setts, and New Jersey, not to mention the Anglo-­ American college campuses that had been such a major influence on ­those original parks’ design aesthetic. Employing what Ann Forsyth and Katherine Crewe call “the international campus-­garden-­suburb” model, the Japa­nese technopoles incorporated green space, housing, and other infrastructure throughout.30 Other rapidly industrializing East Asian nation-­states, notably ­Korea and Taiwan, employed similar visual cues in the design of high-­tech facilities, even for semiconductor fabrication plants whose internal functions had ­little in common with the university ­research laboratory.31 Now faced with both American and East Asian challenges, planners and politicians in Western Eu­ro­pean nations, especially France and West Germany, followed suit with further policies to advance national computer industries and to incentivize commercial research and development, using the technopole as a physical vehicle. As Neil Brenner has observed, the Eu­ro­pean approach used high-­tech development as a means to achieve broader regional economic ends, employing “spatial Keynesianism” to more equitably distribute industrial activity across national subregions.32 The notion of building dedicated spaces away from urban hustle and bustle entranced the politicians and planners b­ ehind t­ hese enterprises and elaborated on postwar industrial strategies that centered on large-­scale government subsidy and state-­run enterprise. Unlike the science cities of the immediate postwar period, however, an increasing number of ­these ­were places focused not on scientific exploration and the growth of the military but on research commercialization and the growth of high-­tech industry.33 While occupying a range on the po­liti­cal spectrum from being centrally planned and managed science cities to being mostly privately developed research parks, the Eu­ro­pean technopoles ­were all “public-­private” from the beginning, and set a pre­ce­dent for using robust public infrastructure investment (and, in some cases, central government planning) to create physical space for private, multinational ­industry and workers. France’s most enduring experiment of this sort demonstrates how research parks became expressions of national needs and desires, even when they occupied the more “private” end of this spectrum. In 1969, a consortium of business and higher education interests led by Pierre Laffitte, the codirector of École des Mines de Paris, founded Sophia Antipolis in the South of France. Although the sun-­drenched region was known primarily for its tourism, local

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officials had long had greater economic aspirations, including Nice’s long-­shot application in 1958 to become the capital of the Eu­ro­pean Union (a title that ­later went to Brussels).34 Laffitte, never one to shy away from ­grand gestures or rhetorical flourishes, chose a name for the new development that had multiple meanings. The “Sophia,” he explained, paid homage to his wife, Sophie, as well as the ancient Greek term for wisdom. The “Antipolis” was an amalgam of the name of nearby Antibes and the Greek “polis,” or city—­but then again, by putting the two together one obtained a word literally meaning “anti-­city.” For Laffitte, Sophia Antipolis brought the cosmopolitan spirit of cities like Paris into a more bucolic setting. He spoke of the park as a “quar­tier latin aux champs” that would bring scientists and intellectuals together in the quiet of the countryside.35 Yet its main orientation would be business, a place where higher education institutions could seed start-­ups and “develop a corporate culture like California.”36 Both Silicon Valley and Boston grew high-­tech economies around existing dense networks of research and homegrown innovative industry. In contrast, Laffitte chose Sophia Antipolis’s site in the countryside outside Nice b­ ecause of the presence of research facilities for large American technology companies, IBM and Texas Instruments. The only higher education institution in the area, the University of Nice, was only four years old at the time of the park’s founding and could offer ­little scientific firepower in Sophia Antipolis’s early years. Aesthetically, however, Sophia Antipolis was right on the mark. It had the sunshine and warmth of a Mediterranean climate, and enough proximity to Nice and Antibes to be somewhat cosmopolitan. IBM’s nearby fa­cil­ i­ty, designed by the preeminent architect Marcel Breuer, was an audacious and elegant sweep of poured concrete that opened in 1963 and encouraged Laffitte’s high ambitions. The design and planning of Sophia Antipolis mirrored the campus-­g arden-­suburbs of North Amer­i­ca and Asia, featuring low-­rise modernist buildings linked by a maze of winding roads that bore aspirational names like “Rue Albert Einstein.” Sunshine, famous architects, and culs-­de-­sac alone could not create another Silicon Valley, and government infrastructure proved critical in getting Laffitte’s ­grand idea off the ground. While conceived around the same time as the Plan Calcul, Sophia Antipolis initially received ­little attention from ­those ­running the high-­tech efforts of the de Gaulle and Pompidou governments; the ­little growth that occurred seems to have resulted simply from Laffitte’s sheer force of ­w ill. In 1977, Laffitte turned the management of the park over to public authorities, and the trajectory changed. The state



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telecommunications mono­poly France Telecom chose Sophia Antipolis as the base of o­ perations for development of a power­ful national and international telecommunications network. Major research institutions, both governmental and educational, started to locate in the park. The French government’s establishment of a generous research-­and-­development tax credit starting in 1983 was a further incentive for both domestic and foreign companies. As government presence grew in the 1980s, however, economic woes for some of the big American computer companies caused them to pull back from overseas campuses. Left b­ ehind ­were state-­subsidized companies and more staid research institutions, which shifted the mood and the focus. When private investment in the global software industry roared back in the 1990s and 2000s, fueled by the expansion of the Internet, French firms ­were only a small part of the wave. As a result, Sophia Antipolis entered the twenty-­fi rst ­c entury with a private-­sector landscape composed chiefly of large foreign multinationals (mainly American). Innovation networks ­were vertical, staying within firms, rather than the densely networked, horizontal pattern seen in Northern California.37 Ultimately, Sophia Antipolis proved remarkably successful at becoming a destination campus for technology enterprises from elsewhere, but it was less successful in generating new start-­ups of its own. Similar patterns emerged at other Eu­ro­pean technopoles founded in the 1970s, including North Rhine-­ Westphalia in Germany’s industrial Ruhr, and Oulu in northern Finland.38 The case of Sophia Antipolis reveals the flaws in the “if you build it, they ­will come” strategy, as interventions financed by national government agencies and populated by foreign companies did ­little to foster the creation of indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems. Sophia Antipolis—­t he “anti-­city of wisdom”—­was from its conception a place that was apart from the urban places of Nice and Antibes, and it had l­ittle connection to the industries and ­people already ­there. Strong state management contributed to this disconnection, as agencies and parastatal entities (like France Telecom and École des Mines) with major stakes in Sophia Antipolis’s success ­were based in Paris. So w ­ ere the Eu­ro­pean headquarters of major multinational corporations of the park. The Côte d’Azur provided a lovely setting, but ­little of the social and po­liti­cal capital fueling the park. Without ­these new ecosystems, the physical and cultural separation of ­these sorts of high-­tech suburbs from the landscapes and ­people surrounding them became even more pronounced, making ­these high-­tech islands more connected to overseas corporate headquarters than to their home countries.39

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The evolution of Sophia Antipolis provides insight into why many regions’ state-­subsidized silicon dreams never came to full fruition, and it also helps situate transnational urbanism historically. In Sophia Antipolis, transnational streams of influence ­were aesthetic and architectural, from Breuer’s IBM ­research center to the names of its curvilinear streets. They ­were po­ liti­c al, driven by the boosterism of municipal officials in Nice and the aspirations of Pa­ri­sian bureaucrats, as well as by the currents of international trade and global markets. They ­were cultural, as attempts to graft on an American-­ style business culture had ­little traction in a region and country with dif­fer­ent definitions and traditions of entrepreneurship and invention.

Singapore to India, 1970–90 If the evolution and organ­ization of high-­tech suburbs in the United States and Western Eu­rope reflected the po­liti­cal contingencies and market imperatives of federalized cap­i­tal­ist democracy, the parks of East and South Asia ­expressed the power and po­liti­cal vision of state-­sponsored developmentalism. No nation better exemplified this than Singapore, which not only used high-­ tech park development as a vehicle to develop its own economy but became so good at ­doing so that it became a global leader in research park development across Asia and the ­Middle East. As a result, Singapore had an outsize influence on the patterns of high-­tech suburban development throughout the newly industrializing world in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. The creation of physical space for all types of industry is a major thread in the story of Singapore’s rise. Small, ethnically diverse, po­liti­cally fractured, and resource-­poor, Singapore entered the postcolonial period displaying few signs of the cap­i­tal­ist behemoth it would l­ater become. At the center of this economic transformation and attendant mythmaking was a small group of po­liti­cal leaders, chief among them Lee Kuan Yew, who served as prime minister for the nation’s first twenty-­five years of existence. With all of its geographic disadvantages and its large and potentially threatening neighbors, Lee ­later reflected, “I concluded that an island city-­state in Southeast Asia could not be ordinary if it was to survive.”40 In 1960, the same year de Gaulle visited California and five years before Singaporean in­de­pen­dence, Dutch economist Albert Winsemius led a United Nations survey mission to Singapore to assess the ­future nation’s economic development prospects. What Singapore needed, Winsemius argued, was



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marketing and managerial expertise from Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope. Further, to attract ­these ­people and the firms they represented, Singapore would need to do something about “your Communist Party,” which was a major po­liti­cal influence and controlled most of the nation’s l­ abor ­unions.41 Winsemius went on to become Lee’s closest foreign economic adviser, framing an aggressive national development policy that, among other ­things, would create new physical spaces for industrial activity. He continued to circle the globe to find the best experts on economic development from Eu­rope and Amer­i­c a. A true transnational citizen, Winsemius continued to serve as an unpaid aide to Lee into the mid-1980s, never living in Singapore but coming to visit about twice a year for three weeks at a time. Although Winsemius was the most prominent foreigner in Lee’s inner circle, many of Singapore’s se­nior leaders had been educated abroad as well. Singapore’s nation builders, in short, ­were transnational in background and outlook.42 At the center of all of this was a single, power­ful government agency: the Economic Development Board (EDB). Founded at Winsemius’ suggestion in 1961, the EDB was a one-­stop shop for any foreign investor wanting to establish a manufacturing fa­cil­i­t y or managerial outpost in Singapore. In a model ­later seen in countless other regional economic development efforts throughout the world, the EDB eased the entry of foreign capital by fixing regulatory and tax hurdles, pro­cessing paperwork, and ensuring facilities had the necessary infrastructure.43 The building of industrial estates became a major plank of the EDB’s work, for in tiny Singapore all of t­ hese economic dreams required not simply the building of parks but the creation of new land. By 1963, Lee and the EDB leaders had set their sights on Jurong, a swampy, sleepy coastal area in the western part of Singapore. With deep ­waters off its shoreline and a hilly topography that bulldozers could flatten to make landfill, Jurong presented an ideal blank slate for Singapore’s bold economic dreams. In 1968, the EDB spun off an in­de­pen­dent agency, the Jurong Town Corporation (JTC), to take over all industrial estate development, as well as “provide amenities for the advancement of the well-­being of the ­people living in such estates and sites.”44 Through the 1970s, the JTC mowed down hills and filled in swamps, creating a landscape that was accompanied by chemical and petrochemical facilities, and both heavy and light manufacturing. Electronics had been a focus of Singapore’s economic strategy since the beginning, and the nation-­state joined Hong Kong and Mexico in establishing special trade zones that presented a particularly alluring destination for American companies looking for

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cheaper l­abor and quick assembly of electronic components. By the early 1970s, manufacturing of this sort was already beginning to make its second set of moves in Asia. Japan and Taiwan had established themselves as hubs for cheap consumer electronics in the 1960s, but by the 1970s rising ­labor costs ­were opening up new Southeast Asian destinations as preferred sites for electronics production. “So Long, Taiwan,” read a 1973 headline in the Wall Street Journal, atop an article that described the light manufacturing facilities springing up in Singapore’s northern neighbor, Malaysia.45 Electrical and electronic equipment made up nearly half of Singapore’s total manufacturing employment in 1973, the majority of it occurring in firms that w ­ ere primarily or wholly foreign owned.46 To be clear, both the form and the function of high-­tech industry in Singapore during this period ­were quite dif­fer­ent from what could be found in North Amer­i­ca, Eu­rope, and even Japan. The East and Southeast Asian technology landscape of the 1970s was one dominated by factories rather than research parks, and Singapore was far from being the major regional player. The landscapes of this technology economy ­were not ones that aspired to look like the research laboratories of suburban California or the modernist showcases of global tech ­giants like IBM. Instead, they ­were much more utilitarian and undistinguished concrete-­block buildings and high-­rise housing estates. Japan built university campuses in its technopoles. The JTC built parks, schools, and childcare facilities. Th ­ ese w ­ ere working-­class spaces for working-­class ­people. ­These rather ordinary landscapes, however, displayed national ambition and courted international audiences. The JTC built a seven-­story-­high tower on one of the few hills left remaining at Jurong Town, which offered visitors a panoramic view of the industrial facilities and became a regular stop for visiting dignitaries, who in the span of a few years in the mid-1970s included Queen Elizabeth II, Deng Xiaoping, and Spiro Agnew. Officials cultivated glowing press coverage in English-­language outlets in Singapore and elsewhere, and recruited high-­powered lobbyists to make the case for Singapore as a global business destination.47 ­Labor cost pressures limited Singapore’s competitive position in the electronics industry, however. In contrast to many postcolonial states, Singapore had built a sizable ­middle class. The generous subsidies offered to industry by competing nations like Japan also posed a challenge. “In Singapore we do not believe in subsidies, but many of our competitors do,” observed former EDB chief Hon Sui Sen in 1981.48 With other Asian powers able to undercut Singapore



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on both l­abor and land costs, po­liti­cal leaders re­oriented industrial strategy away from heavy industry and manufacturing, and ­toward research and development. If Singapore could not become the Pacific Rim’s manufacturing capital, it could become the command-­and-­control center for white-­collar management and high-­tech research, development, and design. The EDB reor­g a­nized its electronics-­industry activities in 1978 in recognition that Singapore needed a fresh strategy, one that entailed “intensive promotion” and “sharper marketing.”49 This approach, government leaders proclaimed, would be “Singapore’s Second Industrial Revolution.”50 Over the next few years, the government began to make a series of major investments in basic and applied research, higher education, and trade and tax mea­sures intended to attract the R&D and design operations of multinational electronics companies. Along with ­these came even more aggressive policies to slash the costs of ­doing business and to court footloose foreign capital and highly skilled expatriates.51 The place-­making strategy changed accordingly, away from industrial ­estates and ­toward fancifully named and elaborately conceived research parks that paid deliberate homage to North American examples. The Singapore Science Park, established in 1980, became the first of t­ hese outposts. Instead of building the park near Jurong or other industrial areas, Singapore planners built it in the southwest part of the city near higher education and research institutions, including the main campus of the National University of Singapore. A de­cade ­later, the National Technology Plan of 1991 mapped out a broad high-­tech corridor, near the center of which was the Science Park. Over the next two de­cades, the government spent billions of dollars building richly ­appointed and slickly marketed facilities for corporate and government research, with names that sounded like elite private real estate ventures rather than government enterprises: Biopolis, Fusionopolis, Mediopolis, One-­North. To further lower the cost of d ­ oing business and smooth the regulatory path for potential tenants, JTC spun out another quasi-­independent entity, named Arcasia, to serve as a property man­a g­er for the high-­tech facilities. Arcasia ­offered, in the words of one of its man­a g­ers, “flexibility, in terms of ease of changing policies and coming up with innovative products.” He added, “Government agencies can change ­things but at a slower pace. We also wish to subject ourselves to more private sector’s [sic] disciplines.”52 In crowded Singapore, t­ hese new research parks could not sprawl out to the extent that such facilities could in suburban California and the South of France, and, over time, they began to establish a new, more urbanized aesthetic. The 160-­acre Singapore Science Park had a look and feel much like that

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Figure 1.4. Both land scarcity and market demands for “live-­work-­play” environments spurred the development of more high-­density and high-­rise technology parks in the 2000s. In Singapore and elsewhere, however, ­these continued to be located in self-­contained environments outside the city center. Biopolis, Singapore, 2012. Photo by author.

of its technopole counter­parts elsewhere, with discreet clusters of buildings in a green, landscaped setting. By the turn of the twenty-­first ­century, the park had more than three hundred tenants, including major multinationals like Sony and Silicon Graphics.53 In contrast, the Singapore government built Biopolis and Fusionopolis as multistory midrise buildings, sleekly clad in glass, with ­little surrounding

Figures 1.5 and 1.6. Through the de­cades, the low-­slung Californian aesthetic of Silicon Valley continued to inform the design of global high-­tech suburbs and telegraph their aspirations to become the next capital of the technology world. Moving from an overcrowded Bangalore to its smaller neighbor of Mysore, the Indian IT ­giant Infosys built a massive headquarters campus (top) whose entrance looks nearly identical to Palm Drive, the entrance to Stanford University’s Palo Alto campus (bottom). Figure 1.5: Photo by Karen C. Seto, 2011. Figure 1.6: Photo by author, 2016.

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landscaping. Gardens grew on the rooftops, but received relatively l­ittle use in Singapore’s muggy climate. Within the comfortably air-­conditioned buildings, multiple tenants surrounded common spaces of atria and food courts. The developments ­were more like shopping malls than science parks, and ­emphasized the “live-­work-­play” troika that was becoming the ubiquitous marketing tag­line for high-­end real estate developments worldwide. As in the science park and technopole, the governing rationale for building ­these places was colocation: of basic and applied research, industry, and government. As all of this was happening, the rest of the world was g­ oing mad for research parks. The PC revolution gave way to the Internet revolution, while hundreds of science parks, science cities, and research parks sprouted on vacant lots and green fields outside cities, large and small. As the market for highly skilled engineers and scientists became a global one, national governments and supranational entities like the United Nations and World Bank poured money into new research institutes and technological centers in efforts to stem brain drain and build up new hubs of high-­tech innovation. In Trieste, Italy, the UN in 1984 funded a biotechnology research center, headed up by a Pakistani scientist, designed as a home for researchers from developing countries who might be tempted to decamp permanently to the West. “By allowing third world scholars access to its research facilities,” explained the ­ ill not New York Times matter-­of-­factly, “the Trieste center hopes that they w need to commit themselves to foreign universities to conduct their proj­ects.”54 Po­liti­cal leaders in the newly developing megaeconomies of China and India looked at the flurry of research park construction with keen interest. Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping’s late-1970s experiment in “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” had designated the southern city of Shenzhen as a ­special economic zone and set off an extraordinary urban and industrial expansion; more trade zones followed in other coastal cities, and the po­liti­cal and financial capitals of Beijing and Shanghai exploded in size and economic activity. While low-­end manufacturing drove the bulk of this growth, party leaders from Deng on down had visions for a Chinese ­future where “high-­ tech industrial parks” played a significant role.55 As other nations had done before, China looked overseas for expert advice, and Deng’s eyes turned to Singapore. The nation-­state’s dominant Chinese minority provided a cultural connection. Their track rec­ord in economic development showed how an authoritarian state could successfully court free-­ market cap­i­tal­ists. “We should tap their experience, and learn how to manage better than them,” Deng remarked in 1992.56



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Lee Kuan Yew was nearing the end of his po­liti­cal ­career, and was looking for one final legacy proj­ect. Having developed the Singaporean peninsula to its furthest extent, Lee recognized that Singapore needed overseas investments of its own in order to maintain its staggering rate of GDP growth. So, in 1994, the Singaporean and Chinese governments entered into a joint agreement to create a Chinese version of Jurong Town on marshy land eighty kilo­meters outside Shanghai, near the city of Suzhou. The seventy-­acre Singapore-­Suzhou Industrial Park had a US$20 billion price tag and planted a major Singaporean stake in the booming Chinese economy. Japa­nese corporations reportedly asked to rent space in the park. China “politely” told them no.57 Suzhou became the first of many Singaporean-­led overseas ventures in commercial real estate development in the last de­cade of the twentieth ­century and the first de­c ade of the twenty-­first. As the EDB and its quasi-­private property development subsidiaries embarked on more work in China, India, and the ­Middle East, its focus shifted away from re-­creating the industrial landscapes of Jurong Town and t­oward the postindustrial landscapes of the Singaporean high-­tech parks. This critical shift tracked a wider re­orientation in the nature of high-­tech places’ transnational urbanism. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, East Asian nation-­states’ industrialization strategies dovetailed with multinational technology companies’ desire for lower l­abor costs and regulatory burdens.58 In 2001, the JTC’s investment arm merged with Arcasia to make a new for-­profit development enterprise called Ascendas. Like other private companies that had spun off from Singaporean government agencies, Ascendas’s leadership came from the po­liti­cal elite, members of the ruling ­People’s Action Party who had spent most of their c­ areers in government rather than in business. Their task now was to make money, and plenty of it, by re-­creating lush, high-­amenity working and living environments across Asia and the M ­ iddle East. Ascendas referred to the parks as “products,” gave them increasingly exotic monikers like Galaxis, CyberPearl, and CyberVale, and marketed them to a global consumer base of multinational firms.59

Bangalore, 2000 Now our transnational history comes full circle, back to the “world in a park” outside Bangalore. None other than ITPB was the first of ­these Singaporean

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real estate ventures in India, and it became a crown jewel in Ascendas’s product portfolio. The development is not only an example of the intricate network of transnational flows undergirding India’s high-­tech boom. It also reveals how and why the developmentalism of the Cold War era established path dependencies and policy feedbacks that contoured the subsequent neoliberalism of the Internet age. It also shows the nuances and flows of influence between public and private realms pres­ent both in the “statist” era before India’s post-1990 economic liberalization and in the “market-­driven” era ­after it. In the first de­cades of the Cold War, India was distinctive among “Third World” nations not only ­because of its size and economic heft but also ­because of its alignment with the Soviet Union. While embracing an aggressive set of policies to encourage industrialization, the leaders of the newly in­de­pen­dent India had ­little interest in propagating American-­style market capitalism and set up high barriers to foreign direct investment. For Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a modern, in­de­pen­dent India was one that was no longer dependent on foreign imports. To accomplish this, he urged, the first task was to “build up heavy and basic industry . . . ​on which other industries can gradually be built up.”60 To accomplish this, the national government subsidized and steered the creation of this industrial base to such an extent that, by the late 1970s, more than 60 ­percent of India’s total productive capacity was in the public sector.61 Bangalore was the one place where Nehruvian developmentalism departed from its heavy-­industry-­first strategy. The southern metropolis already had a long history as a government and military hub, as well as a strong educational infrastructure, being home to the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (also known as the Tata Institute) since the early twentieth ­century. Nicknamed the “garden city” b­ ecause of its pleasant climate and neighborhoods of bungalows and trees, Bangalore became a particularly attractive destination for research-­and technology-­intensive activities in postin­de­pen­dence India. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) moved ­there in the 1940s, followed by Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited and Hindustan Machine Tools in the 1950s. Th ­ ese firms employed tens of thousands and drew a significant middle-­class population of public servants and white-­collar technicians. ­These large state-­supported enterprises did not build facilities in the city center, however, nor did they build peri-­urban factories to which urban workers ­were expected to commute. Instead, HAL, ITI, and the ­others built ­giant, self-­contained satellite cities on Bangalore’s outskirts, providing housing,



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schools, utilities, and social infrastructure. HAL’s campus alone was nearly three thousand acres. This kind of decentralization was in the slipstream of midcentury global urban development trends, but in Bangalore’s case it created a particularly impor­tant pre­ce­dent for the self-­contained high-­tech landscapes to come. In 1961, Nehru proclaimed the metropolis “India’s city of the ­future,” and his government led a push to enlarge the presence of research-­and engineering-­ driven industry in the city, expand its higher education infrastructure, and make Bangalore the headquarters for research-­intensive bodies like India’s ­national space agency. ­These actions gave further state sanction to, and subsidy for, the development of satellite cities, campuses, and research parks throughout the metropolis that reified and amplified Bangalore’s low-­rise, low-­density, and poly-­nucleated built environment more than four de­c ades before the Internet age.62 ­Under the rubric of “modernization,” India received large amounts of monetary aid and technical assistance from both philanthropic and governmental entities in the United States and supranational institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank. Yet corporate foreign investment was so strongly discouraged as to be scarcely vis­i­ble, reaching barely 0.08 ­percent of GDP by 1990. B ­ ecause of t­ hese stringent controls and regulatory burdens, India missed out on much of the high-­tech wave washing over the rest of Asia in the 1970s. While Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore courted American computer companies, the Indian License Raj actively discouraged them. In 1977, ­after the Indian government demanded that it sell 60 ­percent of its ser­ vice operations to Indian nationals, IBM pulled out of the country altogether.63 IBM’s exit hit particularly painfully in Bangalore, which had become a burgeoning center for high-­tech activity as the result of its concentration of government research centers, advanced manufacturing, and educated workers. An entrepreneurial group of state and local politicians had helped this along, founding the Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (KEONICS) in 1976 to assist businesses in building out IT infrastructure, of which land development was a central part. Following the existing pattern of locating large industry clusters and institutions on the urban fringe, and building new rather than repurposing old, KEONICS established ­Electronic City in 1978 on a three-­hundred-­acre plot twenty kilo­meters south of the city center. The tide began turning in 1984, when Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi took power and planted the seeds of an aggressive program to bring India

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into the global industrial economy, beginning a decade-­long pro­cess of dismantling the License Raj and opening up the national economy to foreign direct investment, with the computer industry as a key emphasis. Gandhi and his successors saw Bangalore as the forefront of this strategy, a true “city of the ­future” with many of the key ingredients—­workforce, institutions, and research parks—­needed to become a global high-­tech capital. In 1985, Texas Instruments opened a research fa­cil­i­t y in Electronic City, and by the end of the de­cade several other large American computer firms had arrived as well. India’s market liberalization occurred just at the moment that technological changes, particularly in telecommunications, made the physical distance between India and the rest of the world ­matter less, and the high skill level ­ atter more. Large firms ­were followed of Bangalore’s technical workforce m in turn by small to medium-­size foreign technology companies, drawn in part by the presence of their larger competitors. Many dif­fer­ent parts of the computer-­industry supply chain came to Bangalore, of which white-­collar engineering and managerial facilities ­were only one part. By 1999, Bangalore accounted for over 43 ­percent of all the foreign direct investment in India.64 The state and national government efforts to smooth the path for foreign high-­tech firms created an odd disconnect in which sophisticated, specialized infrastructure became layered over a still-­dysfunctional system of local utilities. In 1987, Texas Instruments engineers ­were able to use satellite communication to beam software code between Texas and Bangalore, but they still had to wait one year for the telephone com­pany to install local ser­vice. Twenty years ­later, Microsoft had to install two additional electric generators in its Bangalore fa­cil­i­t y to ensure that its servers would not be disrupted by the outages of the municipal power grid that occurred several times each day.65 ITPB embodied all of ­these opportunities and contradictions. The idea for the park came from the highest levels, coming out of a 1992 meeting between Indian prime minister Narasimha Rao and Singaporean prime minister Goh Chok Tong. Eight years ­later, its first phase opened, financed as a joint venture between the Indian government, a consortium of Singaporean investors led by the JTC, and the Indian industrial ­giant Tata Industries. The financing of the park blurred the lines between public and private, as did its joint management by the State of Karnataka and Ascendas. The park, proudly proclaimed Karnataka’s chief minister, the American-­educated S. M. Krishna, “was the best address in Bangalore.”66 ITPB became the first of many Singaporean ventures that ultimately invested billions of dollars in India. By 2007, Ascendas had seven software



Silicon Dreams 43

parks in five dif­fer­ent Indian cities and had launched an Indian property trust. In a signal of how wildly profitable the transnational research park business had become, demand for the trust’s IPO among institutional investors exceeded supply by more than forty-­six times. In Bangalore, plans came on line for an expansion of ITPB, as well as for construction of a high-­tech corridor that would stretch in a wide arc along Bangalore’s far eastern periphery, down to Electronic City. “History is bringing us together, again,” said George Yeo, Singapore’s foreign minister, in 2007. “Many threads from India are woven into the Singapore fabric and more ­will be in the ­future.”67 The boom in research park construction spurred the growth of an accompanying residential real estate industry dominated by Indian-­run enterprises but adapting the architecture, landscape, and aspirational messaging of high-­ end North American suburban developments. Ardash Properties opened the gated enclave of Palm Meadows only a few years ­after ITPB opened. While it was one of the most luxurious of ­these properties, it had plenty of com­pany. Other major Indian developers built both high-­rise apartments and single-­ family communities with names like Whispering Pines and the Prestige Acropolis. Like the research parks, the residential areas offered self-­contained electric, ­water, and sewer ser­vices, as well as the promise of security from the increasingly chaotic city outside.68 The p ­ eople and firms that inhabited Bangalore’s landscapes of wealth added another transnational layer of influence and agency. The tenants of ITPB ­were a mix of American and Eu­ro­pean multinationals and India-­based firms whose business almost entirely consisted of exported software and ser­ vices. With them came a set of multinational real estate ser­vice firms—­ developers, agents, property man­ag­ers—­whose job was to ensure that Indian parks ­offered the highest caliber of international-­standard business amenities. International real estate g­ iant Jones Lang LaSalle came to India in 1998 to ­facilitate the offshore move of Silicon Valley–­based software firm Oracle. Eight years ­later, the firm had one thousand employees in the country.69 While subsidized by physical and social infrastructure financed by a ­par­tic­u ­lar national government, the inhabitants of Bangalore’s landscapes of wealth ­were a polyglot group of expatriates whose allegiances w ­ ere to their employers, not to the host nation-­state. The geographic isolation and ­self-­containment created in ­these developments further removed them from the rhythms of everyday life and culture. “It is amazing what you can get in terms of quality of life,” remarked one resident of Palm Meadows, an Indian who had returned in 2004 ­after many years in the United States. But it seemed

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appropriate, given the times. “Why should my country be any less than the country I was in?” asked another returned expatriate. Years abroad had shifted standards, expectations, and aspirations. In the high-­tech suburb, it seemed, one could be thoroughly global and thoroughly placeless.70

Conclusion: The High-­Tech Suburb and Transnational Urbanism Building on Cold War models in 1950s and 1960s Amer­i­c a, Eu­ro­pean and Asian technopoles from the 1970s forward set a pre­ce­dent for robust public investment in peri-­urban spaces for private industry, made in the interest of fostering national and regional economic competitiveness. The reliance on foreign enterprise to populate ­these places, however, made the global high-­tech suburb a fundamentally transnational enterprise from the start. Thousands of research parks, science cities, and “Silicon Somethings” emerged from this tidal wave; this chapter has highlighted a few salient examples. The fact that the high-­tech suburb became the Holy Grail of regional economic development in the late twentieth ­century, and that this quest had such a global scope, makes it an impor­tant site for understanding and historicizing the “world city” phenomenon and delineating the actors and agents of transnational urbanism. So, what should we make of this history? First, quite simply, state action makes ­these places pos­si­ble. While both local boosters and outside observers tend to frame con­temporary high-­tech landscapes as playgrounds for ­free enterprise and entrepreneurship, historical analy­sis underscores the degree to which the state was and is a critical actor. This has largely been state building by stealth, which has made it difficult to see. The indirect and often hidden pro­cesses by which governments channeled public financing ­toward building high-­tech suburbs obscured the state’s role at the moment of creation and, in time, encouraged broader forgetfulness about the public under­pinnings of “private” spaces. In the Cold War de­cades, universities and quasi-­private special agencies became agents through which government spending occurred, and local governments partnered in the enterprise through tax and zoning policies that w ­ ere hardly the stuff of headlines. Post-1990, a newer breed of privatized government spinoffs—­like the Singapore EDB’s Ascendas development corporation—­further separated the building of high-­tech parks from the daily work of government, although none of the work of t­ hese entities would be pos­si­ble without public subsidy.



Silicon Dreams 45

Ironically, the pro­cess of unfettering high-­tech places from old bureaucratic rules and regulations during the post-1990 period necessitated robust and perhaps even more expensive government action and investment, ­whether via the establishment of tax-­free enterprise zones, subsidies to industry and investment in research, or the building of expensive new urban infrastructure. National, provincial, and local governments all bore some of ­these costs. Spending this money of course entailed spending less on other ­things, and while funding poured into high-­tech industrial zones, city-­and region-­wide infrastructure proj­ects lagged ­behind. This was as true for Silicon Valley as it was for Bangalore. It is hard not to conclude that the dramatic inequalities observed in “world city” landscapes stem at least partly from policy makers’ decisions to focus public resources on certain places and industrial sectors rather than addressing the urban ­whole. Second, the high-­tech suburb shows how transnational urbanism is not a ­matter of global forces (governments, capital) overtaking and erasing local cultures and disempowering local actors, but is instead something that results from a complex interchange between the local and global over time. The ultimate economic trajectory of high-­tech suburbs, in fact, depends on local conditions; a city’s past limns the possibilities of its world-­class pres­ent. We see this in Sophia Antipolis, where the lack of existing regional assets—­a well-­ established university, locally headquartered technology industries, an entrepreneurial business climate—­limited its ability to be much more than a pleasant setting for branch campuses of multinational firms. Further, the transnational urbanism of the high-­tech suburb reveals that actors are never wholly global or local, but often roam the spaces in between. The builders of high-­tech suburbs ­were a seemingly stateless cadre of developers, con­sul­tants, financiers, and master tenants who operated in multiple localities. The ­people and firms that populated ­these spaces ­were similarly transnational, moving back and forth across nations and continents over the course of an adult lifetime, while often maintaining strong ties to their native communities and cultures. In some re­spects, the networks they engendered paralleled earlier movements of ­people and ideas, from the Enlightenment’s “republic of letters” to Progressive Era “Atlantic crossings.” In contrast to t­hese earlier moments, however, ­these transnational flows involved ­people who worked in the interest of global business enterprise and the expansion of markets, rather than the expansion of states. Third, taking a longer view of a phenomenon often studied in the pres­ent tense gives us a clearer answer to the question of what, exactly, spurs high-­tech

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growth and industrial innovation. This “search for the next Silicon Valley” has animated hundreds, if not thousands, of economic development efforts worldwide since the 1950s and has been one of the most influential strands of postindustrial urbanism. Yet the relentless emphasis on building high-­tech parks and elite residential subdivisions not only came at the expense of more holistic and equitable urban investments but also incorrectly conflated physical space with meaningful network connections among ­people. True high-­ tech “innovation”—­measured in startup companies, new inventions, and market-­disrupting products—­came only from ­those places where policy and politics allowed a rather messy and bumptious entrepreneurial culture to flourish. This was a secret of Silicon Valley that many of its imitators missed, and it underscores the nuanced public-­private dynamic undergirding ­these regional stories.71

chapter 2

Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas Ciudad Kennedy as a Midcentury Crossroads A my   C. Offn er

The largest housing proj­ect built in Latin Amer­i­c a ­u nder the Alliance for ­Pro­gress was a private homeownership venture.1 Ciudad Kennedy, or Kennedy City, grew up on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, during the early 1960s, ­ ouse eighty-­ a sprawling complex of private homes and apartments designed to h 2 four thousand ­people. The promise of property owner­ship fascinated every­one involved in the undertaking. Nearly four de­cades ­later, an original resident of Superblock 7 explained the origins of his neighborhood by digging up a newspaper ad from 1962. The faded scrap of paper showed a dapper man standing in front of a two-­story home, and issued a call to readers: ­“Become Mr. Property Own­er.”3 The construction of private homes in Ciudad Kennedy exposed multiple conceptions of homeownership that intersected in the postwar world. The proj­ ect lay at the crossroads of city and countryside, of U.S. and Latin American social policy traditions, and of varied popu­lar and professional ideals of spatial, social, and political-­economic order. For many Colombians living in a period of rapid urbanization, private property in the city held the same a­ ppeal that a plot of land in the countryside did: it was a site of production and petty commerce that residents used to secure income and autonomy. For housing planners, smallholdings in the city w ­ ere the very definition of slums. They

Figure 2.1. “Conviértase en Don Propietario” (Become Mr. Property Owner). This advertisement by the Instituto de Crédito Territorial contractor COVICA promoted housing in Ciudad Kennedy. The three-­bedroom unit in the advertisement cost 33,600 pesos and offered a ten-­year mortgage with a down payment of 11,200 pesos. Momacu, “El barrio verde” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 2000), Colección General, Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia.



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 49

i­magined a functional division of space that would reproduce nuclear families headed by male wage earners. Home and work ­were to be separate, and each room in the ­house was to have a distinct function corresponding to the prescribed activities of f­athers, ­mothers, and c­ hildren. The homes in Ciudad Kennedy thus drew on and nurtured multiple ideals of economic production and social structure: practices associated with the campesino holding, the cap­i­tal­ist employment relationship, the nuclear f­ amily, and extended r­ elations of tenancy and kinship coexisted in the same space. The multiple ­orders contained within Ciudad Kennedy bring to mind familiar criticisms of the stage theories of development that informed midcen­ hether modernization theory, economic tury policy making worldwide, w structuralism, or teleological va­ri­e­ties of Marxism.4 Residents of Ciudad ­Kennedy certainly followed no linear path from rural “tradition” to urban “modernity,” from ­house­hold to market economy, or from peasantry to proletariat; their lives depended on joining informal and subsistence production to small-­scale proprietorship and wage l­abor. In defying teleological, linear narratives of historical change, they resembled rural mi­grants who flocked to postwar cities across the globe, and their lives lay bare the limitations of the social theory of their own time. Nonetheless, the residents of Ciudad Kennedy ­were living through dramatic changes of the twentieth-­century world: the redefinition of public and private responsibilities for social welfare provision, the rise of self-­identified home-­owning ­middle classes, and the ascent of economists as policy makers and public intellectuals. Thinking in time, Ciudad Kennedy was planned in the 1950s and built in the 1960s. This suggests the transitory nature of midcentury po­liti­cal economy without implying any teleological or stage theory of history. Legally and institutionally, the proj­ect grew from the New Deal and Colombia’s Revolución en Marcha of the 1930s. It adapted the instruments and commitments of the Depression era and, in ­doing so, revealed the profoundly indeterminate ends that they harbored. Ciudad Kennedy helped create a state that was both developmentalist and austere. It strengthened residents’ regard for both government and private capital as guarantors of social welfare. It expanded the welfare state while cultivating a middle-­class consciousness among residents that narrowed their social solidarities and set them against Colombians poorer than themselves. It was a flagship initiative of the Alliance for Pro­gress, an aid program dedicated to accelerating economic growth, and yet it stubbornly resisted the demands of economic efficiency and expansion. Half a ­century ­later, as historians strug­ gle to name and understand the political-­economic transformations of the late

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twentieth ­century—­whether conceived as a shift from socialism to postsocialism, Fordism to post-­Fordism, or Keynesianism to neoliberalism—­Ciudad Kennedy appears enormously contradictory, inconsistent with any single order. In fact, it reminds us that the midcentury mixed economy contained commitments that only appeared as irreconcilable de­cades ­later. Ciudad Kennedy was, then, a crossroads in both time and place. The teeming landscape of privately owned homes held wide-­ranging meaning for participants arriving from farms, cramped apartments, government agencies, universities, and international organ­izations across the hemi­sphere. The private home was, at the same time, an emblematic product of midcentury social policy that nurtured ideals and practices so varied as to threaten the very order from which it emerged.

Homeownership as Austere Government Ciudad Kennedy was built on a swampy patch of land southwest of Bogotá distinguished mainly for housing an airport and a brewery. Originally conceived as an in­de­pen­dent city, the proj­ect was ultimately absorbed by the capital’s explosive growth. ­Today it is the most populous of the city’s twenty localities, with a population of more than one million ­people.5 The Colombian government designed Kennedy during the late 1950s to manage an exodus from the countryside that had begun a de­cade earlier, and a crisis of governance that accompanied it. During the late 1940s, rural mi­ grants began flooding Colombian cities, fleeing poverty and po­liti­cal vio­lence in the countryside. Colombia had been an overwhelmingly rural country in 1938, with only 28 ­percent of p ­ eople living in cities. By 1960, nearly half lived in urban areas, and the housing shortage was most severe in Bogotá (­Table 2.1).6 Municipal and national officials quickly found themselves responding not just to urban growth but also to the po­liti­c al challenge of land invasions and “pirate urbanization,” two illegal strategies of settlement that represented the most common paths to housing in postwar Bogotá. In an invasion, homeless ­people built shantytowns on undeveloped property or seized empty buildings. In ­pirate developments, by far the more common phenomenon, landowners ­legally sold plots to developers who then turned them into illegal subdivisions, violating zoning laws or illicitly appropriating public ser­v ices. For de­c ades, ­these methods successfully ­housed low-­and middle-­income renters who, lacking any alternative, set themselves against government authorities



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 51

Table 2.1. Urban Growth in Bogotá Year

Area (hectares)

Population

Rate of population growth (% per year)

1850 1886 1900 1928 1938 1951 1958 1964 1973

294 610 909 1,958 2,514 no data 8,084 14,615 30,423

29,603 64,000 100,000 235,000 330,000 648,000 1,130,000 1,697,000 2,855,000

0.6 2.2 3.2 3.1 3.5 5.5 8.0 7.4 5.8

Source: Alfonso Torres Carrillo, La ciudad en la sombra: Barrios y luchas populares en Bogotá, 1950–1977 (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popu­lar, 1993), 23.

and at times allied with Communists. The clearest expression of that alliance came in 1959, when members of the Communist Party helped to establish the Central Nacional Provivienda, a national housing organ­ization that or­ga­ nized squatters to win public ser­vices, utilities, and individual land titles. No one considered Colombia ripe for socialist revolution, but all of this activity elicited two swift responses from public officials. The first was s­ imple repression: the City of Bogotá sent police to clear invasions, sparking pitched ­battles with residents but failing to stop the seizures. Si­mul­ta­neously, the municipal and national governments turned to legalization, property rights claims, and large-­scale housing construction to reclaim control of urban space. Strug­gles over land tenure in Bogotá mirrored conflicts erupting worldwide, as postwar cities became sites of land seizures, illegal subdivisions, and massive re­orientations of housing policy. The international significance Colombia’s conflict became clear in 1961, when the national government secured Alliance for Pro­gress loans to build Ciudad Kennedy.7 The planning and construction of Kennedy unfolded across two eras in Colombian po­liti­c al history: the military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas ­Pinilla and the National Front government that succeeded it. Rojas’s dictatorship, which lasted from 1953 to 1957, represented an exceptional period in Colombian politics. Unlike most of its neighbors in Latin Amer­i­ca, Colombia sustained a formally demo­cratic government and a single two-­party system from the mid-­nineteenth ­century to the late twentieth ­century. But the country’s Liberal and Conservative Parties faced a crisis of legitimacy during the

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late 1940s, when they became vehicles of massive po­liti­c al vio­lence. La Violencia, an extraordinary wave of banditry, kidnappings, and po­liti­cal assassination or­ga­nized along party lines, began during the mid-1940s and lasted for two de­cades, ultimately taking the lives of two hundred thousand Colombians. At its height during the late 1940s and early 1950s, La Violencia destroyed the parties’ ability to govern. Rojas seized power in a bloodless coup, and he did so with widespread popu­lar consent, promising to inaugurate a new era of peace and prosperity. Upon taking office, Rojas launched a national program of infrastructure development to pacify the countryside, and his plan included large-­scale housing construction. While the dictatorship prized housing development, the final plan for Kennedy came together ­after Rojas fell. The National Front, established in 1958, was a power-­sharing agreement between Colombia’s old Liberal and Conservative Parties that restored them to power while containing partisan conflict. For sixteen years, party leaders agreed to evenly divide all national government positions, trade the presidency back and forth, and bar all other parties from office. Liberals and Conservatives thus excluded both the authoritarian right and the anticapitalist left from national politics. Si­mul­ta­neously, they committed themselves to social reform and a pioneering community ­action program to legitimate the profoundly constricted new regime and contain popu­lar mobilization.8 During the 1950s, then, housing policy promised to resolve Colombia’s twin crises of governance: the spread of illegal settlements in Bogotá, and po­ liti­cal vio­lence power­ful enough to destroy one of the longest-­lasting po­liti­cal systems in the hemi­sphere. Over the course of the de­cade, Colombian leaders enlisted and strug­gled with a parade of international advisers in a drive to govern and ­house an unruly population. The arguments that erupted in Bogotá at times obscured an essential point of agreement. ­W hether military appointees, Liberal Party leaders, or old New Dealers, every­one involved in Colombian policy making believed that planned communities of privately owned homes could remake poor ­people and provide them with new loyalties, ­whether to the Catholic Church and military government or to a stringently circumscribed form of democracy. In ­either case, private homeownership promised to cultivate ties to the state and power­ful national institutions, and ­those ties promised to make Colombia peaceable and orderly once more. The question that consumed policy makers was how to build the ­houses. Dif­fer­ent systems of financing and construction, they believed, would nurture dramatically dif­ fer­ent social and po­liti­cal ­orders.



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 53

For its part, the Rojas regime embraced private homeownership in part b­ ecause the country’s low-­income housing authority had never pursued anything ­else. The Instituto de Crédito Territorial (ICT) did not directly build, own, or manage property, but offered several forms of credit to expand ­private homeownership. The ICT was a product of an earlier period of social and economic reform, having been created in 1939 by President Alfonso López Pumarejo to finance rural housing for campesinos. During that era, demands for property by the rural poor had forced Congress to pass the country’s first land reform law, and had si­mul­ta­neously oriented the ICT ­toward fostering homeownership in the countryside. Indeed, the very same Liberal Party politicians who wrote Colombia’s 1936 land reform law designed the ICT. Rural mi­grants moved to the cities during the 1940s, and the institution and its policies followed them. The ICT gained responsibility for financing urban housing in 1942, and although it did virtually nothing in cities before the 1950s, its original mission and capacities informed the possibilities of urban policy.9 ­Under the military regime, ICT officials defended homeownership in paternalistic and civilizational terms that echoed Rojas’s own variety of pop­u­ lism. They argued that Colombians living in crowded, unhealthy conditions ­were “literally underdeveloped groups,” too ignorant to want anything dif­fer­ ent. Owning ­houses in ICT-­planned communities promised to turn the poor into responsible citizens, teach them to save money, wean them from alcohol, and connect them to priests, teachers, social workers, and state inspectors who would educate and evaluate them. ICT officials presented themselves as ­doing more than creating housing: homeownership was a tool to “forge citizens” and create “a new civilization.” But Rojas did not chiefly aim to build urban housing. The government planned to return mi­grants to the countryside, build new developments ­there, and address the remaining urban settlements as a secondary concern. The challenge was to prevent poor Colombians from re-­ creating “underdevelopment” when they returned home. According to the ICT, ignorant campesinos had caused Colombia’s housing prob­lem by using “primitive” construction methods and disregarding their own health and well-­ being. Only national planning and standardized production by state contractors could deliver decent homes.10 For four years, Rojas’s ICT battled with international advisers who prized homeownership but advocated an alternative approach: aided self-­help housing. This policy had originated in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce during the 1940s u ­ nder the terms of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. That New Deal law,

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the foundation of the country’s twentieth-­century public housing program, made federal money available to local housing authorities, which could use it to buy land and develop low-­income housing. While officials in the continental United States used the funds to build subsidized public apartment buildings, Puerto Rican policy makers deci­ded to turn the poor into homeowners. The idea was to reduce the cost of ­houses to an absolute minimum. The state provided a site, public ser­vices, mortgage loans, construction plans, and super­ vision. But recipients themselves built the ­houses and paid most of the costs associated with their construction.11 In Bogotá during the 1950s, aided self-­help became the cherished ideal of advisers associated with the Inter-­A merican Housing and Planning Center (Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento or CINVA). Created in 1951 and based in the Colombian capital, CINVA was a technical agency of the Organ­ization of American States (OAS), and it trained housing officials throughout the Amer­i­cas. Its founding and original vision owed much to Jacob L. Crane, a veteran of the U.S. Public Housing Administration who had participated in the Puerto Rican proj­ects of the 1940s and coined the term “aided self-­help housing.” In 1947, he had joined the international office of the U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), the orga­nizational pre­de­ces­sor to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Working with State Department officials, Crane collected information on proj­ects worldwide that resembled Puerto Rico’s self-­help initiatives, publicized them through government newsletters and manuals, and convinced the U.S. aid program Point IV to promote self-­help housing policies abroad. By 1954, Point IV formally embraced aided self-­help as “the most promising modern approach to housing prob­lems in underdeveloped areas.”12 CINVA’s allies in Bogotá included U.S. advisers sent by Point IV, who worked inside the ICT and spent four years clamoring for aided self-­help. All of them saw unpaid ­labor and cheap materials as necessities in a tax-­starved, low-­income country. T. Wilson Longmore, a rural sociologist with two de­ cades of experience in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, made the case in 1953. “The prob­lem for the resettled person is how to get the most ­house for the limited amount of money that is available to him,” he wrote to the ­ ere cash poor, they had plenty of ­labor U.S. embassy.13 While campesinos w power, and Longmore argued that this was an underutilized resource for policy makers to mobilize.14 The very idea that unpaid l­abor might compensate for a lack of public investment and individual purchasing power suggested the profound ways in



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 55

which the New Deal became transformed in Puerto Rico and the Third World. ­ reat Depression, the administration of Franklin D. During the pit of the G Roo­se­velt had famously directed public works spending into formal-­sector construction that created paid jobs and boosted consumer demand.15 Housing planners in Colombia drew on entirely dif­fer­ent strands of U.S. and Latin American policy, and fortified them with new technical research. Indeed, advisers from CINVA and Point IV spent the 1950s studying building materials and methods, convinced that cutting the cost of construction was the only ­ ouse the poor. CINVA left its lasting mark on international homeway to h building in 1957 when engineer Raúl Ramírez in­ven­ted the CINVA-­R AM, a hand-­operated press that made bricks from stabilized earth.16 In 1955, Point IV sent five architects and engineers from the University of Illinois Small Homes Council (SHC) to work with the ICT. Founded in 1944, the SHC had originally addressed the housing shortage in the United States, conducting engineering and architectural research to lower the cost of single-­family suburban homes. A de­c ade ­later, it was adapting that experience to serve aided self-­help proj­ects abroad. Mission head Rudard A. Jones and his four colleagues had worked not only in states from Oregon to Florida but also in Brazil, Paraguay, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and El Salvador by the time they arrived in Colombia. This was technical expertise that produced both suburban tract housing in the United States and urban public housing in Latin Amer­i­ca.17 The advocates of aided self-­help or “autoconstruction” regarded it not only as an economic necessity in low-­income countries but as a social good that encouraged community development. Longmore explained to the chief of the National Census that “houses can be built by cooperative (social) action,” and maintained that the pro­cess was “impor­tant to sound f­ amily development and hence to the wellbeing of the Republic.”18 Point IV praised community action “for stimulating or­ga­nized self-­help undertakings through the demo­cratic pro­cess.” Community development and self-­help became linked terms that suggested a natu­ral relationship between two ostensibly distinct issues: on the one hand, mutual aid and demo­cratic decision making among neighbors, and on the other, the mobilization of resources by poor communities in order to reduce the financial demands on national and international sponsors.19 From the perspective of U.S. aid administrators, aided self-­help deliberately and usefully pushed costs onto groups with fewer resources to cover them: foreign governments and, ultimately, poor p ­ eople themselves. “Demonstration proj­ects should have the maximum financial support of the host government and . . . ​make maximum use of ­family or group ­labor,” explained Point IV

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officials in 1955. “The money cost of the proj­ects should be kept at a level sufficiently low to make it pos­si­ble for the owner to repay all or most of this over a reasonable period of years.”20 The U.S. media celebrated self-­help as a foreign aid strategy that asked very ­little of U.S. taxpayers. According to the New York Daily News, the CINVA-­R AM “might be called the Miraculous Building Block Machine”: “It’s a ­simple, hand-­operated dingus. It costs about $30, can be put together by anyone from easily obtainable materials. . . . ​It promises to revolutionize low-­cost housing construction in rural Latin Amer­ i­ca. It ­will cost the US taxpayer peanuts. . . . ​K now any billion-­dollar give­ ese arguments away proj­ect that’s done anything a tenth as useful?”21 Th effectively eliminated public owner­ship and formal-­sector construction as strategies considered in U.S. policy discussions. With ­t hose options off the ­table, cutting the cost of housing through technical innovation became the basic challenge of policy making. So long as Rojas remained in power, aided self-­help housing went ­nowhere.22 But the fall of the dictatorship in 1957 transformed the means and ends of planning, elevating international advisers in policy making circles and binding them to the new National Front government. The newly reconstituted ICT immediately took up the counsel of the SHC, and the National Front developed an exceptionally close relationship with CINVA. Colombia’s first president during the National Front, Alberto Lleras Camargo, had been secretary-­general of the OAS when it established CINVA in 1951, and the center’s location in Bogotá gave it special influence. By 1958, Colombia provided a full 40  ­percent of all government officials enrolled in CINVA courses. For their part, the international experts who taught CINVA’s classes used Colombian neighborhoods as training sites, assigning students from ­every part of the hemi­sphere to plan “urban renewal” proj­ects in Bogotá and Cali.23 CINVA found common ground with the Lleras administration in its embrace of community action. In 1958, the Colombian government established a national program of Acción Comunal that sought to contain popu­lar mobilization by incorporating local communities into national po­liti­c al structures. The government created popularly elected Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community Action Boards, or JACs) in e­ very urban neighborhood and rural subdivision in the country, and funded them through the national bud­ get. JACs embodied the idea of aided self-­help. They provided a formal ave­nue through which Colombians could request assistance from government organs and receive guidance to build their own schools, health clinics, roads, and ­water and sewer lines. The Liberal and Conservative Parties hoped that popu­lar



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 57

participation and infrastructure development would legitimate their return to power and the exclusion of competing po­liti­cal groups. The unpaid ­labor mobilized through Acción Comunal offered a way for a tax-­starved state to fulfill developmentalist expectations. During the early years of the National Front, community action appealed not only to party leaders but also to left-­ wing academics long involved with CINVA, including sociologist Orlando Fals Borda and historian Caroline Ware. The latter, a noted New Dealer, civil rights activist, and consumer advocate, had taught classes at CINVA in 1953, and returned in 1959 as an OAS adviser to the community action initiative. She hailed it as “a pioneering program, not only for the country but for the continent and even the world.”24 By 1959, the Colombian government, CINVA, and U.S. advisers had ­arrived at consensus on the value of aided self-­help housing, and the Lleras administration made it the cornerstone of Colombia’s national housing policy. Si­mul­ta­neously, the National Front abandoned the Rojas regime’s goal of returning displaced persons to the countryside, and took the novel step of orienting national housing policy t­oward the cities. The centerpiece of the government’s housing plan was the massive proj­ect on the outskirts of Bogotá that eventually became Ciudad Kennedy. The ICT designed the proj­ect in 1959, two years before the establishment of the Alliance for Pro­gress, and initially called the development Ciudad Techo, a pun pitched at a very local audience. Techotiba was the name of an indigenous cacique who had once lived on the building site, while in Spanish, techo means roof, and the homeless are destechados. Two years l­ater, when the Alliance for Pro­g ress was launched, the anticommunist National Front represented an ideal Cold War ally, and Ciudad Techo struck the John F. Kennedy administration as a perfect object of U.S. aid. In 1961, the U.S. government approved a loan for construction, and Kennedy visited Colombia to lay the first brick at the housing proj­ect that eventually bore his name. He declared that “the field of Techo is not just another housing site—it is a battlefield.” The success or failure of Colombian public housing would be the mea­sure of “the capacity of demo­cratic government to advance the welfare of its ­people.” Colombians, who almost never see a U.S. president in the flesh, warmly remembered Kennedy’s tour, and four years a­ fter his assassination, the city renamed the housing proj­ect for him.25 Ciudad Kennedy was, in Colombian terms, vivienda de interés social, a phrase with no precise equivalent in En­glish. Commonly translated as “low-­ income” or “low-­cost housing,” it can refer to all sorts of subsidized housing.

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Figure 2.2. Ciudad Techo on December 17, 1961, when John F. Kennedy visited for a cornerstone-­laying ceremony. Cecil Stoughton [Harold Sellers], White House Photo­graphs, JFK Library.

But in a functional sense, the ICT’s proj­ects ­were comparable to public housing in the United States: both represented the most heavi­ly subsidized state-­ sponsored units in the country, designed to serve p ­ eople too poor to qualify for other publicly backed mortgage programs.26 CINVA, U.S. housing advisers, and the Lleras administration had nonetheless made certain that Ciudad Kennedy was, by U.S. standards, hardly public at all. It was a private homeownership program backed by government loans. Among the government’s several systems of housing finance and construction, the most common was auto-­construction: families received fifteen-­year mortgages with no down payments, the exterior shell of a h ­ ouse, and plans and materials that they used to complete the homes on their own. The highest-­end units came with ten-­year mortgages and down payments totaling one-­third of the price of the ­house. In ­those cases, private contractors built and advertised the units, mediating and symbolically obscuring the role of the state. One such developer, ­COVICA, placed the 1962 ad inviting Colombians to “Become Mr. Property Owner.” Although the resident who saved the clipping paid his mortgage to



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 59

the ICT, he described himself and his neighbors as “COVICA recipients.”27 This was a housing policy that was both developmentalist and austere, and that legitimated both the state and private capital as guarantors of social welfare. The planning of Ciudad Kennedy brought into relief the competing political-­economic possibilities latent within Depression-­era policies for economic recovery and re­distribution. The very law that expanded public construction and owner­ship of low-­income housing in the continental United States nurtured private homeownership in Puerto Rico and Colombia. The U.S. government’s characteristic method of implementing social policy through local government produced divergent systems of social welfare provision, and veterans of New Deal housing programs in Puerto Rico forged easy alliances with Colombians, whose own Depression-­era institutions existed to foster small private property owner­ship in the countryside. If U.S. historians ­today regard New Deal homeownership programs as incubators of right-­wing, racist po­liti­cal mobilization that helped to destroy public housing, the unfolding of the New Deal outside the continental United States reveals just how ­little public housing officials themselves did to create ­viable systems of public property in the first place. Policy makers’ embrace of private homeownership owed much to their deep-­seated assumption that they needed to produce as much adequate shelter as pos­si­ble within impossibly tight bud­gets. They ­were economizers in an old-­fashioned sense, accepting state revenue as a fixed, scarce resource and betraying no interest in e­ ither economic re­distribution or economic growth that might channel new funds to the poor. Indeed, the defenders of aided self-­help seemed outsiders to the contagious spirit of their time: the midcentury fasci­ uman welfare and social peace nation with economic growth, the belief that h depended on it, and the conviction that states had the capacity and responsibility to generate it. The industrial, agrarian, and tax reforms of the Alliance for Pro­gress all exemplified that spirit, aiming to raise productivity and increase tax revenues. But as Kennedy himself explained in 1961, national and individual incomes remained extraordinarily limited in the short run, and the Alliance’s social welfare programs had to operate within the logic of austerity. Housing planners in midcentury Latin Amer­i­ca generated a model of social welfare provision that was internally suited just as well to an era of fiscal retrenchment, and that was widely adapted in the neoliberal era.28 The proponents of aided self-­help not only asked very ­little of the state but offered very l­ittle. It never occurred to them to or­ga­nize the pro­cess of

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homebuilding in a way that would expand the national product and tax base. Labor-­intensive technologies and unpaid ­labor itself ­were deliberately inefficient uses of resources, and during the 1960s, economists in both Colombia and the United States began to criticize aided self-­help housing as a drag on growth. Their critique exposed the divergent logics by which competing professional groups aimed to orient midcentury policy making, and the ways that distinct areas of the social sciences seeded dissimilar policy regimes. The planners who advocated aided self-­help ­were not economists but architects, urban planners, engineers, and rural sociologists. Working within poorly financed social agencies of the Third World, they embedded in midcentury development programs lasting strands of policy that resisted the logic of macro­ economic expansion.29 In all of ­these ways, Ciudad Kennedy sat at the crossroads of political-­ economic ­orders and illuminated competing possibilities inherent in midcentury developmentalism. ­Those possibilities multiplied as Bogotanos began arriving in the neighborhood. Indeed, Ciudad Kennedy incubated multiple ­futures not only ­because the New Deal operated through devolution, ­because Colombia’s Depression-­era politics revolved around the use and control of rural private property, or ­because social scientists brought dif­fer­ent logics to policy making. The proj­ect’s internal tensions derived from the Colombian state’s use of community action as a method of governance.

The Uses of Property During the late 1950s, the Colombian and U.S. governments, as well as the OAS, used the image of the private home to convey the promise of cap­i­tal­ist development to Colombians. In 1957, the ICT and CINVA used the CINVA-­R AM to build a model Casa Campesina Inter-­A merica (Inter-­A merican Campesino House) in Bogotá. Ten thousand p ­ eople visited the exhibit.30 During the previous year, the U.S. Information Agency had hired the Advertising Council to ­counter Soviet propaganda highlighting poverty and in­equality in the United States. The Ad Council produced a traveling exhibit called “­People’s Capitalism” that projected a populist image of the U.S. economic system. The exhibit featured a model of a log cabin and a script informing audiences that “this is the way Frontier Americans lived in 1825”: “Abraham Lincoln, like many other pioneer Americans, lived in a log h ­ ouse during his boyhood. In ­those days, all the back-­breaking work was done by men and animals. In



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 61

order just to survive, men and w ­ omen had to work long hours.” The Ad Council juxtaposed the log cabin with a model of a prefabricated suburban home in the 1950s. “This is Edward Barnes and his ­family,” the script went on. “Ed Barnes is a typical American worker—­a steel worker.” According to the exhibit, science, technology, and even foreign investment had increased the productivity of U.S. industry, which had shared its profits with workers to create a ­middle class. In the pres­ent day, U.S. patterns of property owner­ ship had virtually eliminated class divisions. “Nearly ­every American” earned some investment income and a majority of ­people owned their own homes or farms. In the course of U.S. history, the exhibit concluded, “almost every­body became a cap­i­tal­ist.” “­People’s Capitalism,” with its model homes and ham-­ handed script, had its international debut in Bogotá in 1956. Over 235,000 ­people came to see it.31 The two exhibits presented superficially compatible ideals, both proposing to turn Colombians into private homeowners. But the campesino smallholding and the suburban home embodied quite dif­fer­ent conceptions of the purpose of private property and the political-­economic and gender systems into which it might fit. The CINVA-­R AM ­house treated rural h ­ ouse­holds engaged in subsistence production, petty commerce, and wage ­labor as workshops where campesinos and professionals would transform standards of health, education, and productivity. By contrast, the Ad Council explained that Barnes had earned enough as a millwright to move his f­ amily to “a residential community,” a site of leisure beyond the factory gates. Both of t­ hese homes w ­ ere stylized, aspirational ideals, and during the 1960s, neither existed in Ciudad Kennedy—or, for that ­matter, in much of the Colombian countryside or the U.S. suburbs. As it turned out, homebuyers in Ciudad Kennedy insistently used residential property as a source of income and subsistence to complement wages earned at industrial and office jobs outside the home. They formed ­house­holds that quite often looked nothing like nuclear families. ­Ultimately, the onerous financial demands of private homeownership within ICT developments forced Bogotanos to fuse social and economic forms that most social theory of the time associated with distinct historical epochs and political-­economic systems. When Colombians began moving into Ciudad Kennedy in 1962, they knew that homeownership required hard work and resourcefulness. All of the homes in Ciudad Kennedy sat on cheap land far from the city center to minimize costs. In many cases, families lived in and worked on half-­built ­houses for months while waiting for the city to install w ­ ater, electricity, and sewage

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systems. The homes themselves w ­ ere, in the words of one CINVA researcher, “merely unfinished core shelters”: They have silicon block walls, corrugated sheet metal roofs made of pressed asbestos cement, and prefabricated metal win­dows and doors. The foundations are made by filling hand-­dug trenches, about twelve inches wide and twenty inches deep, with large rocks and poured concrete. The floor is pounded earth, and if a ladder to the second floor is not sufficient for the f­ amily, they must build their own stairs. The only finished materials that are provided in the basic unit are the fixtures in the kitchen and in the bathroom.32 Despite the spartan conditions, Ciudad Kennedy appealed to Colombians as a path to owner­ship. “I said to my husband, ‘Dear, I am ­going ­there if I have to live in a cardboard box,’ ” recalls Graciela García de Avendaño. So many Bogotanos solicited housing applications that the ICT had to distribute forms in the downtown bullfighting arena. When applicants arrived at the ICT office to deliver their paperwork, they formed a line that circled the block eight times. Ana Teresa Huertas de Díaz, her husband, Jeremías, and their five c­ hildren did not secure a h ­ ouse in Ciudad Kennedy u ­ ntil 1966. “I gave thanks to God ­because we had the ­house,” she explained forty-­five years ­later. “My oldest ­daughter says the same ­t hing, that ­t hey’ll take us out of the h ­ ouse in a coffin bound for the cemetery, but that we 33 ­won’t sell.” The Colombian government’s inability to build publicly owned, heavi­ly subsidized housing prevented Ciudad Kennedy from serving very poor p ­ eople. The minimum income requirements for ICT mortgage loans disqualified at least half of all Bogotanos, and Ciudad Kennedy therefore became a neighborhood for government employees and skilled workers looking to escape rental housing. It was simply impossible to build ­houses cheaply enough for poor ­people to pay most of the cost themselves. And Ciudad Kennedy was hardly the cheapest variety of aided self-­help housing; indeed, it revealed the ­great variety of settlements that the technique created, and the range of costs involved. The residents of Ciudad Kennedy w ­ ere not in fact using CINVA-­R AM machines to make earthen blocks, but employing labor-­ intensive methods to assem­ble fairly conventional materials.34 And although they spent weekends and holidays building the original core ­houses, the ICT supervised paid construction workers to supplement their efforts during the



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 63

Figure 2.3. Alliance for Pro­gress officials visit Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda to see a model home in Ciudad Kennedy. Patiño, far right, worked as the chauffeur to Milton Drexler, the Alliance for Pro­gress housing adviser in Bogotá during the 1960s. James Fowler, the director of the United States Agency for International Development mission in Colombia, observes in the background. Photo courtesy of Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda and Carmen de Patiño.

workweek. In its materials, cost, and work schedule, Ciudad Kennedy was designed for Bogotanos with well-­paying, formal-­sector jobs.35 It was also designed for ­people with connections. The Díaz ­family received their ­house in 1966 thanks to Jeremías’s job as a police officer; the ICT had earmarked housing for members of the police and military. María Ester Ramírez and her husband worked for the National Registry of Civil Status, and she recalls the 1960s as a time when patronage and clientelism served her ­family well: “Before, for example, to get a job, I would go to a magistrate’s office, or I would go to the President’s office, and I would say, ‘I am so-­and-so, I work in this or that,’ and right ­there they would give me a job. . . . ​Now you ­can’t do that, and I have a ­daughter who works in the presidential ­house!” Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda worked as a driver for the ICT, and during the 1960s, the institute loaned him out to the U.S. embassy. ­There he became the chauffeur for Milton Drexler, a veteran of Puerto Rico’s self-­help housing

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program and the U.S. housing adviser to Colombia u ­ nder the Alliance for Pro­gress. Patiño, his wife, Carmen, and their two c­ hildren would have been unlikely candidates for ICT housing without their relationship to Drexler and the institute, since the application pro­cess gave priority to large families.36 Owning a home in Ciudad Kennedy gave residents more than a place to live. Families used the property to augment their incomes, renting out rooms ­ ouses in violation of ICT rules that forbade the practice. In fact, and entire h the Patiños first moved to Ciudad Kennedy during the early 1960s as illegal renters before qualifying for a mortgage in 1965. Graciela García de Avendañ­o’s husband, an ICT security guard, built three apartments inside their ­house and rented them to other families. The Díazes, living in military housing, covered their mortgage payments by renting out the living room. When María Ester Ramírez and her husband traveled to La Guajira for a work assignment, ­ ouse for use as a store. By the early 1970s, more than a quarter they rented their h ­ ouses, and of homeowners in Ciudad Kennedy rented out rooms or entire h 37 13 ­percent of families lived with ­people unrelated to them. Houses doubled as workplaces and businesses, likewise violating ICT rules that designated the properties as purely residential spaces. In 1966, one-­third of families in Superblock 8-­A took in laundry, operated small workshops, or ran stores out of their homes.38 María Ester Ramírez, in addition to her job in the National Registry of Civil Status, ran an ice cream shop out of her ­house. Alcira Peñuela de Guerrero moved to Ciudad Kennedy as a ten-­year-­ old in 1962, settling in barrio Tequendama. Her f­ ather was a skilled ironworker, and he established a small shop where he taught his sons the trade. Peñuela and her neighbor Aura Morena de Fajardo became part of a group of ­women and ­children who knit sweaters in an old-­fashioned sweated l­ abor operation. A ­woman from the United States whom they knew as Doña Bertha supplied the wool, paid residents by the piece, and then marketed the sweaters. During Tequendama’s first years, only one of Peñuela’s neighbors owned a tele­v i­sion set. He ran a small business of his own, charging neighborhood ­children admission to watch programs, and renting them bicycles to ­ride.39 Growing vegetable gardens, raising livestock, r­ unning businesses, and renting rooms, the residents of Ciudad Kennedy did more than bend their homes to their needs. They suggested a reason that Colombians in postwar cities idealized homeownership. Most observers have regarded that desire as so natu­ral as to require no explanation, but it had clear social and historical roots.40 When the ICT began soliciting applications for Ciudad Kennedy, most Bogotanos had been born in rural areas. While many if not most housing



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recipients ­were already living in the city, the ways that they used residential property recalled the long history of campesino demands for land as a source of income and autonomy.41 That old ideal turned out to be more than a vestigial feature of rural life. It was a necessity of urban existence, sustained and invigorated by the costly proposition of homeownership. Despite the ICT’s efforts to functionally separate urban space, divide home from work, and establish supposedly modern forms of economic and social organ­ization, the demands of private homeownership breathed new life into strategies of survival and social mobility that planners increasingly denigrated as backward.42 When Bogotanos first moved to Ciudad Kennedy, their neighborhoods lacked essential public institutions. Aura Morena de Fajardo walked more than three miles a day to drop her ­children off and pick them up from the private bus line that took them to their old school in the center of Bogotá. “I did third grade in the living room,” recalls Alcira Peñuela. “­Every ­family made a room available, and ­every room had a class. A [public school] teacher would come, teach the class, and leave.” As ser­vices became available during the 1960s and 1970s, ­these families eagerly took advantage of them. To this day, they speak highly of the governments of Alberto Lleras Camargo and John F. Kennedy, and praise the local schools, police, and other state institutions in their ­communities. Morena took classes in doll making, painting, and crafts at the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA), which enabled her to become a vendor selling stuffed animals and dolls. Carmen de Patiño enrolled in secretarial courses at SENA in order to get a job with the ICT in 1974. Peñuela recalls buying groceries from a truck sent by the Instituto Nacional de Abastecimientos before supermarkets opened in Ciudad Kennedy. Both she and the Díazes’ ­daughter Elizabeth Torres fondly remember meals at the John F. Kennedy School, whose cafeteria was open to the public and served “a delicious lunch.”43 ­These homeowners developed the identification with the state that the ­advocates of self-­help housing hoped to inculcate in them. They also came to identify with one another. The experience of auto-­construction forged lasting ties between ­people who shared nothing in par­tic­u­lar but their income levels, va­ri­e­ties of employment, and age. “We all cooperated to build the ­houses,” explains María Ester Ramírez. In barrio Tequendama, Peñuela recalls that ­after the early days of construction, “­there was a lottery to distribute the yards, ­because that w ­ asn’t closed in. Th ­ ere was just one yard for twenty-­five ­families. . . . ​We ­were a single group of p ­ eople.” Peñuela married one of her neighbors; she and Morena list other marriages within the neighborhood,

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and note that “the Gómezes are married to all of the block.” The c­ hildren in Peñuela’s generation created what she describes as a joint savings fund, made up of equal monthly deposits from each person; they divide the earnings equally among them ­every December. Within and beyond barrio Tequendama, all of ­these residents vividly remember weekends spent working collectively on their homes. They describe local stores selling to them on credit when they lacked cash, and they insist that ­there was no crime whatsoever in Ciudad Kennedy during much of the 1960s.44 Idyllic memories of Ciudad Kennedy’s early years are dubious history. By 1964, residents w ­ ere in fact writing directly to the president to report crime and demand local police forces.45 ­These stories are not unvarnished truth, but rather fascinating evidence of class formation that took place in Kennedy’s superblocks. By the mid-1970s, most ICT recipients in Ciudad Kennedy identified themselves as “­middle class,” and de­cades ­later, they universally describe the trajectory of the neighborhood in terms of decline and insecurity. Ciudad Kennedy experienced the array of prob­lems during the 1970s and 1980s that other areas of Bogotá did: residents recount muggings, murders, and drug dealing on their streets. Their understanding of ­these events is colored by the origins of their neighborhoods as socially segregated communities. The 1970s saw the growth of new neighborhoods around the original ICT developments, including both formal settlements and informal ones launched by ­people too poor to qualify for ICT housing. “­There are drug addicts around ­here,” says Ana Teresa Huertas de Díaz, describing her neighborhood in 2011. “I go to the police gymnasium, and the comandante gets us together ­there so that we can serve as in­for­mant guides.” Morena recounts the growth of poorer, illegal neighborhoods during the 1970s and says that her block now experiences “terrible insecurity.” For ­t hese residents, class segregation is remembered as security, community, and well-­being.46 For ­these homeowners, the identifications forged in Kennedy’s neighborhoods went hand in hand with a tightly constrained sense of social solidarity. “Thank God ­unions ­were never formed ­here,” exclaims Clímaco Patiño. His neighbors concur: they ­were not ­union members, and they do not consider ­unions to have had any significant influence among the p ­ eople they knew. By the 1980s, Juntas de Acción Comunal in the neighborhoods of Cuatro Puntas, Pío XII, and Las Américas ­were organ­izing to expel poor Bogotanos who had begun squatting in public parks. JAC leader José Elías Calderón Cabrera recalled the effort with pride in 1998. “I’m pleased ­because that green space, which was almost a zone of disposables [a derogatory term for the poor], almost



Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Amer­i­cas 67

Figure 2.4. Bogotá during the early 1980s. Alan Gilbert and Peter M. Ward, Housing, the State, and the Poor: Policy and Practice in Three Latin American Cities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 63.

a garbage dump—it is a g­ reat satisfaction to me to see how it is t­oday.” José de la Cruz Acevedo Hurtado explained that his neighborhood junta had mobilized with police, city authorities, and Acción Comunal against “black ­people” whom he considered a source of crime and vio­lence.47 Living in Ciudad Kennedy gave thousands of public-­sector employees and skilled workers access to property owner­ship, state ser­vices, and forms of income, credit, and investment. In at least some cases, the experience also taught them to fear and despise the poor, and they in turn became objects of envy and resentment by both po­liti­cal radicals and mainstream development theorists. Almost from the start, Provivienda denounced Ciudad Kennedy as an ­example of the government’s clientelism and disregard for the poor. In 1972, Martín Reig of the National University denigrated ICT housing as “a

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magnificent business” for residents but “a bad business” for “The Nation.” Throughout the 1960s, Lauchlin Currie, an erstwhile New Deal economist, lambasted self-­help as an engine of in­equality and an impediment to economic growth. As community action boards cleared squatters out of Ciudad Kennedy during the 1980s, geographers Alan Gilbert and Peter M. Ward saw the perversity of a program that had made miserly promises in order to reach the poor, and then failed to reach them at all: “It is a sad situation to say that if poverty forces p ­ eople to build their own h ­ ouses, many h ­ ouse­holds are too poor to do even that.” Ciudad Kennedy generated the kinds of inequalities, social animosities, and po­liti­cal conflicts that Rojas and the National Front had set out to defuse, or at least to po­liti­cally neutralize.48 In 1961, when the Kennedy administration had begun making plans for the Alliance for Pro­gress, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously advised the president that Latin Amer­i­ca needed a “middle-­class revolution” or it would face a “workers-­and-­peasants” revolution. Ciudad Kennedy certainly encouraged the pro­cess of middle-­class formation that Schlesinger had envisioned, transforming the fortunes and solidarities of a thin stratum of working-­class Bogotanos.49 But the cultivation of a self-­identified, home-­owning ­middle class was hardly the ­simple, stabilizing phenomenon that Schlesinger had ­imagined. Not only did it breed conflict, but the social relationships and economic practices that emerged in Ciudad Kennedy never conformed to planners’ expectations, themselves based on mythological views of the First World. Residents survived by combining skilled, formal-­sector employment outside the home with subsistence production, informal work, and small-­scale proprietorship in the home. Paid and unpaid ­labor by ­women and ­children made ends meet, and “overcrowding” generated the illicit rental income necessary to cover mortgage payments. In Aura Morena’s ­family, a wife’s informal earnings from knitting sweaters w ­ ere precisely what made the home conform to the image of modern domesticity, a place where a husband joined his ­family ­after work to watch tele­vi­sion: I remember that my husband used to arrive home and the distraction was to go out to the IRIS theater. . . . ​I would say, “Where is he ­going ­every day?” He said, “But what am I ­doing h ­ ere sitting like an idiot?” and would leave. So, one day a man came in a car advertising tele­vi­sions with no downpayment. . . . ​I got the tele­­vi­sion, and when Pedro got home at 5 p.m., he said . . . ​“Where did that tele­vi­sion come from? ­You’re ­going to pay for it.” . . . ​I



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said, “Leave it t­ here. I’ll watch it. I’ll pay for it.” ­Later, he stopped being angry and would come home to watch the telenovela and ­wouldn’t go out. And I told him: now you see, now you get it.50 The m ­ iddle class emerging in Ciudad Kennedy confused and disappointed planners ­because the modern home could not cease to be a site of commerce and ­labor.51

A Midcentury Crossroads For every­one involved in creating Ciudad Kennedy, private homeownership represented an instrument of political-­economic order. Over the course of a de­cade, the homes came to exemplify the varied promises that private residential property made to midcentury Americans, and tensions endemic to the mixed economy. Ciudad Kennedy lay bare the divergent possibilities latent in Depression-­ era social policies, which became pronounced u ­ nder the fiscal and ideological constraints of the Alliance for Pro­gress. Its internal complexity owed not only to the nature of the New Deal and Revolución en Marcha but also to the Colombian government’s use of community action as a method of governance. Indeed, the proj­ect’s origin as an instrument of governance, its value to a state in crisis, and its monumental scale and princi­ples of spatial organ­ization all recall the spirit of high modernism that James C. Scott finds in Brasilia. Yet Scott’s depiction of government-­built apartments destroying popu­lar ideals of order and sociability fails to account for the life that developed within Ciudad Kennedy’s superblocks. The National Front’s reliance on community action constrained popu­lar mobilization but made Ciudad Kennedy a product of vernacular knowledge and an object of political-­economic visions beyond ­those of its planners. Where Scott sees a stultifying planned city spawning an illegal, unplanned city around its edges, Ciudad Kennedy combined both formations in the same place.52 Ciudad Kennedy exemplified a variety of low modernism, but it defied any romantic expectations implied by the term. Community action, native materials, and local knowledge appealed to governments that lacked the resources necessary to provide for social welfare in any other way. When used to accommodate austere bud­gets, ­these strategies could be both eco­nom­ically exploitative and incapable of serving the poor. Po­liti­cally, they could

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­incorporate citizens into a ­great variety of ­orders, including the deeply compromised democracy of the National Front. Community development and community action constituted some of the most promiscuous policies of the twentieth c­ entury, crossing political-­economic systems and historical eras, exhibiting no affinity for any par­tic­u­lar order.53 In Ciudad Kennedy, low modernism did not produce social justice, but it did nurture strategies of economic survival that defied the categories of rural tradition and urban modernity. Requiring residents to build and pay for private homes brought skilled workers and public-­sector employees into the neighborhood, and si­mul­ta­neously forced them to live in nonnuclear families and use residential property for productive and commercial purposes. The private home became a source of income and autonomy, a site of l­abor and leisure, a link between formal and informal sectors, a foundation of po­ liti­c al citizenship, and an incubator of middle-­class consciousness. Dipesh Chakrabarty, James Ferguson, Janice Perlman, and other critics of midcentury social thought have demonstrated the ubiquity of such hybrid and internally varied social forms. And they have suggested the value of imagining historical change not as the pro­gress of modernization but as a pro­cess by which one constellation of ideas and practices gives way to another. In that spirit, to what global historical pro­cesses did Ciudad Kennedy belong? One was unquestionably the rise and fall of welfare and developmentalist states from the 1930s to the 1980s. The competing tendencies within Ciudad Kennedy suggest that midcentury social policy generated ideas and practices that could eventually unsettle the welfare state itself. The use of community action to compensate for austere social spending, the reliance on private initiative and property owner­ship to fulfill social needs, and the association of private property with demo­cratic decision making and community building ­were as indispensable to constructing a welfare state in mixed economies as they ­were to dismantling it. Ciudad Kennedy exemplified typical tensions in postwar social welfare provision: self-­help housing circled the globe in the years ­after 1945, making the contradictions of Colombian statecraft exemplary rather than exceptional. In this corner of the Amer­i­cas and beyond, the challenge awaiting historians is to explain the mechanisms by which midcentury practices and ideals became selectively appropriated and redeployed for dif­fer­ent purposes during the late twentieth ­century. Ciudad Kennedy does not belong to the my­thol­ogy of midcentury social theory, but it might belong to a new history of the making and unmaking of welfare and developmentalist states.54

chapter 3

Building the Alliance for Pro­gress Local and Transnational Encounters in a Low-­Income Housing Program in Rio de Janeiro, 1962–67 Lea n dro B en mergu i

On Friday, August 17, 1962, the governor of the State of Guanabara, Carlos Lacerda, escorted Teodoro Moscoso, the U.S. coordinator for the Alliance for Pro­gress, and Lincoln Gordon, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, on a visit to the ­ nder construction in construction site of Vila Aliança.1 A housing development u suburban Rio de Janeiro, this housing program was intended to showcase an efficient and technocratic administration with private homeownership for ­those favela residents that could afford it—­this at a time when the favela population accounted for almost one-­fifth of Rio’s total population. For many reasons, the visit was momentous: the event coincided with the first anniversary of the signing of the Alliance for Pro­gress charter and Moscoso’s official mission to Brazil. President John F. Kennedy had launched the alliance in 1961 to promote social reform in Latin Amer­i­ca and to combat an alleged communist expansion in the region a­ fter the Cuban Revolution (1959). The local government of the State of Guanabara had made use of the opportunities created by Kennedy’s overtures, dramatically restructuring urban space in Rio in concert with bilateral and multilateral development agencies based in the United States. Vila Aliança was part of a broader effort that included the construction of a total of almost 15,000 units distributed in Vila Aliança (2,187

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units), Vila Kennedy (formerly Vila Progresso; 5,069 units), Vila Esperança (464 units), and the initial stage of Cidade de Deus (originally 6,658). Both concretely and symbolically, ­these vilas bound together the United States and Guanabara in a hybrid built form.2 That morning, the official del­e­ga­tion led by Lacerda first visited the Favela de Bom Jesús, located in Botafogo, a middle-­class neighborhood in South Rio, where 465 families ­were to be relocated in Vila Aliança. Speaking in front of the school, Governor Lacerda introduced the distinguished visitors as “friends ­ ere leaders of a program “to help t­ hose who help themselves.”3 of Brazil” who w When the official del­e­ga­tion left the favela to visit the construction site of Vila Aliança, however, favela residents “expressed only objections and doubts” about the governor’s slum clearance and relocation program, according to New York Times reporter Juan de Onís. The events of that morning in Bom Jesús illustrated the dissonance between the harsh real­ity of favela life and the official rhe­toric that praised the commitment of the Alliance for Pro­gress to assist poor Brazilians through self-­help. When ­later that day reporters asked Moscoso about his reaction to the complaints of Bom Jesús’ residents, he belittled them, arguing that he had encountered similar anx­i­eties when he was the executive director of the Puerto Rican Housing Authority, an appointment he had held before becoming the head of Operation Bootstrap, the program for the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico. Moscoso believed poor ­people’s complaints “had been overcome in Puerto Rico and would be overcome ­here with hard work and po­liti­cal leadership.”4 Puerto Rico had been the laboratory of aided self-­help programs undertaken ­under the guidance of U.S. housing experts linked to the New Deal ­ ere part of state-­ since the 1940s.5 For Moscoso, urban and housing programs w led planning to transform agrarian socie­ties into industrial ones.6 By the 1960s, the Puerto Rican experience had become a centerpiece in the trans­ nationalization of Pan-­A merican developmental policies, including key urban planning and housing components. Moscoso connected state-­led interventions into the spatial, social, and po­ liti­cal configurations of Rio’s favelas with past experiences in social reform in Puerto Rico. Urban renewal and low-­income housing programs in Rio ­were not mere local, short-­term po­liti­cal attempts by the Lacerda administration to palliate the dramatic shortages of affordable housing or a move to stimulate the construction industry and the real estate sector, as the historiography ­ ere also part of a uniquely postwar transnational urbanhas argued.7 They w ism that included a space for experts and policy makers across the Amer­i­cas



Building the Alliance for Pro­gress 73

to intensely debate the role of housing and the built environment in modernizing the habits of the urban poor. This transnational urbanism emerged from and was embedded in Cold War power relations. The U.S. del­e­ga­tion’s support for a pro-­A merican governor’s housing policy in Bom Jesús and Vila Aliança reveals the connections between slum eradication, the construction of low-­cost dwellings, and international relations. In the po­liti­cal context of Brazil in 1962, U.S. assistance to right-­of-­center Lacerda counteracted the populist and leftist administration of Brazilian president João Goulart, whom U.S. cold warriors held in high suspicion of communist tendencies. The favela of Bom Jesús was no stranger to this explosive po­liti­c al scenario, at least in American eyes. According ­ ere connected with Leonel to the New York Times, “outside agitators” w Brizola, “an out­spoken ­enemy of the Alliance for Pro­g ress,” whose po­liti­c al influence among Rio’s favela residents was strong enough to influence the upcoming congressional elections scheduled for October 1962.8 Brizola was the nationalist and populist governor of Rio Grande do Sul, a po­liti­cally influential state, and a strong supporter of Getúlio Vargas, an overwhelming force in Brazilian politics (Vargas was president between 1930 and 1937, dictator from 1937 to 1945, and demo­cratic president from 1950 to 1954). Given the recent Cuban Revolution, the United States feared Goulart and Brizola would convert Brazil to communism. U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk also worried that local social and po­liti­c al conflicts ­under Governor Lacerda might be symptomatic of larger insurgencies in the nation as a ­whole. Housing, therefore, was not only a m ­ atter of physical and social development. In the minds of local and foreign experts at the height of the Cold War, new residential arrangements and an emphasis on homeownership could contribute to the integration of so-­c alled marginal p ­ eople (mostly ­recent rural mi­grants) into a consumer society and moderate politics, contributing to the formation of a new civil society. Foreign assistance in social welfare and the provision of modern shelter for poor p ­ eople became foundational ele­ments for social peace and stability in the region. In this way, housing policy came to play a critical role in larger transnational cir­cuits of knowledge, expertise, and capital. It brought together deeply contested pro­ cesses of modernization and formalization of urban poverty with equally power­ful populist impulses. Questions of state power, international Cold War security, and ­human rights became part of the living rooms, the roofs, and the walls of the everyday shelter of poor ­people in Rio.

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The character and scale of t­ hese debates distinguished this historical moment from prior movements to better ­house the urban poor. As Adrián Gorelik has pointed out, the “Latin American City” became a trope from the 1940s to the 1970s, an object of the technical, scientific, and po­liti­cal imagination of scholars, experts, and government officials who claimed a regional set of urban prob­lems in order to act on them.9 The vibrant recent scholarship on transnational urbanism has shown the extent to which scholars from vari­ous disciplines, technical cadres, con­sul­tants, and policy makers (the rule of experts) traveled across the Amer­i­cas and circulated in professional and academic conferences, in business or diplomatic meetings, in universities, in multinational organ­izations, and even on construction sites.10 In so ­doing, they situated the prob­lem of housing as a key component of a larger prob­lem of modernization in Latin Amer­i­ca. Thus a historical approach to the question of transnational urbanism allows us to link housing for the working class with the history of development. Rather than taking the highly technical (“neutral” and “value-­free”) language of the era at face value, we look at the historical way in which sociologists, po­liti­c al scientists, bankers, architects, social workers, urban planners, and policy makers tried to make sense of rapid social transformations in a moment of strong expectations about the role of the state in shaping ­people’s lives. By connecting the provision of low-­ cost housing to the policies of modern statehood, historians can look at the ways spaces of urban poverty and the formulation of housing solutions w ­ ere part of a contested language of development and modernization in the Amer­i­cas. This contestation happened in the context of dramatic social transformations in the region, most especially the massive movements of ­people from the rural countryside to urban centers. As cities grew, the working class responded to the lack of affordable housing with land invasions, precarious settlements, and overcrowded dwellings. The expansion of the informal city emerged as one of the disparate and unequal characteristics of urban growth in Latin Amer­i­ca driven by industrialization, the expansion of the ser­vice sector, and increasing middle-­class consumption. Social mobility led to the growth and densification of middle-­class neighborhoods, the construction of spaces of ­leisure and consumption, and the modernization of the urban infrastructure. But the expansion of slums and substandard housing made vis­i­ble the increasing degree of social in­equality, poverty, and spatial segregation. For the residents of the formal city, informality represented not only a social and economic prob­lem but also a po­liti­cal one. It was from working-­class neighborhoods and slums in the margins and interstices of the city that residents began to push



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the limits of social inclusion and po­liti­cal participation. The living conditions ­ atter of social and of the working class and the urban poor thus became a m po­liti­cal concern for the ­middle classes, government officials, and increasingly influential technical experts. Broadly speaking, urban renewal, slum clearance and rehabilitation programs, the construction of affordable housing, and the ­ ere part of the debates and the public policy formation of mortgage markets w agenda of almost ­every major Latin American city in the postwar de­cades. Rio’s housing history can be understood, then, as representative of, and, in many cases, the spearhead of, larger regional changes. The Guanabara Housing Program was one of the first low-­income housing developments in Brazil to benefit from technical and economic aid from the United States. The lit­er­ a­ture on Rio’s urban social and spatial reconfiguration in the early 1960s has predominantly focused on local and national f­ actors to explain its urban policies. Scholars paid close attention to the role of the governor’s presidential aspirations, technocratic administrative style, and connections with conservative po­liti­cal sectors, the construction industry, and real estate interests in shaping his urban agenda.11 In ­these accounts, the transnational connections with other social experiences and housing programs in the region are missing, although many of the institutional and financial actors involved in Rio ­were directly or indirectly involved in other proj­ects in dif­fer­ent cities of the region. Kennedy neighborhoods, for instance, w ­ ere built in almost ­every Latin American city in the 1960s and 1970s. In the case of the Guanabara Housing Program, scholars usually took for granted the involvement of the United States, denouncing or downplaying its influence. Consequently, U.S. involvement has not yet been thoroughly analyzed. Building on the insights of the recent lit­er­a­ture into the history of postwar urbanism, I seek to understand the interplay between local and national forces and the transnational formation of ideas and expertise with regard to the role of housing in modernizing socie­ties in the global south. Implicated are the histories of mortgage markets and savings and loans socie­ties; the organ­ization of housing agencies; and debates about adequate urban designs and spreading notions of bourgeois domesticity. Ultimately, I argue that the Guanabara Housing Program served as a “contact zone” for global and local actors formulating competing languages and practices of development and modernization. Rather than working within a binary of outside imposition and local re­sis­tance, the concept of a contact zone allows for a more complex understanding of the transnational as a space of negotiation and contestation—­a pro­c ess by which ­people, ideas, and ­policies are constantly redefined through encounters. “Contact zones” are, as

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Gilbert Joseph pointed out, borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt, “sites of transculturation.”12 Within this framework, a local low-­income housing pro­ j­ect financed by the United States is part of broader transnational connections in a context of local and national po­liti­cal strife and hemispheric Cold War anx­i­eties in the 1960s.

Building a Brazilian Housing Crisis For two centuries Rio de Janeiro was the po­liti­cal center of Brazil u ­ nder Portuguese rule (1763–1821), the Brazilian empire (1822–89), and for most of the republican period (1889–1960). In 1960, the city lost its status as the capital of the nation when Brasilia, the modernist symbol of the country’s new era of development and pro­gress, was inaugurated in April. By then, Rio was an extended metropolis facing new challenges as a result of population growth, inadequate urban infrastructure, and lack of comprehensive planning; it was a city marked by social conflict and po­liti­cal instability. Rio’s most dramatic transformation was demographic: the urban population more than doubled between 1940 and 1970, from 1.76 million to 4.2 million, a growth over 3 ­percent a year between 1940 and 1960.13 The decline in mortality rates, the improvement of life expectancy, and massive rural-­to-­urban migration (39 million ­people from rural areas to urban centers in Brazil between 1950 and 1970) explain such expansion. Poor mi­grants ­were pushed out of interior and neighboring states by the stagnation of the rural sector, droughts, and a regressive land tenure structure. Eco­nom­ically speaking, the onset of heavy industrialization in and around the city of São Paulo imposed a serious res­triction on Rio’s own industrial development, whose participation in the national industrial production declined from 15.16  ­percent to 9.66  ­percent between 1950 and 1960. Rio remained competitive in the production of consumer basics, textiles, and food, as well as financial ser­vices, whereas heavy industrialization concentrated in the industrial parks of São Paulo and the centers of raw-­material extraction in other Brazilian states.14 Still, immigrants kept arriving in Rio, pulled by the growth of the ser­vice, commerce, and public sectors, as well as the material improvement that the working class obtained during the Vargas administrations.15 While still the country’s second industrial city, Rio’s productivity could not absorb the growing number of workers who moved to the ser­vice and informal sectors and also swelled the ranks of the unemployed.



Building the Alliance for Pro­gress 77

Rio faced serious infrastructural prob­lems as demographic growth and middle-­class consumption imposed tremendous pressure on the city. Horizontal and vertical expansion had increased since the 1940s. Social mobility, ­especially in the ­middle classes, spurred the growth of the neighborhoods of Zone Sul (the southern zone of Rio), almost saturating the density of Copacabana, and expanding ­toward the coveted beaches of Ipanema, Leblón, Gávea, and, slower, Barra da Tijuca.16 The expansion of sewage and ­water ser­vices, garbage collection, schools, and hospitals required serious investments. The proliferation of cars and buses (themselves the result of a boom in automobile production and consumption) overwhelmed a city whose intricate geography demanded major public works, including tunnels to cut across the hills, overpasses, and highways to reduce distances and commuting times, especially between the city’s south and north zones.17 Construction, domestic work, and multiple forms of informal employment provided jobs for new contingents of mi­grants, increasing the need for housing close to workplaces. The lack of affordable housing led to the overcrowding of tenement and flop­houses in the city’s downtown. In Rio’s south zone, favelas expanded quickly on public and private lands, in the steep hills or in illegal subdivisions negotiated through an informal housing market. Favelas spread also in the interstices of the city and into the suburbs to the north in swamplands or on the margins of rivers. ­Here lived the workers of the industries localized in the north zone and ­those who lived in the satellite cities outside the city’s limits but inside the metropolitan area, thanks to the expansion of the railroad system. Between 1940 and 1950, the population of four satellite cities in Rio’s suburbs grew in some cases to almost twice their original size.18 The number of favela residents grew almost threefold from 1950 to 1970 (from more than 169,305 in 1950 to a ­little more than half a million in 1970). By the mid-­twentieth ­century, favelas had become a permanent feature of Rio’s landscape, a pro­cess vis­i­ble in almost e­ very industrializing urban center in Latin Amer­i­ca at that time. Favelas connected directly with local and national politics. Always vulnerable to eviction and police repression, their existence depended in g­ reat degree on their residents’ ability (or that of their leaders) to navigate networks of state patronage.19 Municipal authorities during the Vargas era embarked on urban reforms and policies that expanded po­liti­cal clientelism, even when elections ­were banned during the dictatorial period (1937–44). Po­liti­cal participation increased with the return of demo­cratic elections in 1945, even when illiterate residents did not qualify for suffrage. The Brazilian Communist Party

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received strong support among workers for the election for the local council—­ one of the reasons why it was again banned in 1947. Participation, however, did not translate into higher po­liti­cal autonomy for poor urban residents or a decisive solution to the illegality of favelas: given Rio’s status as the nation’s capital, its authorities w ­ ere appointed by the federal government and not by local constituencies. With the transference of the capital to Brasilia in 1960, and ­after much debate, the city of Rio became the state of Guanabara, a city-­state with the same administrative status as any of the other states of Brazil.20 For the first time, cariocas (the residents of Rio) had the chance to elect a governor and a legislative body that would be accountable to them.21 Lacerda became the first governor of Guanabara, and during his tenure Rio was to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary. From the beginning of his administration, the governor ­adopted a new po­liti­cal and administrative style that emphasized “modern,” “efficient,” and technocratic management to deliver his ambitious program. His agenda included the construction of infrastructure including tunnels, overpasses, and roadways, as well as housing and schools, and the monumental expansion of the sewage and ­water system. To accomplish ­these reforms, Lacerda decentralized local administration to guarantee orga­ nizational autonomy in the decision-­making pro­cess. He also created autarchic agencies charged with urban renewal, and divided the city into administrative regions instead of traditional municipal wards. For Lacerda, the administration of Rio was a platform to launch his presidential candidacy.22 As governor of a po­liti­cally and symbolically power­ful state, Lacerda aspired to appear an effective and accomplished deliverer—­one who could take Brazil away from the populist practices of the past, especially that pop­u­lism associated with Vargas. Lacerda projected the idea that good governance was about expertise and technical knowledge. But he was also a politician well versed in the po­liti­cal culture of Brazil. His po­liti­cal reform sought to rearrange loyalties at the local level by directly appointing his own administrators rather than dealing with the local ward bosses. Favelas ­were central to Lacerda’s concerns early in his c­ areer as a journalist and ­later as a politician. In a series of columns he wrote in 1948 for the newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa, Lacerda denounced the manipulation and perpetuation of misery and desperation among favela residents by local bosses and national politicians who responded to Vargas. Lacerda called for social action as a social duty to “rescue” slum residents from the “pernicious” influence of populist leaders and agitators of “foreign ideologies.” In t­ hose pieces,



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Lacerda’s paternalistic depictions of passive, manipulated favela residents echoed middle-­class and conservative sectors’ anx­i­eties about the po­liti­cal role of the working class in the return of democracy. By the early 1960s, favelas came to be seen as the result of social and ­economic disparities in Brazil and the prob­lem of poverty became a highly contentious issue in the context of po­liti­c al instability and increasing radicalization.23 President Goulart’s administration (1961–64) sought a large-­scale transformation of Brazilian society, including agrarian reform and the nationalization of foreign corporations. For the opposition, including sectors of the military, conservatives, and entrepreneurial sectors linked to foreign capital, Goulart represented a communist threat.

Recruiting Foreign Housing Aid In a Cold War context in which the specter of the Cuban Revolution tainted everyday politics, the U.S. government followed Brazilian politics with alarm. Lacerda was aware of ­these concerns and crafted his po­liti­cal image for both domestic and international audiences. A successful government in Guanabara meant a launching platform for a presidential candidacy for the upcoming national election set for 1965 (which never happened b­ ecause a military coup canceled elections and established a dictatorship that lasted ­until 1985). Decisive and vis­i­ble action in favelas would be showcased nationally and inter­ nationally and confirm the governor’s long-­standing position against the politics of patronage, presenting him as a champion of private enterprise and modernization—­precisely the kind of leadership attuned to the geo­ po­liti­cal interests of the U.S. State Department. A skilled politician, Lacerda nourished anx­i­eties about communism and characterized social protest, especially in working-­class neighborhoods, as attacks on the city. This strategy allowed the governor to pres­ent himself as the only pos­si­ble guarantor of order. Fear mongering was not mere po­liti­cal artillery; it emerged as a result of the turbulent po­liti­cal times and the social turmoil of the early 1960s. The life of poor urban residents was marked by economic instability, inflation, production decline, food shortages, a lack of substantive changes in the housing market, and repressive eradications. The strong support that favela residents gave to Brizola, Lacerda’s po­liti­cal opponent and potential presidential competitor in local elections, and the less spectacular but consistent work of the Brazilian Left contributed to the po­liti­cal

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organ­ization of many favelas, which led to the formation of the first federation of favela associations by 1963 and or­ga­nized re­sis­tance to eradications. The local government was conscious of the potential po­liti­cal threat in such living conditions. By 1962, Lacerda launched a plan for the construction of five markets to be built with U.S. funds in strategic working-­class suburban areas. ­These markets would reduce the real threat of food riots as a consequence of inflation and supply shortages. According to the government, The sense of justice and solidarity of governments and elites to the lower classes has been further pressured by the collective consciousness of the masses, which are beginning to agitate, fermented by the eternal profiteers of times of crisis, the propagandists of the far left. The communist agitators, before the dramatic supply crisis situation . . . ​, foster intense propaganda and, finding a favorable climate of righ­teous anguish and despair, lead the masses to demonstrations disrespectful of the authorities and the subversion of order, endangering our own demo­cratic institutions that support our social system.24 Supermarkets built with U.S. aid and stocked with government-­controlled food supplies brought together local, national, and international interests with potentially long-­lasting ramifications. The relationship with the United States was central for Lacerda, and he cultivated it carefully. His well-­k nown sympathies for the United States, his reputation as an ­enemy of Vargas and his legacy, and his fierce anticommunism made Lacerda a model Cold War politician for the Kennedy administration. The United States saw Lacerda as a reliable ally and a palatable presidential candidate. In a tele­gram to U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-­A merican affairs Thomas Mann, U.S. ambassador in Brazil Gordon described the governor as “one anti-­commie. One of ablest in country. Brilliant. . . . ​Good administrator. Would make good President—­under attack for being pro-­A merican.” The potential po­liti­cal liabilities of the close ties between the governor and the United States prompted Gordon to be cautious of “so obvious a public relationship as to make him appear a favorite son of U.S.”25 Lacerda himself framed his urban and housing policies as po­liti­cal tools to both stimulate the economy and contain social tensions in a personal meeting with President Kennedy during a trip to New York and Washington,



Building the Alliance for Pro­gress 81

D.C., to negotiate loans for his public works program with the Inter-­A merican Development Bank (IDB; established 1959) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in March 1962.26 The governor let Kennedy know “my state is, and could be even more so, the showcase for demo­ cratic pro­gress in Brazil. It is the main center of the Communist effort. Powder ­ ere operating] but may lie in the Northeast of Brazil [where armed guerrillas w the wick is in Rio.”27 In this way, Lacerda presented himself as a reliable executive, astute anticommunist, and accomplished leader who could lead Brazil into a course of development in line with U.S. interests and values. Lacerda repeatedly invoked housing as evidence of his competence. In cultivating the relationship with the White House and capitalizing on his access to U.S. officials, Lacerda established a preferential relationship that ultimately allowed the arrival of U.S. loans and technical assistance directly from USAID to Guanabara, bypassing the control of the federal administration. In lending to a governor, USAID broke with pre­ce­dent and waived the requirement of considering only proposals that ­were part of a comprehensive national development plan submitted by a national government. U.S. geopolitics in the region w ­ ere thus as much about social programs, including housing, as they ­were about traditional diplomacy. The initial focus of Lacerda’s housing policy during the first two years of his administration was aided self-­help. He appointed sociologist José Arthur Rios, a known figure among favelados during the previous municipal administration, as director of the Department of Social Ser­vices. For Rios, the solution to the favela prob­lem required the joint effort of local governments and favela residents, which he helped to or­ga­nize into neighborhood associations. For the first time, the local administration officially recognized favelas and their organ­izations and sought the empowerment of its residents by promoting aided self-­help, or mutirão (joint-­effort), proj­ects. The residents determined their needs and priorities, and contributed with ­labor (including personal skills and abilities) while the local government provided technical advice, guidance, and materials to solve specific needs (for example, the pavement of streets, construction of trash disposals, installation of stairs on steep hills, opening of ­water faucets, opening of nurseries, or creation of soccer fields). In this way, residents carried the weight of reform and associations focused on immediate rather than structural ­causes of poverty in the favelas. Rios’s expertise in urban poverty—­particularly in the favelas—­made him a respected figure among colleagues and favela residents alike. The sociologist’s professional and intellectual biography shows the intricate ways in which

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transnational flows of ideas and experiences came to frame his policies ­toward favelas. Rios was emblematic of a new cohort of Latin American social scientists and scholars (including economists and po­liti­cal scientists) interested in understanding the structural transformations of Latin American socie­ties. This cadre of scholars and experts conducted their first social surveys and fieldwork in many Latin American favelas, and it was common to see them sharing their results in conferences and meetings across the hemi­sphere, including the United States.28 The construction of housing for the poor as a prob­lem of policy was intimately connected with social sciences and was part of the same transnational pro­cess. The case of Rios suggests that the flow of ideas was not reduced exclusively to north-­south exchanges but also included Eu­rope by way of the “under­ developed” and decolonizing world through a combination of modernization theory and Catholic social reformism concurrent with the Second Vatican Concilium.29 Rios was profoundly s­ haped by his intellectual and working relationship with French Dominican f­ ather Louis-­Joseph Lebret and his movement Économie et Humanisme—­a movement deeply committed to aiding the poor in rural and urban developing countries. Lebret actually commissioned Rios to work on a comprehensive so­cio­log­i­cal study of Rio’s favelas. This work became a foundational study that s­ haped a generation of scholars and policy makers working in favelas.30 ­Because of ­these multiple affinities, Rios shared a scientific ethos that brought together experts, scholars, governments, and policy makers to better comprehend Rio’s urban issues. In 1962, however, Lacerda changed course, opting for more drastic, repressive action, including a significant redefinition of urban space through slum clearance efforts, partial favela urbanization, and the construction of publicly financed low-­income housing complexes to ­house displaced favela residents. Aided self-­help became a priority. The governor dismissed Rios as the head of Social Ser­vices and named as his successor Sandra Cavalcanti, a ­woman linked to Catholic conservative sectors. The ­causes of Lacerda’s change in housing policy ­were multiple. The governor wanted to embrace more impactful urban planning policies in his drive to become president. The city was experiencing serious infrastructural prob­lems, and the sense of urgency to tackle them was widespread among experts, policy makers, and middle-­and upper-­ class cariocas. For ­these sectors, favelas became obstacles to the development of the city, in par­tic­u­lar ­those slums located in growing areas such as the coveted upper-­middle to upper-­class neighborhoods of Ipanema and Leblon or in Pasmado Hill, with a scenic view of Guanabara Bay, for which Lacerda was



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in conversation with the Hilton Corporation to build a h ­ otel. Liberating t­ hose lands from slums was part of Lacerda’s spatial reor­ga­ni­za­tion and modernization of Rio. The identification of poor living conditions with marginality and criminality and the equation of favelas with rural, backward, traditional enclaves made them easy targets for public policies.31 Likewise, the government shared the notion that most poor residents ­were, or could be, financially capable of ­either joining the formal sector or becoming private homeowners if offered affordable, long-­term financing. The transformation of favela residents into homeowners was a way to modernize and formalize the urban poor—­ goals shared by Latin American and U.S. housing and foreign experts.32

The Mechanics of Transnational Housing Policy Lacerda made the most of Alliance for Pro­gress financial and technical assistance to launch his housing program. Given the scarcity of domestic savings and growing inflation, this outside aid was critical in allowing Lacerda to undertake his ambitious public works program. Conversations with foreign organ­izations had already begun in May 1961 when Guanabara authorities applied to the IDB for a line of credit of $10 million from the Social Pro­gress Trust Fund (mostly funded by the United States). ­A fter appointing Stanley Baruch as housing chief, the IDB proceeded to issue seed capital loans for low-­ income housing across Latin Amer­i­ca, and it encouraged the organ­ization of domestic mortgage markets, especially through the creation of savings and loan institutions. Philip Glaessner, the IDB representative in 1961, set practical bud­getary limits in order to maximize the impact, fixing the overall price per unit (including land and urbanization costs) at no more than Cr$200,000. Local authorities worked with IDB authorities to locate the new developments in rural areas removed from the city where the cost of land was comparatively lower, and they rationalized construction from conception to execution. In terms of design, the solution was the construction of single-­family embryo ­houses, the construction of a “core” from which the homeowner could expand at a ­later time following a preestablished layout.33 USAID became the main source of technical and economic assistance outside Brazil ­after the IDB declined the proposal to prioritize a work of ­major social impact: the city’s w ­ ater and sewage supply infrastructure. The Guanabara government, according to the loan proposal submitted to ­USAID, calculated that almost a third of Rio’s population of 3.5 million was

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living in substandard housing. The housing shortage was estimated at 200,000 units, with an increase of the housing deficit estimated at 11,500 units annually. The construction industry and the financial market did not attend to this segment of the population, given the small revenue expected, instead focusing on middle-­and upper-­class housing. Between 1962 and 1966, USAID provided four dif­fer­ent loans from Public Law 480 for almost the equivalent of US$4,500,000 (approximately 6.75 billion cruzeiros). This program, renamed Food for Peace, allowed countries that had bought U.S. surplus bulk food (wheat in this case) to use the profit generated in domestic sells to be reinvested in social programs predetermined by the United States and the recipient country. This mechanism, which had been previously used only in Peru—­a lso as part of Cold War containment policies—­provided long-­term loans, with no minimum payment requirements for ten years, and a grace period of up to five years at low interests.34 Homeownership was at the core of the proj­ect to integrate the favela resident into both polity and society. The government estimated that most of the ­people living in favelas ­were financially fit to buy their own ­house in monthly installments by allotting between 15 and 18 (but not to exceed 25) ­percent of their minimum wage. Guanabara vice-­governor Rafael de Almeida Magalhães even suggested that this was the amount ­people paid for a shack on the hill in the informal market.35 The rule of thumb was that a ­house­hold income had to equal 25 ­percent of the minimum salary, that is, a f­amily of four had to earn at least one minimum salary, a f­amily of five at least one and a quarter minimum salaries. The plan envisioned that in ten years the new resident would have paid off urbanization, construction, and financial costs, becoming the owner of the home. Installments ­were to be indexed to inflation to avoid speculation or a decrease in the loans’ value due to the unpredictability of the markets. No down payment was required. Proprietorship, therefore, was the key. As Lacerda put it bluntly years ­later, “We are not ­going to give anything for ­free except [to] the miserable, the indigent. The poor can always pay something, within reach of their poverty . . . ​­these slum-­dwellers may have lost hope . . . ​but they can be sure they h ­ aven’t lost their shame . . . ​not wanting ­ eople’s freedom and honor, acto give up their freedom and honor.”36 Poor p cording to Lacerda, ­were morally connected to homeownership. In the beginning, USAID officials found the program promising. In a few years, they expected, 8,747 new dwelling units served with w ­ ater, gas, and electricity hookups would ­house 47,800 residents who would enjoy access to health care, educational, commercial, and community facilities. The construction



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pro­cess would also provide three thousand new jobs. Equally impor­tant, USAID considered the housing program a pi­lot proj­ect that could set guidelines for a national housing plan; its officials praised the agency’s role as a contributor to the development of self-­sustaining state institutions, a guiding princi­ple of the Alliance for Pro­gress. Some scholars in Brazil have minimized the role of the United States ­because it financed only a fraction of the proj­ect. However, this assistance was key to launching the program in a time of housing shortages and electoral anx­ i­eties.37 Lacerda wanted to act quickly before the next elections, but domestic savings ­were insufficient given the multitude of government expenses and financial commitments. In addition, the federal government obstructed the release of funds and limited support for negotiations with international organ­izations. U.S. funds, released upon the achievement of set program goals, ­were considered “seed capital” whose returns had to be reinvested in the construction and financing of more homes. The United States agreed to fund 11 ­percent of the total investment and the State of Guanabara the rest. According to Almeida Magalhães, the deal established a repayment period of forty years with an interest rate of 2.75 ­percent and a seven-­year grace period at the beginning of the program.38 The state agreed to allocate all the returns from down payments, mortgage repayments, and other benefits to this end.39 ­These w ­ ere the kinds of operations that international lending agencies sought to promote in the region in the 1960s. USAID assistance was thus decisive in kicking off the housing program, and recipients understood the United States’ role in that precise way. As was also the case in other Latin American cities, U.S. funds for housing came with a demand for administrative rationalization, part of a broader attempt to modernize state institutions in the region. First the IDB, and then USAID, mandated that the State of Guanabara create a housing com­pany. The establishment of the Companhia de Habitação Popu­lar (COHAB; Popu­lar Housing Com­pany) was sanctioned in the State of Guanabara’s new constitution, approved in December  1962. Formalized in March  1963, COHAB was a joint venture between private and state capital (Guanabara subscribed 51 ­percent of the stocks), which gave the com­pany an autarchic status and relative autonomy from the state, as U.S. officials recommended.40 The state also guaranteed 3 ­percent of the state tax revenue to be destined e­ very year to capitalize COHAB, a significant commitment at that time.41 Lacerda and his vice-­governor also expected the com­pany to work as a “real estate com­pany” with the flexibility to operate in the low-­income construction market.42 Hence,

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state-­led affordable housing reform was part of the modernization of the state bureaucracy, a partial result of U.S.-­Brazilian conversations. The construction of the vilas was the most impor­tant aspect of the program in terms of scale and resources employed.43 In June 1962, USAID provided the first loan in local currency (about US$1.6 million) for the construction of Vila Aliança and Vila Esperança. The operation prescribed land purchases, land filling and ground leveling, urbanization, construction of homes and communal facilities, slum eradication and relocation, and supervision of the  new neighborhoods. Land cost was central in determining the location of the vilas. The government looked for terrain in areas of considerable size but cheap enough to build several thousand units, easily accessible by paved road or rail ser­vice, and with the capacity to offer sufficient job opportunities. Rio’s periphery to the west and north met the criteria.44 Lacerda also expected the new neighborhoods to provide a settled and disciplined l­abor force for his plans to bolster Rio’s battered economy. The governor created the Com­ p­any for the Pro­gress of Guanabara (Companhia de Progresso da Guanabara; COPEG) to promote the formation of an industrial pole via state tax exemptions and subventions as a way to c­ounter São Paulo’s competence.45 Vila Aliança and Vila Kennedy, built in the proximities of that industrial pole, w ­ ere to provide such a supply of ­labor. Construction began in Vila Aliança in March 1962 and in Vila Kennedy by the end of that year. In both cases, construction occurred in three dif­fer­ ent sections (glebas) and stages as funds w ­ ere secured and p ­ eople removed from favelas and relocated to the vilas over a period of three years. This scheme allowed COHAB architects to learn from the construction pro­cess and tweak typologies and layouts to better meet the needs of the new residents. In both vilas, communal facilities ­were the last ­thing to be built: completion of a health post and a police post, a community center, and the main square, equipped with recreational facilities and playgrounds, occurred around 1965. In comparison, Vila Esperança was a smaller development of 464 homes built as an extension of Vigário Geral, a working-­class neighborhood. ­There, COHAB built the homes but not communal facilities. Fi­nally, the program also included the construction of the first stages of Cidade de Deus, built on state-­owned lands in Jacarepaguá. Originally, Cidade de Deus was not part of the plan crafted in 1962, although discussions for its development appeared soon ­after the beginning of construction in Vila Aliança and Vila Kennedy. Work on the site began in



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November 1964, and USAID became involved ­after the approval of the third loan on April 1965. By that time, the military dictatorship was already in power and had created the National Housing Bank, the first of its kind in Brazil and ­under control of the federal government, which contributed more than half of the funds. The State of Guanabara contributed 33 ­percent and USAID 17 ­percent. The original plan envisioned sixteen thousand housing units. For this reason the construction of Cidade de Deus involved a larger orga­nizational effort. Community facilities, for instance, ­were to include an administrative center, a field office, a medical post, a police substation, two primary schools, a kindergarten for two hundred c­ hildren, a day nursery for sixty infants, a social center with a library, two large public parks, five playgrounds, four sports fields, a large movie theater, a multiunit commercial center, a bakery, a self-­ service supermarket, and almost two hundred commercial-­residential shops.46 ­These original plans for Cidade de Deus changed drastically in January 1966 and then again in February 1967 as a consequence of heavy storms that flooded the city and caused landslides and the partial collapse of many hillsides, including the favela in the Providência Hill downtown. The bad weather para­lyzed city ser­vices. More than two thousand favela residents perished, and around twenty thousand p ­ eople ­were displaced with no shelter or belongings.47 USAID diverted counterpart funds originally meant for housing construction to the “disaster relief program” in the amount of NCr$3 million. The Francisco Negrão de Lima administration, which followed Lacerda’s in 1965, used ­those funds to repair damage in Cidade de Deus and construct emergency dwellings for 1,300 families. The chaotic situation and the dramatic character of the events led the government to locate more than 200 families in a place that was still u ­ nder construction, in unfinished h ­ ouses that lacked connection to the public w ­ ater and sewage system and in vacant buildings and tents. A cruel irony, premature occupancy reproduced the living conditions of the favela, worsened by the sudden displacement and rupture of social, ­familiar, and economic links. The USAID office in Rio had to react quickly in response to the urgency of the events, deviating from original plans and sometimes making decisions that w ­ ere not entirely supported by U.S. officials. The urgency of the situation in the summers of 1966 and 1967 was quite unique. But on another level they remind us that the resolution of unexpected emergencies was endemic to the construction of housing. It was on t­hose construction sites that a second tier of Brazilian and U.S. technicians and experts negotiated on-­the-­ground issues and, ultimately, subtly modified the

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original plans conceived on the desks of architects, engineers, and experts in Brazil and the United States.

Transnational Design Transnational design could sometimes emerge from a divided system of l­abor. For instance, COHAB architects designed the vilas while USAID officials oversaw the plans. The resulting layouts of Vila Aliança, Vila Kennedy (with the exception of the third section), and Vila Esperança presented a spatial design that emphasized long street corridors where long rows of single-­family ­houses displayed in flat areas created a serialized, sanitized residential space. This aspect reinforced a sense of closure, monotony, and repetition (as con­ temporary pictures, layouts, and blueprints show) that differed from the more spontaneous and disorderly arrangement of the favela. Built in suburban rural areas, the vilas also contrasted greatly with their surroundings. COHAB architects recognized the rigidity of the design, echoing the grievances of the new residents, and experimented with a dif­fer­ent pattern, looking for some degree of formal flexibility. The introduction of the quadra-­padrão, the repetition of a block pattern (first implemented in Vila Kennedy’s third section and ­later in Cidade de Deus), offered a more varied landscape within blocks through the construction of pedestrian walkways separated from vehicular traffic, the introduction of green areas, an assorted distribution of lots, the introduction of color, and better road distribution. The central piece of the architectural program was the “embryo-­t ype” scheme, a ­house of 3.5 by 5 meters, built from a core of clay bricks and cement blocks, with a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom and s­imple finishes. The embryo-­type scheme rested on the premise that families could move into the new homes quickly and, with ­little additional work, complete and expand the ­house subsequently as time and funds allowed. The blueprints of individual dwellings already prescribed the layout for ­future additions as a way to control improvisation, a characteristic of spontaneous construction in the favelas. One of the advantages of this design for the government was that it could be mass-­produced on-­site at a considerable savings and did not require relatively complex production and supervision operations. In addition, it transferred to the occupant the cost of finishing and expanding the new home. In other words, while the physical program of the housing complexes was somewhat schematic in nature, the embryo model allowed for some



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flexibility, with the owner assuming ultimate responsibility. As a resident-­ driven pro­cess, the plan sought to unleash individual and collective potential and to empower low-­income families through self-­help programs while transferring both responsibility and cost. The embryo model also envisioned an ideal community of homeowners and consumers who would invest in home improvements. The housing program thus conceived of the ­future resident as someone who would develop bourgeois values of domesticity and comfort, a consumer of building materials and decorations, and a citizen engaged in local affairs. In the technical imagination of the experts, development and modernization entailed not only a moral dimension but also a spatial one. In this sense, the Guanabara Housing Program was not a rigid final product but a flexible one that conceived of an ideal neighborhood whose needs ­were ­going to change as occupants lived their lives—­a modernism distinct from the rigid vision of modernist Brasilia.

Displacement and Isolation While the pro­cesses that created ­these housing proj­ects w ­ ere transnational, the resulting displacement and isolation w ­ ere profoundly local. Th ­ ese results ­were not the accidental outcome of housing policies but rather intrinsic to them, fulfilling local po­liti­cal needs as much as transnational or international interests. ­Here, we can see a pro­cess that some scholars have described as the “slumification” of cities across the global south; unlike this homogenizing vision of slumification, however, the Brazilian cases reveal just how impor­tant local politics ­were. From 1962 to 1967, COHAB displaced 8,078 families, almost 42,000 favela residents from more than thirty-­two slums—­ranging from tiny settlements with few shacks to highly populated favelas such as Pasmado or Esqueleto. The eradication pro­cess involved several steps before final relocation to the vilas or temporary housing. In some cases the operation was relatively calm, but in other cases residents resisted and police coercion added more trauma to an already difficult experience. The eradication of Favela do Esqueleto, whose residents w ­ ere relocated to Vila Kennedy and temporary housing, provides a well-­documented case. The Favela do Esqueleto, also known at that time as Vila São Jorge, was located in Rio’s northern zone, right next to the Maracanã Stadium—­t he world’s largest sporting stadium, inaugurated in 1950 to host the World Cup— on public federal lands.48 The site provided good access to workplaces, as it

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was close to main ave­nues and right in front of the Mangueira train station. The location provided ready access to job opportunities in the city and around the stadium on match days. The origins of the settlement can be traced to the 1930s when Mayor Pedro Ernesto began the construction of a health clinic. According to COHAB’s reports, the workers employed in the construction of both the hospital and the Maracanã Stadium (construction began in 1948) occupied the site around the hospital’s skeleton frame (esqueleto in Portuguese), which gave the name to the favela. New contingents arrived to Esqueleto when an ice-­cream manufacturing plant (Kibon) settled in neighboring Mangueira, displacing the residents living in that squatter settlement. By the time of ­Esqueleto’s eradication, ­there ­were 15,635 ­people living in its 118,520 square ­ ouses made of wood and stucco served with illegal w ­ ater meters, mostly in h and electrical hookups. By the early 1960s, the Department of Social Ser­ vices counted that a third of the dwellings w ­ ere made of masonry, a fact that the government saw as evidence of the residents’ purchasing power and their capacity to own homes. The government put forward environmental and sanitary reasons for removal and developed plans to build the campus of the Universidade do Estado da Guanabara (­today’s Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro).49 Eradication demanded a carefully planned procedure to coordinate the dif­ fer­ent areas and actors involved, including social workers, engineers, architects, ­lawyers, workers, and supervisors, among ­others. The pro­cess began with a socioeconomic survey of the favela and a strict count of the number of residents. Social workers from the Department of Social Ser­vices and COHAB visited and gathered information on the residents’ socioeconomic status and living conditions, including ­family size, income, and marital status.50 The data gathered was to be used to determine the quantity of homes and rooms that had to be built in the vilas to accommodate the relocated families. Social workers explained to the residents the purpose of the program, provided details about life in the new housing complexes, and showed, to predominantly female audiences, the models of the new homes. Many of ­these ­women visited construction sites and homes ­under construction. The assumption was that ­women, as ­house­wives and ­mothers, ­were more inclined to domestic care and the improvement of the f­amily’s situation, while men w ­ ere less willing to abandon proximity to workplaces and spaces of sociability. Internal memorandums asked social workers to always proceed with patience and care, minimizing social tensions in an already stressful pro­cess.



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Efficiency and standardization also guided eradication. COHAB engineers subdivided the favela into sections to facilitate fieldwork and removal; in the case of Esqueleto, open drains and informal streets or ave­nues facilitated ­ eople, the demarcation. COHAB spent on average three days to move the p bulldoze the shacks, and clean individual sections. An architect or an engineer usually served as a field coordinator, supervising the removal and transportation of the residents and the bulldozing of the area. Their tasks ­involved the organ­ization of the foremen and the gathering of the families to be relocated, following the lists that the Department of Social Ser­v ices crafted in advance. Then, social workers assigned the families to vans, checking the residents’ moving cards, which stated name and place of destination. ­These moving cards sought to avoid any kind of informal transactions between favelados, especially the selling of their “place” to a dif­fer­ent candidate. Soon-­ to-be ex-­residents w ­ ere allowed to take construction materials that could be reused in their new homes (for instance, tiles, timber, bricks, mosaics, floor boards, galvanized pipes, iron rods, or toilet frames). ­These materials ­were then loaded in com­pany trucks and moved to ­either the vilas or the temporary settlements. Once residents left the site, the bulldozers and levelers began their work. By the end of the day, according to the plan, the families had eaten and gone to bed in their new homes and the section of the favela was cleared of any sign of the ­people who had once lived ­there. Social workers and COHAB’s administrators held disproportionate power in this pro­cess. They chose the residents’ destinations. They determined ­house­holds’ incomes, composition, and occupations and calculated the num­ ouses.51 Economic ber of families in a condition to pay (or not) for their new h criteria—­household income—­organized space by creating a new class of homeowners in the suburbs while segregating ­others in underserved locations. ­Those h ­ ouse­holds whose incomes could meet the requirements set by the ­local government ­were eligible to move to the ­houses in the vilas. The government relocated ­those who did not meet the stipulated income to temporary housing built with minimum infrastructure and no social ser­vices in the northern reaches of greater Rio. This temporary housing in most cases became permanent and, over the years, an indivisible part of the landscape of urban poverty in Rio’s suburbs. Nova Holanda, for instance, one of the triage zones that COHAB built as temporary housing, de­cades ­later became part of the Complexo da Maré, a group of favelas infamously known for vio­lence, drug trafficking, and police repression. Paradoxically, though the housing program

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sought to address the lack of affordable housing for Rio’s popu­lar classes, it instead contributed to the modernization of urban poverty. In theory, dwelling units ­were assigned by lottery. In real­ity, personal ­favors, clientelism, venality, and profiteering also played roles in housing allocation. Lacerda personally ordered officials to accommodate individual requests. Luiz Carlos de Moraes Vital, the state secretary of social ser­vices by 1965, for instance, diligently responded to the governor’s requests in written notes when a beneficiary was placed in a ­house. While it is difficult to establish the number of t­hese requests, they are indicative of how patronage and personal ­favors ­were also part of Lacerda’s po­liti­cal culture, even when he presented himself as the champion of transparency.52 It is particularly in­ter­est­ ing to observe the number of individuals who approached the governor for homes. This fact brings some nuance to traditional accounts that focused almost exclusively on the authoritarian aspects of the housing program. This also speaks to the strategies that poor favela residents put in practice in finding a place of their own: for many families, the possibility of owning a home and accessing urban amenities and the expectation of reaching new standards of living and status w ­ ere power­ful dreams.53 According to the “user’s manual” given to the new residents, once they arrived in Vila Kennedy, and ­after a quick overview about payment modalities and responsibilities, they had to sign the deed of purchase and sale commitment. The notarization of the signature, however, was ratified five months ­later to establish the effective occupation of the dwelling unit. COHAB set this procedure to avoid informal transferences from the original beneficiary to potential buyers. In l­ ater days, social workers oriented the new residents on how to expand their embryo unit, but for the most part this introduction was brief and incomplete b­ ecause of a lack of personnel. Many families complained vehemently that COHAB neglected to assign the number of rooms or the type of homes originally conveyed. The agency recognized having poorly planned the number of homes and recreational areas that w ­ ere part of the social and cultural life of the favelas, and failing to or­ga­nize bus lines to facilitate commuting to the city. The assessment of the results of Vila Aliança and Vila Kennedy in the years ­after their inauguration was predominantly negative. Residents, the Brazilian and U.S. press, USAID officials, and members of the U.S. Senate pointed out that new housing developments had produced spatial isolation and fractured traditional economic, social, and cultural linkages.54 In 1966, a USAID mission led by Bernard Wagner, David McVoy, and Gordon Edwards produced



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a report (the Wagner report) that echoed t­ hese complaints—­complaints that ­were confirmed again ­later that same year in an ethnographic study produced by a young American anthropologist, Lawrence Salmen.55 U.S. experts had the luxury of condemning proj­ects from a distance, but residents had to contend with the day-­to-­day challenges of transnational design. Among other issues, they complained about the absence of transportation ser­v ices, the lack of jobs (the planned industrial park in Santa Cruz failed to materialize), unpaved streets, and unsanitary conditions due to irregular garbage collection. Even Sandra Cavalcanti recognized poor planning in Vila Kennedy (particularly the lack of buses to the city) in a personal letter to the military president Castelo Branco at a time when she was negotiating the terms of her incorporation into the federal government as president of the newly ­created National Housing Bank (established 1964).56 To make ­matters worse, squatting in vacant homes in the vilas and the high rate of financial delinquency compromised the reinvestment of t­hose revolving funds to replicate the housing program in other areas.57 An ethnographic work in Cidade de Deus in the early 1970s showed that residents actually abandoned their new homes in the vilas soon ­after arriving ­there to go back to the favelas, making a small profit from this informal transaction, or they relocated themselves in the suburbs. As dwelling units changed hands, a new class of p ­ eople, mostly of slightly higher income—in many cases COHAB agents—­moved into the neighborhood.58 The Guanabara Housing Program, following sociologist Licia do Prado Valladares, ultimately benefited a more affluent lower-­middle class rather than helping the original targeted population. Remarkably, this unexpected clientele celebrated their new homes and their status as a new ­middle class. Janice Perlman has recently shown the complexity of evaluating ­these kinds of housing programs, since the residents’ experiences varied from place to place and time to time according to changing historical circumstances.59 Immediately a­fter relocation, residents complained about the way the government conducted eradication and the difficult transition they experienced. Nevertheless, they also mentioned how much they liked their new homes, all built of solid material on solid ground and ser­viced with ­water, sewage, and electricity—­a ll of which they did not have before. The prospects of secure tenure offered a good alternative to the fragile situation in the favelas. Furthermore, some residents of Vila Kennedy expressed gratification at overcoming the negative connotations associated with living in favelas and expressed satisfaction at the fact that their lifestyle resembled, for them, ­those of Rio’s ­middle class.60 According to geographer Iná Elias de

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Castro, three main reasons explained this: the location far from the city’s downtown might have protected the residents from the rising prices of the housing market; the spatial characteristics of the housing units allowed for further expansion; and, fi­nally, residents may have appreciated their newfound access to the ideal of homeownership.61 Anthropologist Alba Zaluar showed that ­people in Cidade de Deus actively claimed their homes by decorating and expanding them and humanizing their surroundings, a fact that USAID personnel greatly celebrated in internal conversations.62 While most favelados strug­g led, with more or less success, to adapt to the challenges of life ­a fter eradications, ­others had deci­ded to or­g a­nize and resist the favela clearance policies. Less destitute residents, then, took charge of transnational housing programs to fashion lives for themselves, and they did so in ways that often surprised and confounded the original architects.

Conclusion By the late 1960s the local, national, and international situation had changed greatly. Brazil was ­under a harsh military dictatorship that suspended national elections, destroying Lacerda’s presidential ambitions. The federal government initiated a centralized housing policy and federalized the experience of Guanabara by opening several COHAB agencies in dif­fer­ent Brazilian states. Guanabara fi­nally lost the l­ittle relative po­liti­cal autonomy it had kept a­ fter the transference of the capital city, eliminating along the way the po­liti­cal bargaining power of slum associations. The Alliance for Pro­gress was winding down. Fiscally conservative House representatives and senators in the United States strongly criticized the use of public funds for proj­ects like the Guanabara Housing Program and took advantage of ­every trip and ­every negative article in the newspapers to make their point. In addition, the military dictatorship proved to the United States that its geopo­liti­cal interests in the region and the twin goals of the Alliance for Pro­gress—­economic development and po­liti­cal stability—­were better achieved by military regimes than by a highly polarized demo­cratic pro­cess. The cover page of the Wall Street Journal on March 20, 1967, highlighted the harsh living conditions in Vila Kennedy for a broad American audience: “This community of 30,000,” the article observed, “is a place that US foreign administrators would just as soon forget about.” According to the correspondent, Vila Kennedy was planned “as a showcase for the American effort to aid



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Brazil, a must stop on the tour of any visiting VIP,” although he advised against taking President Lyndon B. Johnson ­there in his visit to South Amer­i­ca. Vila Kennedy was worth seeing for only one reason: “What has gone wrong ­here tells a g­ reat deal about what can—­and often does—go wrong in Amer­i­ca’s massive foreign aid program.” In other words, “the basic lesson of Vila Kennedy seems to be that much more thoughtful planning often is required before taxpayers’ dollars are shelled out for any new proj­ect.”63 This denunciation of Vila Kennedy and Vila Aliança helped fuel mounting criticism in both the United States and Brazil, beginning with an internal USAID-­Brazil investigation into the costs of foreign aid.64 Other reports echoed Lacerda’s complaints that state neglect of the vilas was the result of the po­liti­cal machinations of his rival, the new governor Negrão, who opted for a policy of favela urbanization.65 Negrão created a new agency, the Companhia de Desenvolvimento Comunitário, run by a group of progressive urban planners and architects ­under the leadership of the architect-­turned-­anthropologist Carlos Nelson Ferreira dos Santos. This solution was part of a transnational revalorization of favelados in building cities, with architect John Turner and his Freedom to Build movement serving as particularly emblematic advocates on the global stage.66 The newfound interest in the positive, constructive role of informal settlers served shifting local and transnational needs. Progressive sectors in Rio sought to humanize favela residents and to appreciate their contributions to the city, while experts within USAID (including t­ hose involved in the Wagner report) embraced the downsized financial obligations of such an approach as well. This shift in paradigm would become the official housing policy of the World Bank for the developing world years l­ater.67 The Brazilian military dictatorship, conversely, opposed this more demo­cratic approach that empowered favela residents and their alliance with a pro-­favelado sector of urban experts. The creation of the Coordenação de Habitação de Interesse Social da Área Metropolitana do Grande Rio was a way to counteract the policies of Negrão and insist on a more authoritarian and repressive approach to favela eradication and the construction of affordable housing.68 This top-­down approach, which emphasized state-­led construction of affordable housing and the clearance of slums, favored the reactivation of the housing market and the construction sector. By the late 1960s, the era of large-­scale U.S.-­funded housing proj­ects in Latin Amer­i­ca was coming to a close. In May 1969, William A. Ellis, director of USAID’s Housing and Urban Development Office, wrote a letter to

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Governor Negrão letting him know that his office considered the proj­ect agreement for the Guanabara Housing Program terminated and the proj­ect completed. Between June 1962 and January 1966, USAID made available NCr$8.45 million (8.45 billion old cruzeiros), and by mid-1969, more than forty-­five thousand inhabitants occupied nine thousand h ­ ouses in Vila Aliança, Vila Esperança, Vila Kennedy, and Cidade de Deus. The USAID Housing and Urban Development Office in Rio closed on June 30, 1969.69 The case of the Guanabara Housing Program shows how U.S. and Latin American counter­parts shared a horizon of expectations about the role of housing and private homeownership in formalizing urban life, promoting middle-­class values and habits, and integrating the urban poor into the modern polis. As Latin Amer­i­ca was becoming a hot spot of Cold War anx­i­ eties in the 1960s, social programs in the region became an impor­tant ele­ ment of foreign diplomacy through technical and economic assistance. In most cases, the conditions attached to the release of loans not only influenced the blueprints for housing and urban renewal plans but also included significant administrative reforms of governmental bureaucracies. The study of specific housing proj­ects as spaces of encounter for local, national, and transnational actors has helped to build a more complex understanding of north-­south Cold War relations, one that highlights on-­the-­ground negotiations, borrowings, and re­sis­tances. This kind of study also shows how a second tier of experts, con­sul­tants, and technical cadres working for U.S., international, and domestic agencies w ­ ere key actors in planning and building housing programs made pos­si­ble by the availability of foreign assistance. They ­were the ­people who negotiated the details, who dealt with the everyday give-­ and-­take as prob­lems emerged and solutions had to be found. It was in ­these “encounters” among second-­tier technicians that plans designed by higher officials, s­ haped by their agendas and visions of power and counterpower, w ­ ere strug­gled with and, fi­nally, concretized. The material results ­were hardly the ones originally envisioned. ­These housing proj­ects critically demonstrate the contested nature of the rule of experts and development in itself. It is in this sense that it is pos­si­ ble to think of certain housing developments and urban plans also as part of hegemonic encounters at the height of the Cold War in Latin Amer­i­c a. In this way, during this period, development as a language and a practice was part of the popu­lar imaginary that fueled the intense conflicts of the day, as it entailed notions of economic growth and social improvement, as well as social and po­liti­cal inclusion. ­Here, the hegemony of experts, formed transnationally,



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was something other than the imposition of technocratic designs. Rather, transnational experts helped create expectations and desires about urban life that ­were appropriated by dif­fer­ent social sectors, including the urban poor. ­ ere constantly being redeThe languages and practices of development w fined, opening up the possibilities of contestation and alternative forms of rule and counterrule. In the end, technocratic notions of development may have ­shaped urban policies and thinking in the Cold War Amer­i­cas, but they also contributed to a volatile and dispersed pro­cess of housing design, construction, and use.

chapter 4

Slum Clearance as a Transnational Pro­cess in Globalizing Manila N a n cy   H . Kwa k

Perhaps one of the most striking features of late twentieth-­century urban management is the exercise of slum clearance. A faithful companion to most visions for urban improvement, slum clearance is inextricably bound up with the pursuit of modernization, development, and growth. While the term “slum clearance” has become po­liti­cally unpalatable of late, policies of identification, labeling, and settlement eradication remain intact from the mid-­to late twentieth ­century, and the recent preference for terms like “relocation” (removal of settlers from a designated space) and “resettlement” (rehousing of individuals and families in a new space) says more about image making than the pro­ cess of removal itself. In the same way that it stretches across time, slum clearance also remains coherent across national and regional bound­a ries: ­whether in countries in Africa, Latin Amer­i­ca, Asia, Eu­rope, or North Amer­i­ca, governments typically identify an urban space they deem to be in­effec­tively used, calculate the po­liti­cal cost of seizing property rights in this area, delineate and map the space to be “redeveloped,” remove existing residents (often forcibly), and direct the cleared property—­now formal real estate—­toward more profitable uses. A history of slum clearance, then, straddles local, national, transnational, international, and global histories, on the one hand demonstrating the power of states and, on the other hand, exemplifying the relationships between settlements, states, and broader patterns of industrialization, trade networks, property investment regimes, and l­abor management.



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Slum clearance also brings in the role of intergovernmental organ­izations in supporting states—in fostering state power where ­there was ­little or none. By employing violent removal and by physically breaking apart coalitions—­ neighborhoods, communities, po­liti­cal networks—of poor urban dwellers, states could delegitimize claims to use rights and assert the primacy of only ­those property rights sanctioned by the state. ­There are many potential starting points for this sort of history. Colonial and postcolonial history highlights some of ­these strug­gles over property rights. The end of World War II is equally rich in this regard: in the late 1940s and 1950s, so-­called developing-­world cities experienced explosive growth with refugees, dislocated populations, and job-­hungry itinerants flooding into the nearest metropole in hopes of finding work and food. Newly in­de­pen­dent regimes and postwar governments, conversely, aspired to reshape urban land­ ere friendly to investment and that enticed more affluent scapes in ways that w populations while eliminating unsightly, inadequate housing. At least two impor­tant results followed: urban real estate values ­rose rapidly and governments found it increasingly vital to secure prime locations without paying ­those rising prices. Above all, states understood that they needed to connect their nations to a world economy via urban hubs, and that the organ­ization and infrastructure of ­those cities played a key role in setting regional and ­international hierarchies. Governments may have welcomed poorly paid laborers as part of the pro­cess of development and modernization in postwar cities, but in the eyes of politicians and government officials, their poor accommodations ­were another ­matter.1 Given that economic incentives and tactics developed at the global level, postwar slum clearance makes more sense when considered in global, transnational, and international as well as local or national terms. A more expansive approach allows for impor­tant questions about the relationship between transnational urban planning practices and state power, about the art of ungoverned urbanism (to adapt James Scott’s phrase) and informality, about the sources of po­liti­cal legitimacy for an intergovernmental organ­ization like the World Bank. While still looking closely at one urban site—in this case, Manila—­and one specific time period—in this case, from the 1970s to t­ oday— it quickly becomes apparent that transnationalism did not have a historical “moment” in the case of Manila or even Philippine planning history. ­There was no decisive rise or fall of transnationalism; rather, transnational ideas about good planning traveled along intellectual, educational, and professional networks and contended with the needs and wants of national and city

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administrations while also competing with deeply local, pragmatic approaches to spatial order in specific communities. The transnational dimen­ sion to this sort of urban history, then, plays an impor­tant function in dena­t uralizing the power and coherence of state planning, instead refocusing attention on contestations of power. In this chapter, close attention is paid particularly to the relationships ­between national government policy, informal dwellers and informal dwellers’ organ­izations, nonprofit organ­izations often working on global scales, and intergovernmental organ­izations like the World Bank. Interactions on the global and transnational scale revealed, on the one hand, clear institutional and rhetorical reproduction of what Filipino government officials perceived to be American, at other times more vaguely “modern,” standards. On the other hand, local and national po­liti­cal needs often overshadowed even the hefty financial power and global influence of organ­izations like the World Bank, instead steering slum clearance proj­ects decisively ­toward domestic conceptualizations of successful urban development. Proj­ects often reflected the needs and desires of elite Manila residents, but informal settlers played a critical, if often undocumented, role in this story as well: while states enacted costly, expansive slum clearance programs, the impoverished stratum of Manila society continued to move and resettle in ways that confounded urban planners, disappearing from government rec­ords and reinhabiting urban spaces without the permission or even knowledge of the state. The invisibility of many of the cleared residents speaks to the myriad ways in which state policy failed in its most fundamental goal of controlling who lived where, and how. From the point of view of individuals and families, this invisibility was not a victory, but rather a symptom of dispossession and extreme marginalization.

Creating Slums and Squatters In order to comprehend slum clearance in Greater Manila, it is necessary to take a step back and examine the context of illegal land occupation. When American advisers first arrived in the archipelago less than a year ­after the Japa­ nese surrender and a few months before in­de­pen­dence on July 4, 1946, mission leader Earl Gauger, l­egal adviser John Tierney, and economic adviser Roy J. Burroughs found Manila utterly decimated by war and occupation. Homeless and displaced families had erected self-­made structures amid the rubble in neighborhoods around Barrio Fugoso, Casbah within Binondo,



Slum Clearance as a Transnational Pro­cess in Globalizing Manila 101

Ermita, Intramuros, Harrison Plaza, Magat Salamat Elementary School, Malate, and North Harbor.2 Preexisting land rights ­were poorly delineated, and land titles were ­either lost or disputed ­a fter years of occupation and war. As with much of the rest of the world, decent housing was in short supply. Despite such obvious trou­bles, the federal government focused on institutional changes that had ­little connection with the realities of poor residents. Informal settlements spread rapidly across the city, with up to 75 ­percent of informal dwellers in Manila having no vis­i­ble source of income in the early and mid-1950s, according to the government.3 Unable or unwilling to directly provide housing for lower-­income urban dwellers, administrations from Manuel Roxas’ (1946–48) to Elpidio Quirino’s (1948–53), Ramon Maysaysay’s (1953–57), Carlos Garcia’s (1957–61), Diosdado Macapagal’s (1961–65), and, fi­nally, Ferdinand Marcos’ in 1965 generally focused on bolstering upper-­class housing via institutional changes. Outside advisers fueled this trend: one team (N. J. Demerath and Richard N. Kuhlman) paid for by the U.S. National Housing Agency and U.S. Navy, for instance, suggested the nation firm up its home financing system for t­hose interested in buying property on credit.4 The Philippine government followed much of Demerath and Kuhlman’s advice, merging the ­People’s Homesite Commission (an agency primarily geared to stimulating homeownership) and the National Housing Commission (an organ­ization devoted more to housing for the poorer classes) into a newly created ­People’s Homesite and Housing Corporation (PHHC, 1947–75).5 A 1947 Joint Philippine-­A merican Commission helped smooth the way for banks and financial institutions to issue more long-­term, low-­interest loans, and it also set up the Rehabilitation Finance Corporation to shore up the secondary mortgage market and create a more vibrant set of housing choices for “salaried ­people in the moderate income groups.”6 The newly created Home Financing Commission, meanwhile, deliberately patterned itself ­a fter the American Federal Housing Administration in its system of mortgage insurance.7 In this first attempt to replicate First World housing conditions, then, international input complemented domestic interest in housing for the wealthier classes. Slum clearance and relocation stood on the policy sidelines: a mere 6,900 families ­were relocated during the entire de­cade of the 1950s, and by the end of the 1960s, many of t­ hose had returned to informal settlements b­ ecause of the lack of jobs and community ser­vices, as well as a general inability to pay for PHHC housing.8 Ultimately, it was domestic politics that drove the government to fi­nally consider informal dwellings during the 1970s. Informal communities had been

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a po­liti­cally potent force since liberation in 1945; by the early 1970s, President Ferdinand Marcos came to see them as dangerous sources of po­liti­cal unrest and antigovernment mobilization—­a fear that drove Marcos to more explic­ itly marginalize and, eventually, criminalize self-­housed individuals and families. In Tondo, an enormous, mostly self-­housed community of roughly 180,000 ­people located along North Harbor in Manila, the government Bureau of Public Works began building its port and industrial complex in the early 1970s, using the Tondo Foreshore Land Act of 1956 to articulate ­government land rights and to take over properties occupied by informal dwellers. Tondo residents worked together to fight government eviction, mobilizing po­liti­cal action through groups like Zone One Tondo Organ­ization (ZOTO), an organ­ization that represented some sixty thousand residents in the area. While ZOTO fought for informal dwellers’ rights to inform city planning in Tondo, the organ­ization freely admitted that “only about sixty ­percent have a right to the land where their h ­ ouses stand,” according to an in9 ternal census of Zone One in April 1973. Still, the ZOTO report concluded, “the reason why Tondo is overcrowded with ­houses is ­because the ­people prefer to live in a very small barung-­barong [makeshift ­house] that is their own rather than rent a place.”10 The seeming contradiction of disenfranchisement and shanty owner­ship encapsulated a critical transition in the way land rights w ­ ere being reframed in the postwar period: many families used land for which they had no state-­issued paper titles, but they nonetheless felt a sense of community owner­ship and shared rights through their use of the land and through their personal investment in self-­built housing, as well as their long-­standing occupation of it. That system of land rights was being systematically threatened by the slum clearance process—­and deliberately so. President Marcos had ­little interest in sweat equity or the use-­based land rights put forward by ZOTO. Instead, he forcibly adjusted expectations for house-­owner recognition in his administration’s response in the mid-1970s. This was not simply a case of one form of land right (­legal paper titles) competing against another (owner­ship through occupation and investment), but rather of the state asserting its power through the language of land rights. Land titling was not a neutral pro­cess designed to empower citizens; it was a weapon wielded to delegitimize their rights to the land they lived on. Marcos’ Presidential Decree 772 in 1975 defined “squatters” as criminals, as individuals who, “with the use of force, intimidation or threat, or taking advantage of the absence or tolerance of the landowner, succeeds in occupying or possessing



Slum Clearance as a Transnational Pro­cess in Globalizing Manila 103

the property of the latter against his w ­ ill for residential commercial or any other purposes.” Such actions ­were “illegal and nefarious” and ­were punishable by prison time or fines. A second presidential decree, PD 814, in the same year addressed the fact that “the Tondo Foreshore [was] the largest squatter and slum colony in the Greater Manila Area where p ­ eople live[d] in substandard conditions incompatible with the goals of the New Society.” PD 814 specified a squatter upgrading and resettlement program for Tondo Foreshore and Dagat-­Dagatan that would remove residents from the property and permit new tourist-­and investor-­friendly developments like ­hotels and industrial production sites. As the clearest evidence of the powerlessness of residents-­turned-­squatters, Manila police seized ZOTO leader Trinidad Herrera in April 1977, questioning her first at police headquarters before turning her over to the Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group to be further ­ ntil she questioned and tortured with electrical wires on her hands and breasts u was so emotionally and physically stunned that she could no longer speak. Only ­after considerable international outcry including an outpouring of letters from Christian and ­human rights organ­izations, and the mounting discomfort of World Bank officials observing the Marcos regime’s actions, did Herrera’s ­lawyer, Jose Diokno, fi­nally succeed in having her released. ­These deliberately aggressive ­legal and symbolic actions completed the transformation of poor self-­built communities into illegal, criminal communities of squatters. Slum clearance could only succeed at a large scale with this clear division between formal and informal dwellings, between legitimate and illegitimate occupation. During Marcos’ regime leading up to and including martial law, seven agencies helped put into motion resettlement campaigns designed to clear central urban property for more “productive” uses: they ­were the ­People’s Homesite and Housing Corporation, the Presidential Assistant on Housing and Resettlement Agency, the Tondo Foreshore Development Authority, the Central Institute for the Training and Relocation of Urban Squatters, the Presidential Committee for Housing and Urban Resettlement, the Sapang Palay Development Committee, and the Inter-­A gency Task Force to Undertake the Relocation of Families in Barrio Nabacaan, Villanueva, Misamis Oriental.11 This pro­cess of criminalization and delegitimization did not occur merely ­because Marcos established martial law; state-­managed slum clearance ­programs reflected a broader consensus on the part of the ruling class that Manilan housing markets needed to be put in order; more room made for

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i­ndustry, trade, and tourism; and a more modern, smoothly functioning city plan developed to facilitate the movement of goods and ­people into and out of the primate city. Even when Corazon Aquino and subsequent administrations at first tempered, then removed Marcos’ 1975 Presidential Decree with Republic Act No. 8368 (Anti-­squatting Law Repeal Act of 1997), a new 1992 Lina Law (Republic Act No. 7279, Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992—­A n Act to Provide for a Comprehensive and Continuing Urban Development and Housing Program, Establish the Mechanism for Its Implementation, and for Other Purposes) maintained the illegality of “professional squatting” and “squatting syndicates.” Tellingly, the World Bank prided itself on “stay[ing] out of the po­liti­cal fray” and not criticizing the Philippine government, despite intense pressure to do so, especially during the years of martial law.12 By remaining neutral in the midst of po­liti­cal upheaval, World Bank officials believed they could help establish urban housing upgrading programs that would “enormously improve the living conditions of the poor and the displaced—on a scale comparable in Asia only to public housing activities in Hong Kong and Singapore.”13 World Bank officials repeatedly underscored the difference between their in situ upgrading schemes and the disruptive, po­liti­cally volatile removal and resettlement of large central-­city informal settlements. Strangely, then, the World Bank claimed neutrality and yet also claimed credit for urban upgrading programs designed to render Manila legible to global capitalism—­this at a time when the Philippine government actively pursued a diametrically opposed program of mass clearance.

Slum Upgrading Versus Resettlement The World Bank’s stance on large-­scale resettlement programs was a relatively new one, a position birthed in global experiences and, in par­tic­u­lar, on aided self-­help proj­ects in West and Sub-­Saharan Africa. The World Bank benefited from late entry into the work in international housing, beginning its work as it did de­cades a­ fter the U.S. Agency for International Development, the vari­ous regional development banks, a host of United Nations technical missions, and, eventually, the formalized UN Centre for ­Human Settlements and UN Development Programme. When the World Bank did fi­nally begin work in urban poverty and housing in 1972, its officials almost immediately had to grapple with the economic and po­liti­cal repercussions of large-­



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scale clearance. By the mid-1970s, the World Bank had already begun doubting the efficacy of aided self-­help proj­ects, particularly in West and Sub-­ Saharan Africa, where World Bank–­funded proj­ects had removed squatters from their in-­city residences and relocated them to remote sites with better amenities and formal titles.14 Such programs, while certainly appealing to local governments, generally failed to meet cost recovery criteria and had the added negative of stirring up considerable animosity from potential relocatees, most of whom had l­ittle interest in moving hours away from the urban core. It was precisely ­because of ­these reasons that the World Bank chose to experiment with slum upgrading in Indonesia and the Philippines as two first test sites for gradual housing improvement on-­site and the provision of smaller amenities as opposed to ­wholesale resettlement. In a somewhat surprising turn of events, World Bank officials found their concerns with cost recovery aligned them with informal dwellers and humanitarian, Christian, and charitable organ­izations. All of ­these groups urged slum upgrading over any massive resettlement campaigns, albeit for dif­fer­ent reasons. In a further twist, the latter—­humanitarian, Christian, and charitable organ­izations—­generally found it difficult to believe that the World Bank supported small-­scale, on-­site upgrading and that it did not secretly fund the Marcos regime’s massive Tondo resettlement campaigns. Church leaders, Amnesty International, and an array of interested individuals repeatedly wrote impassioned letters to the vari­ous officials in the World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific programs, as well as to World Bank president Robert McNamara, denouncing what they believed to be World Bank support for Marcos’ torture and repression of informal dwellers’ organ­izations and Herrera in par­tic­u­lar. The World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific programs director Gregory Votaw ­responded again and again with letters explaining, “The Manila Urban Development proj­ect thus marks an impor­tant step in assisting the government in developing policies of slum development relying on site development, rather than relocation of local ­people, which is a policy which has long been supported by both the ­people of the Tondo and by the Bank,” but the World Bank’s self-­defense seemed to have fallen for the most part on deaf ears.15 Combing through the archival rec­ords held by the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and by the Philippine government in the National Housing Authority (NHA) in Quezon City, it is difficult to trace precisely when the World Bank turned away from massive resettlement in f­ avor of slum upgrading in Tondo. Nor is ­there documentary evidence to support or refute World Bank officials’ claims that they ­were not involved in the po­liti­cal suppression

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of informal dwellers’ organ­izations. Research uncovers more questions than ­ ere Tondo leaders so thoroughly convinced the World Bank answers: Why w ideologically and financially backed the NHA’s resettlement schemes? Did they have any evidence that the World Bank invested in the resettlement of Tondo residents or the breakup of specific po­liti­cal organ­izations? And given the World Bank’s undisputed interest in Philippine housing, why did almost none of the Philippine government’s massive urban clearance schemes make their way into World Bank rec­ords? Instead of looking at what w ­ ere clearly the most pressing issues in NHA and ZOTO rec­ords, World Bank rec­ords carefully traced the long-­term impact of small on-­site upgrading experiments. In one report by A. Pellegrini, Urban Proj­ects Department head, for instance, the World Bank official stated, “Agreement has been reached between the [branches of the Philippine government] that an upgrading program for blighted areas in the MMA [Metro Manila Area] should be progressively expanded from demonstration proj­ects at Tondo Foreshore . . . ​to the comprehensive upgrading of community facilities for all slum (low-­income and unser­viced) areas throughout Metro Manila, so that t­ hese areas ­will be transformed from their pres­ent status to communities which contribute positively to the overall growth of Metro Manila.”16 Conversely, on the side of the Philippine national government—­whether during the Marcos, Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, or Gloria Macapagal-­Arroyo presidency—­abundant rec­ords indicate the NHA not only prioritized but had no prob­lem publicizing its interest in resettlement over on-­site upgrading. This was as true for smaller city-­managed housing authorities as for the NHA, and for obvious reasons: city officials sought slum clearance not ­because they ­were solely motivated by concerns with poor families’ living conditions or their exposure to “danger sites” like rising estero w ­ aters and proximity to the rails, but rather ­because they needed to find a compromise between the h ­ uman rights of informal settlers and the need for modern infrastructure. From the point of view of the Philippine government, resettlement simply had to occur for large-­scale infrastructural proj­ects to proceed and for the city to operate successfully as a global hub. Put bluntly, successful resettlement programs needed to move marginal workers out of Manila and keep them from returning to prime urban real estate. (Roger Rouse aptly described this pro­cess as the warehousing of excess ­labor on peri-­urban sites.) The NHA focused on precisely t­ hese goals, with a 1978 Slum Improvement and Resettlement Program helping over forty thousand families find employment on decentralized sites like Dasmarinas, Sapang Palay, and Carmona. The NHA



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proudly noted less than 2 ­percent of the total population returned to Metro Manila, according to NHA general man­ag­er Gaudencio Tobias. At the same time, World Bank funding kept slum upgrading programs vibrant, with a Zonal Improvement Program targeting thirteen “depressed areas” in Metro Manila for upgrading. When World Bank housing programs in Metro Manila dwindled in the 1990s, however, the NHA’s emphasis on resettlement became much clearer, as annual reports all highlighted the grinding poverty of inner-­city informal settlements and the healthful, homeownership-­based resettlement communities on the outer reaches of the metropolis. Upgrading helped in the immediate crisis, but resettlement provided answers for the long run.

Owning a Home in a Resettlement Community: A Slum Clearance Success Story? According to NHA officials, the happy ending to slum clearance and resettlement was not merely the cleaning up of critical urban space; it was the prosperity and increased po­liti­cal and literal “buy-in” of families whose lives had been improved by the move. When asking relocatees to summarize their feelings about their new homes, however, families gave more complex answers. In par­tic­u ­lar, individuals relocated from vari­ous parts of Metro Manila to Northville V in Batia, Bocaue, Bulacan (roughly nineteen miles north of central Manila and two hours away by car b­ ecause of traffic congestion and the absence of public transportation), repeatedly underscored the prob­lem of location. Location mattered b­ ecause it was tied to work: even if new housing sites had much safer play spaces for their ­children, even if air quality was vastly better, and even if residents had new opportunities to grow foodstuffs, jobs remained in the city. Ultimately, residents needed to figure out a way to survive on virtually no income, commute four to five hours a day, or send part of the ­family back to Manila or elsewhere to work. Many opted to break apart families in order to survive. One of the proudest homeowners during my site visit in 2013—­a block leader and active participant in the homeowners’ association (HOA)—­freely admitted that she would not be able to afford her mortgage if her two sons had not successfully obtain overseas employment in Riyadh. Tita Baby, as she was known to her friends and neighbors, openly admitted she was “blessed more than most.” Nonetheless, in what felt very much like a rehearsed per­for­mance coordinated

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Figure 4.1. Homeowner and f­amily members in front of their home. January 8, 2013. Photo by author.

with visiting NHA staff, she gladly discussed the benefits of homeownership, noting, “I can say my home is mine.” This first, unequivocal praise for homeownership grew more complicated with further conversation, however: in fact, Tita Baby had originally forfeited her property in the province of Nueva Ecija in order to move into a 1,000 pesos-­per-­month railway rental one meter from passing trains in central Manila. In other words, she had readily given up homeownership for a tenuous existence in an informal urban settlement along the rails. Only with the financial security of her sons’ remittances and the coincidental timing of the NHA’s resettlement program did homeownership again become a priority, fueling a sense of personal dignity and stimulating more investment. With the security of steady remittances from her two sons, Baby showed considerable initiative, selling ­children’s clothes for extra money, redoing all of the interior plumbing in her new home, building a new kitchen, carefully decorating the interior, and planting a lush edible garden on the thin strip of land surrounding her home. Conversely, many of Baby’s neighbors exhibited very ­little of her enthusiasm for homeownership. According to widowed homeowner Marive Fernandez, “I used to wash clothes and make 150 pesos a day—­just enough for one meal. Now I have no income. If I ­can’t eat ­every day ­because I have no money, if Meralco [a power com­pany] is ­going to cut off my electricity, how am I g­ oing



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to pay my mortgage?” Fernandez’s neighbor across the street had even less interest in discussing the merits of homeownership or pro­gress on his mortgage, being an illegal renter in a unit meant for owner occupation. Another ­couple a few ­houses away complained bitterly that they had had no choice but to become homeowners ­after the government demolished their informal settlement in central Manila. More than homeownership, this ­couple longed for the compensation check promised to them by the Philippine government and supposedly issued by the South Korean com­pany developing railways on their former site of residence. (According to NHA officials, no such compensation had ever been promised, much less delivered.) Still other residents grumbled about the difficulties of living so far away from their old rental ­ ere HOA leadproperties—­this despite the fact that many of this last group w ers in the current settlement and fire victims from Tondo and Navotas. When asked what homeownership meant to them, t­hese HOA leaders concurred that the single best word to capture the experience was “sacrifice.” They did not take kindly to suggestions that they return to informal urban dwellings, however, responding with considerable hostility, “Why would we do that? We are not professional squatters! We are invested in our homes!”17 While freely employing the rhe­toric of the government, then, homeowners thought of their tenure type as an obligation and a sign of their law-­abiding status rather than as a source of credit or a personal achievement. When it came to ­house pride, it was not tenure type but rather vis­i­ble standards of living—­indoor plumbing, the quality of the furniture, the size of the tele­vi­ sion, and the like—­that delineated class differences within a low-­income resettlement community. Clearly, homeownership in Metro Manila has evolved in considerably more complex ways than the owner investment and savings scheme envisioned by the World Bank or the NHA. In some ways, homeownership has backfired: for many relocatees, it is part of a welfare program they had and continue to have ­little choice but to accept. ­Those families rejecting homeownership and resettlement ­were offered a single small cash payment from the NHA and expected to move back to their rural province of origin; t­ hose turning down both resettlement and the cash payment w ­ ere met with a potent force one housing official called “forcesuasion.”18 Once resettled, homeownership locked residents at the furthest edges of economic well-­being, most far removed from their now-­forfeited city jobs and unable to pay for their daily needs, much less for their mortgages. Livelihood training did not seem to elicit much interest, ­either, despite the repeated complaints about job access; according to one teen

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participating in a soap-­making training session, “I’m just ­here ­because they ­ ere right now.” Some govcame [pointing at two friends]. My parents are not h ernment workers expressed frustration with the constant refrain about lost work, stating, “They left their jobs in the city? What job? Job as a pickpocket?”19 ­W hether for legitimate or illegitimate work, one fact was irrefutable: homeownership dispersed families and broke apart cramped, communal urban living spaces; it could reduce access to economic security instead of generating entrepreneurial activity through new lines of credit. Worse, it turned marginal settlers into criminals if and when they chose to return to Manila as “professional squatters.” Still, the NHA continues to promote homeownership as a corollary to resettlement. In part, this is ­because the NHA itself has few choices. It is caught, as one Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council worker put it, “between what investors want and what poor ­people need.”20 While NHA workers acknowledge that in-­city housing is more desirable, the government cannot generally afford large housing programs on more expensive urban real estate, nor can they justify offering homeownership at prices low enough to be affordable to the lowest income bracket. (The NHA’s recent, in-­city, medium-­rise housing program only offers a very limited number of multiple-­family units for rent for this reason.) Given financial limitations and given the obvious need to do something about living conditions in central Manila, the NHA continues to implement what its workers freely admit is an imperfect rehousing system. Tellingly, resettlement communities continue to rely heavi­ ly on philanthropy—­both domestic and international—­for basic life necessities like clean ­water and health ser­vices. Nongovernmental organ­izations such as Gawad Kalinga and Habitat for Humanity work with the NHA in the physical construction of housing units on peripheral sites; smaller NGOs like Operation Blessing Foundation, Entrepinoy Volunteers, Life Proj­ect for Youth, and Sige Foundation help dig wells and provide livelihood training; and Salesian priests and Protestant missionaries of wide-­ranging denominations provide mobile dental and physical health clinics. The scale and scope of informal settlements is so im­mense, and the poverty so deep and visually striking, that it comes as no surprise that the majority of the 291 NGOs counted by the Philippine Council for NGO Certification are involved in some way in helping provide decent shelter and bettering living conditions for t­ hese communities. Of the vari­ous efforts, the large media broadcasting com­pany ABS-­CBN has had a noticeable impact in the informal settlements crowded along the



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waterways of the Pasig River in Greater Manila. Gina Lopez, a member of the Lopez Group that owns ABS-­CBN, played and continues to play a prominent role in directing the resources of the conglomerate t­ oward estero cleanup and resettlement campaigns.21 In addition to funding vari­ous efforts through the media ­giant ABS-­CBN, Lopez helped mobilize and or­ga­nize vari­ous individual private donors ranging from members of her own ­family to interested foreigners like the sheikh of Bahrain. Corporate sponsors also play a major role, as in the case of a resettlement community of over five thousand residents in Barangays Dayap and Santo Tomas, where ABS-­CBN and the NHA worked hand in hand with the enormous food, beverage, and packing conglomerate San Miguel Corporation, together erecting housing units, an elementary school (complete with school supplies), day care centers, and a medical clinic.22 The Ayala Group and Sunlife contributed as well, making at least some low-­income homeownership programs the beneficiaries of corporate charity. Homeownership is a key part of what volunteers and donors have bought into ideologically; one ABS-­CBN worker explained that she wanted residents to “break ­free from slum thinking and become in­de­pen­dent.”23 For ­those not living ­u nder bridges or ­t hose fortunate enough to have homes beyond the three-­meter boundary from the edge of an estero, relocation and cleanup campaigns seem to be having exactly the positive effects anticipated by ABS-­CBN’s Kapit Bisig para sa Ilog Pasig (“linking arms for the Pasig river”) river rehabilitation proj­ect workers. Property values continue to rise b­ ecause of the improved amenities and perception of safety; some homeowners have invested considerably in their properties, building extra additions and rooftop rooms and placing decorative plants along the new riverfront walkway. Community development programs such as the River Warriors program have mobilized and trained former estero dwellers to continue the heroic effort of cleaning up polluted waterways and planting vegetation along the embankments as both decoration and a flood prevention method. “The esteros used to be very ugly and polluted, with criminals and drug dealers,” one resident observed. “Now it’s a place for ­people.”24 ABS-­CBN has been particularly skillful in bringing together vari­ous efforts—­public and private, local and international—to work on dif­fer­ent aspects of community development, housing construction, and welfare programs in resettlement programs. Some participants, like the Consuelo Zobel Alger Foundation, have contributed to resettlement communities explic­itly as part of their larger mission to help indigent native ­peoples own their own

Figure 4.2. Corporate and nonprofit organ­izations play critical roles in providing basic amenities like ­water at the Southville resettlement site in Calauan, Laguna. June 10, 2013. Photo by author.



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home. (Besides its work in the Philippines, the foundation also funded native homeownership campaigns with Housing and Urban Development in Hawaii, including a 2004 turnkey development program on the Freitas Dairy site in Waianae Valley.) Most recently, Habitat for Humanity launched a Home Improvement Microsavings Program with Citi Foundation (August 2012) in order to “encourag[e] 3,000 low-­income families to save money for home improvements, particularly to mitigate against natu­ral disasters.”25

Conclusion When looking at slum clearance programs in Greater Manila at the end of the twentieth c­ entury, it becomes clear that housing policies cannot be ­understood as simply local, urban, national, or transnational. Resettlement programs operated and continue to operate si­mul­ta­neously on multiple scales: they take shape in response to domestic politics, to local ideas about how to succeed in an international marketplace, to globally exchanged “best practices” as conveyed through the neoliberal agendas of international financial institutions like the World Bank, and perhaps even to indirect demands of foreign investors and tourists. The transnational aspects of slum clearance highlight just how many actors play roles in globalizing cities like Manila, and how complex the negotiation of rights can be. The stakes are high, with homes saved or lost in the pro­cess. It makes sense, then, that we study slum clearance at all levels, ­whether local, national, transnational, or global.

chapter 5

Crossing Bound­aries The Global Exchange of Planning Ideas Ca rol a H ein

Commodity flows, information streams, and diverse migratory movements have long carried ideas of urban form and function around the world, inspiring ­people to transform and erect buildings, to change their cities, and to develop the rural spaces around them. Studies of transnationalism and trans­ national urbanism have engaged with ­these migrations and the largely unplanned changes they produced in built and urban form and examined how ­these spaces shape further transnational practices.1 But many of ­these same studies neglect the role of professional planners. For their part, planning historians have failed to engage with the larger frameworks in which urban ideas and plans travel, though they have assembled numerous case studies of the transmission of planning ideas across multiple bound­aries, exploring diverse instances of imposition and borrowing.2 ­These two explorations merit an interconnected analy­sis, reading transnational migratory flows and the transmission of planning ideas and practices in light of each other, offering a more complex and integrative approach to the study of planning in border crossings and its effect on the urban environment. Following an examination of terminology, this chapter illustrates how planners have operated in the realms of transnational and cross-­cultural urbanism and migration: as employees of global networks of private corporations, as agents of international institutions, as private mi­grants, and as writers and designers. It shows how dif­fer­ent types of institutionalized and individual



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global settings alter the meaning of national, cultural, or language borders and respectively facilitate or hinder planning migration. The tools of transmission, such as written text or images, further change the quality of the diffusion of ideas. Vignettes based on specific research by the author anchor the analy­sis in concrete examples. ­These examples are not meant to cover the globe or to be geo­graph­i­cally, spatially, temporally, or culturally complete and encompassing, but rather to illustrate the multiplicity of planners’ roles in transnational urbanism and cross-­cultural exchange.

What’s in a Name? Taking the Term “Transnational Urbanism” to Task in the Field of Planning “Transnational urbanism” has become a common term among scholars in the social sciences and history investigating the flows of ­people and commodities across national borders and scrutinizing the connections between ­these flows and urban spaces. They often use the phrases “transnational urbanism” and “transnational cities” to describe how an ethnic group affects urban form and function in shopping malls, suburbs, and housing proj­ects or to discuss the impact of highly paid expatriates on diverse areas of the city; some also use ­these phrases to describe global investments or specific interventions in urban form. Coined to balance the concepts of “globalization” and “global cities,” the term “transnational urbanism” aims to reintroduce the power of national politics and players. Po­liti­cal scientist Michael Peter Smith used the term to distinguish pro­cesses of globalization on the one hand from globalization as a structure framing the sociospatial conditions of localized actors on the other.3 (Critics of Smith’s work point to a lack of concrete evidence and case studies grounding this conceptual work.)4 Between global and local is the national. The term “transnational ” in “transnational urbanism” implies the crossing of a national border and thus emphasizes the importance of the nation. Historian Patricia Clavin in par­tic­ u­lar provides a good overview of the term “transnational,” coined in 1919 in the United States to address issues of migration and identity; she tracks the word’s changing usages and the challenges associated with it.5 As she points out, “Transnational history also allows us to reflect on, while at the same time ­going beyond, the confines of the nation. It sheds new, comparative light on the strengths and the fragilities of the nation-­state and underlines the ways in which local history can be understood in relation to world history.”6 Researchers

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have long used the term to discuss exchanges that are not concerned purely with national bound­aries, but a new term has yet to be introduced. The term “transnational” has been used loosely to signify a range of specific bound­a ries, but it has not yet acknowledged the diverse character of bound­aries themselves and the ways in which their differences influence migratory practices—­especially for the purpose of this chapter, ­those practices related to planners and their tools. Such an acknowl­edgment is particularly impor­t ant for comparative studies that go beyond the American realm or focus on, say, the U.S.-­Mexican border. The character of a given boundary is intimately related to the exchanges that cross it (or the lack thereof). A po­liti­ cal border can overlap with geo­graph­i­cal features like rivers or mountains (the Rio Grande between Texas and some Mexican states is one example), but it can also be guarded and closed off by walls and weaponry, as with the Berlin Wall, or it can be open, like the borders within the Eu­ro­pean Union. A border is not necessarily a single line; it can be a zone. Some borders may be difficult for ­people to cross but more porous for institutions, goods, publications, or ideas. Research that engages with built form needs to acknowledge ­these physical differences and study their effects on cities and planning. National borders continue to be of ­great importance, as Smith has stressed.7 But not even the po­liti­cal border of the nation-­state is a constant, and differences among kinds of borders shape the transfer of planning ideas in distinct ways. Po­liti­cal borders are one kind of boundary, and their par­tic­ u­lar form may or may not overlap with other cultural or linguistic limits that influence the circulation of goods and ideas. Cultural or linguistic borders can contain areas that are smaller or bigger than a national boundary (or that cross ­those bound­aries): the Dutch language, spoken in both northern Belgium and neighboring Netherlands, easily circulates and crosses lines, facilitating the transfer of ideas, including ones on planning. But the regional divide within Belgium between French and Flemish speakers is a split within a nation, and can mark differences in planning approaches despite the national framework. Conversely, the zone between the two ­Koreas and the former border between East and West Germany are hard po­liti­cal bound­aries that cut across cultural and linguistic communities, where opposing planning concepts are at work despite a common language. Religious, linguistic, and historical borders can channel movement along lines outside the physically bounded nation. For instance, cultural communities of ethnic mi­grants communicate ideas across continents, resulting in urban areas of similar appearance such as Chinatowns.8 Global corporations and



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international institutions can channel planners and their works across national and cultural borders in ways that differ from ­those of individual mi­grants. In all cases, planners and plans can have a bigger impact on urban change than other mi­grants or their tools. Books and images can also travel without the migration of ­people and shape urban form. ­Here again, national or other bound­aries support or hinder transmissions in dif­fer­ent ways. Publications may circulate beyond national borders but stay within linguistic or cultural borders. Imagery might not be limited by language, but it may travel according to cultural preferences. ­These movements often go in overlapping, multiple directions, requiring research that carefully places the specific topic into larger contexts. The exploration of economic mi­grants may overlap with expatriate movements, and both need to be considered together. The concept of “transnational” has some limitations that are also relevant in the field of planning. Some scholars have used the term “transcultural or cross-­cultural” to acknowledge a broader array of bound­aries and the streams and networks they generate.9 Clarifying the meaning of borders is particularly relevant in the transmission of ideas in planning, as their migration follows dif­fer­ent rules from ­those followed in the physical migration of planners, and as they amplify the impact of migratory planners. Given the diverse channels along which ­people, goods, and ideas travel and the distinct vehicles they use, the study of borders thus needs to go hand in hand with that of diverse migratory networks of p ­ eople and the tools they use to transmit ideas on urban form (such as in the case of planning). The word “urbanism” in “transnational/transcultural urbanism” also requires further investigation, as it creates confusion among social scientists and planning scholars. Researchers in the social sciences use the term “urbanism” to describe a broad field of urban experiences and forms, capturing what ­people are actually ­doing. But architects and planning professionals use it more specifically to prescribe urban design and planning interventions, mandating or shaping what they think ­people should do. They are the ones who provide public and private decision makers with built forms that reflect desired and ­imagined social realities in the city as much as or even more than existing and emerging ones. Multiple architectural and urban movements have combined ­these definitions of urbanism to reimagine the urban environment and the social relations and lifestyles it facilitates. We can see both description and prescription, for example, in the ideas of “new urbanism.” Social scientists have used this phrase and terms like it to describe migratory and other movements changing urban realities. But planners have used it to propose new

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forms: in the 1950s, the Metabolists’ new urbanism was a movement to create towns for the dwellers of the ­future, and in the 1980s New Urbanism emerged as a neotraditionalist or smart-­growth program that started in the United States and aimed to create new urban and suburban settings to shape the changing demands of the public and to respond to public dissatisfaction with postwar suburban sprawl. The term “urbanism” in “transnational urbanism” thus confusingly addresses both intangible and tangible aspects of cities, planned and unplanned aspects of urban form. Discussions on transnational or cross-­cultural urbanism need to take into account ­these differences or intersections of urban form created by mi­grants and plans created by mi­grant planners. Scholars and planners must clarify ­whether they are using ­these terms to speak about global flows and their role in planning practice around the world, about private or international institutions that own or control large parts of the built environment and that influence planning beyond borders, about the ­people who create urbanity through their everyday lives and use of spaces, about professional planners who migrate short or long term, or about the tools of planning that cross borders without the presence of a mi­grant planner. Smith’s call for a multiscaled approach to the study of migration and the exchange of cultural practices is part of a larger body of lit­er­a­ture on transnationalism, transnational history, and transnational planning history, including commentaries by major writers in urban studies.10 Much of the lit­er­a­ture has focused on transient ­people, institutions, and spaces rather than on physical structures or the built environments, including their planning, that resulted from such transnational transfers. It is this physicality and its production—­including the varying roles of actors with training in design professions and with dif­fer­ent levels of power—­that still demand attention. Planning historians have long been aware of the importance of border crossings of planning ideas, and many authors have written extensive case studies. Key figures include Anthony King, who has reflected on the construction of transnational planning histories at vari­ous moments in his ­career. He has notably pointed to the shifts in theoretical and historical paradigms of such an analy­sis, as well as the difficulty of accessing archives spread around the globe, and the challenges of language and cultural or national belonging of the scholar writing the analy­sis.11 Stephen Ward has notably attempted to systematize the exchanges of planning ideas.12 Themes of urban policy transfers and planning models are at the heart of research by Andrew Harris and Susan Moore, and the international exchange of planning ideas is the theme of the



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edited volume by Patsy Healey and Robert Upton.13 Arturo Almandoz has explored issues of Latin American urbanism and its historiography.14 Other scholars, including the late Anthony Sutcliffe, Pierre-­Yves Saunier, and Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait have helped to refine this work.15 The transfer of planning ideas is part of wider transnational exchanges, as demonstrated in Dirk Schubert’s investigation of the neighborhood unit and its transatlantic exchange in Jeffry Diefendorf and Janet Ward’s book on transnationalism and the German city.16 But an integrated discussion of formal and informal planning activities and their collective impact on urban transformation remains to be written.

Migrations and the Role of Planning Therein An exploration of migrations in transnational and cross-­cultural context and their planned effects on urban built form also needs to consider the role of planners as mi­grants, the institutional context in which they travel and the spatiality and temporality of the border they cross, and the roles of their ­writings and drawings in planning exchange. Individual ­people or huge border-­crossing institutions and corporations have dif­fer­ent levels of agency and intention in carry­ing ideas of urban form. Planners as mi­grants, specifically, through their often close connections with po­liti­cal and economic elites and their disciplinary focus, have had extensive opportunities to reshape cities and they multiply the impact of other mi­grants on urban form. Such an exploration needs to engage with the multidirectional interactions of t­ hese diverse actors, and with a range of bottom-up and top-­down pro­cesses, from the construction of headquarters to the rental of local flats. Also impor­tant in the study of t­ hese diverse migratory frameworks in planning are their interconnections with the exchange of written publications and images.

Mi­grant Planners Individual migration has ­shaped cities for many centuries and in multiple ways, involving a broad range of ­people, including planners, and approaches from migration studies could enrich research in planning history. Mi­grants can be laborers, business elites, professional specialists, émigrés, refugees, or long-­and short-­term travelers, and, as migration scholars have discussed, t­ hese

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border-­crossing ­people affect urban culture and life.17 Their impact on urban form is related to ­whether they are rich or poor (think of Chinatowns) and ­whether they travel for short or long periods (think of cruise ship tourism). Expatriate workers shape cities through their upper-­class consumption, higher incomes, and tastes and aversions; economic mi­grants reshape cities through their ­labor and consumption. ­Factors as dif­fer­ent as mi­grants’ trip durations, intensity of engagement with locals and their spaces, and professional preparation and standing can determine the degree to which an exchange of ideas occurs between two locations through the agency of mi­grants and how and to what degree their travels shape the built environment. Dif­fer­ent groups may or may not act within the same realms and the same length of time; often mi­grants of dif­fer­ent classes travel within specific cultural streams or within the same language realms, creating separate urban realms. Newcomers need housing, trading, storage spaces, and worship and leisure locations, thus transforming local infrastructure and the built environment in general. Beyond ­these direct effects, mi­grants influence the city in a wide range of indirect ways. All of them intersect with the activities of professional architects and planners.18 That is, migration movements overlap with the work of planning professionals. This in turn provides foundations for ­people to create urban form and exchange ideas on the built environment.19 Professional planners or architects are few among the mi­grants, but their specialized knowledge can inspire urban change even a­ fter short trips, ­whether bringing in new information or taking it out. They thus have a multiplier function. As individuals, planners and design professionals have traveled the globe over time, offering their knowledge to diverse corporations and institutions. While the numbers of such professionals are small, their impact can be huge, as they translate their ideas into master plans or buildings that affect entire cities and as the impact of their ideas is spread widely by publication. Architects and planners, and therefore architectural and planning concepts, have traveled also as a result of natu­ral or human-­made disasters. Wars, particularly the two world wars, produced extensive voluntary and involuntary migration, including that of leading architects and planning professionals before, during, and a­ fter the conflict. Th ­ ese individuals influenced power structures in countries that participated in the conflict, as well as neutral ones. The Nazis’ anti-­Semitic and antimodernist dissolution of the German Bauhaus in the early 1930s pushed planning professionals to countries around the world, and they spread modernist ideas that their host countries used in urban redevelopment in the postwar period. Planning professionals traveled extensively



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a­ fter the war—­from the United States to Eu­rope, but also from Eu­rope to the United States—as con­sul­tants, on study tours, and for conferences on postwar rebuilding; their travels ­were part of larger migrations. Not only ­people but ideas traveled, and sometimes ideas that, once exported, even traveled back home, as when modernist plans and planners migrated from the United States back to Eu­rope. New global power structures in the postwar period ­shaped postwar rebuilding in war-­destroyed countries and urban renewal in ­others. Even though the United States dominated in this period, it participated in a multidirectional exchange of planning ideas with Eu­ro­pean countries, including just-­vanquished Germany. Eu­ro­pean émigrés and American professionals explored the reconstruction of downtowns, particularly in northern Eu­ro­pean cities, at planning conferences, on study trips, and in other educational activities.20 Their focus on northern Eu­rope illustrates my point that bound­aries other than national ones come into play in t­ hese discussions. Language, cultural affinities, and long-­standing historical connections, but also geo­graph­i­cal scales, seem to be just as relevant as t­hose created by national bound­aries. Thus issues of bound­aries are at work when we discuss urban form and its expression in varied landscapes, or the creation of urban form infused with practices and concepts from another place or tradition. Particularly in war­time, planners lived in multiple countries, pushed back and forth between many states and movements. The German Jewish architect Otto Koenigsberger worked in Germany before being active in Africa and India; he l­ater headed the Department of Development and Tropical Studies at the Architectural Association in London, and worked for the United Nations.21 His work, and that of his compatriots, is understandable only in the larger context of such global movements and of international politics and economics. Professional groups and associations often magnify the concepts and works of planners. While t­hese groups can multiply the importance of a ­single planner’s opinions, their work can also be reappropriated. For example, conference papers from the Congrès International d’Architecture IV confer­ ere prepared by a group of primarily Eu­ro­pean planners, but w ­ ere ence (1933) w published by Le Corbusier and Jose Luis Sert in single-­authored publications, each author expressing his or her own interests rather than ­those of the group; ­these publications, as well as subsequent ones during the Cold War, also largely deleted the voice of the Rus­sian del­e­ga­tion from the discussions. Scholars in planning history have studied individuals and their professional migrations; tying this research to the discussions on transnational

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urbanism can enrich the emerging field and deliver insights into the multiple facets and forms of migration and their impact on the creation of local urban forms and practices.

Corporate Networks Spread Planning and Architecture Ideas Global corporations are particularly power­ful actors, spreading ideas about urban form and planning practices in both unplanned and planned ways. Given their potentially huge size and economic importance, their imprint on the built environment can be much more consistent and larger than that of individuals. Multinational companies, vectors of globalization, have implemented design guidelines for their outlets and com­pany log­os. The yellow-­ red Shell logo or the blue, red, and white Exxon sign, like the yellow M of McDonald’s, registers the global influence of networked economic players; they are function-­driven similarities rather than planned convergences; they link urban spaces around the world, claiming them for commerce. How local planning responds to the built expression of globalization, from signs to big-­box megastores such as IKEA, and how their presence transforms local planning practices across spatial and temporal scales, is an extensive area of research that requires its own investigation. Corporations make an impact on multiple levels and sometimes take the local planning pro­cesses hostage: issuing novel requirements for building types and urban areas, using planning specialists in a global framework, facilitating education as they pursue their corporate goals, creating mindscapes, and extending philanthropy to the cities that host them. The impact of corporations on cities has a long history. Business communities have long created commodity flows that reshape urban spaces. Elites in port cities have changed ports, ware­houses, administration buildings—­urban form itself—to accommodate specific commodities and new sizes and forms of ships. Elites who traded ­these commodities set up their own facilities for housing, leisure, and religious purposes. P ­ eople associated with trade in general, from business workers to sailors, created their own districts, such as Bryggen, the Hanseatic district in Bergen, Norway.22 ­These mi­g rants have long depended on local experts to translate their needs into built form. We can see ­these effects of business communities and commodity flows on urban built form in nineteenth-­century Japan, for example. ­A fter the arrival of foreign companies, architectural and planning concepts followed commodity flows. Jardine Matheson, a Far Eastern trading com­pany established



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in Canton in 1832 by two Scottish traders, set up headquarters in Hong Kong in 1842 and ­later built offices in numerous Chinese port cities, as well as in Japan. The Hong Kong headquarters stood proudly on the waterfront, as shown in a view from Causeway Bay in 1846. The com­pany similarly occupied a prominent spot on the newly constructed Yokohama waterfront, displaying European-­inspired architectural design erected by local builders. With no local architects available, the Scotsmen taught design concepts to locals. Local builders appropriated ­these concepts for their own uses, as the case of Iwakichi Kajima suggests: having built for Jardine Matheson and learned from the newly arrived Western companies, he developed what would become Kajima Corporation, a global construction com­pany.23 Jardine Matheson served as the interface of global and local trade, and also stimulated cultural exchanges, including in the field of architecture and planning education. When a group of high-­level politicians and specialists traveled from Japan to Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca in 1871–73 to study po­liti­cal systems, economics, cultures, technologies, and built environments, they engaged foreign specialists, including Henry Dyer (1848–1918). This Scottish engineer became director of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo.24 Due to this par­tic­u­lar history, architecture is taught in engineering schools in Japan and not—as in France—in design-­oriented institutions.25 The first architecture professor, Josiah Conder, came from E ­ ngland, bringing his training and ideas with him. ­There are many other histories of business ties facilitating the transmission of architectural and urban ideas—­not only b­ etween Japan and other countries—in fields from construction practices to education. Architectural and urban planning ideas also traveled with commodity flows in the global network of oil. As oil became a global consumer good, its production and transportation ­were intimately entwined with urban growth and development, even before the mass production of cars. The transport and refining of oil require similar technologies and interconnected infrastructure such as pipelines and refineries, shaping built and urban form globally. The innovating as well as standardizing impact of global oil companies has not been limited to structures directly connected to petroleum. Standard Oil, for example, has put its mark on cities by ­either selecting or constructing the most innovative office buildings of their time in multiple locations. Similarly, Exxon, a Standard Oil spinoff, has set trends with its regional headquarters. As the com­pany rapidly grew to a huge size in the postwar era and had similarly huge funding available, it became a key player in the construction of office districts in the 1950s and 1960s on the outskirts of major cities in Eu­rope. The

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com­pany also provided architectural leadership, sponsoring competitions and contracting renowned architects.26 In Hamburg, it designed its new business district as a low-­density office zone with extensive green spaces in the City Nord. Innovative administrative buildings included the BP headquarters next door, whose beehive-­shaped construction established the open-­plan office as a standard. Similarly, in Paris, Exxon was the first to move to the new business district La Défense, helping to establish it. In this example, architectural concepts and needs, transmitted as part of a com­pany philosophy, directly influenced urban development without the participation of planners. Global companies can also shape the built environment indirectly, through philanthropy. The Standard Oil com­pany’s founder, John D. Rocke­fel­ler, affected cities through investments and charitable gifts, including medical and educational facilities, such as Rocke­fel­ler University in New York; Chinese medical facilities such as Peking Union Medical College; and the preservation and reconstruction of the historical city of Williamsburg, where John D. Rocke­fel­ler Jr.’s support was essential. Rocke­fel­ler also invested in American natu­ral landscapes, for example, through the funding of carriage trails in Acadia Park.27 Oil com­pany decisions can affect planning practices indirectly by employing and promoting specialists, as in Caracas ­after the 1930s. Rich with oil money, the Venezuelan government invited a group of French planners, led by the urbanist Maurice Rotival, to imagine a new capital. The planners proposed a new infrastructure and urban heart for the existing capital, which had now become a global player; ­these innovations would, not incidentally, display the country’s new wealth. Over the following de­cades the government ­adopted much of Rotival’s plan.28 Yet planning historians seem to have focused on wider institutional or cultural contexts or on individual planners rather than the corporate institutions that facilitate and transport their planning ideas and interventions.

Intergovernmental Institutions and the Transmission of Planning Concepts Unlike private multinational corporations, international institutions such as the Eu­ro­pean Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank are established by nations to work beyond borders. The study of their role in the transmission of plans and planners adds a dif­fer­ent perspective to the question of



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transnational or cross-­cultural urbanism and the role of plans and planners therein. Designed for cross-­border administration, ­these institutions are ­often po­liti­c ally weak. Nonetheless, they influence the built environment through the policies they make, through the global experts they choose and hire repeatedly, through the construction of headquarters and offices in their host cities, and through other buildings they build, even while ­these are often handicapped by national opposition. The EU, for example, formulates policies—on urban preservation, neighborhood conservation, and so on—­that reshape urban form. Similarly, the United Nations and the World Bank provide institutional frameworks for the migration of planners and the global implementation of their ideas. ­These institutions hire planning professionals who spread their ideas across the conti­ ese nent and its former colonies and to con­temporary overseas territories. Th flows of ­people and knowledge sometimes all but negate newly established national borders through the continuous implementation of ideas that originated in colonial times (before ­these borders existed). Former colonial professionals have often continued their work ­after decolonization. David Oakley, for example, served as special adviser in Britain and the colonies, then ­later became a con­sul­tant on housing and planning, and often for United Nations institutions.29 The French planner Henri-­Jean Calsat was active in the French colonies before becoming an expert for the World Health Organ­ization from 1964 to 1980.30 International institutions can also influence transnational planning ­directly, notably through the design of their headquarters in multiple nations. Creating what I call a polycentric capital, multiple seats give each of the participating countries a “share of the pie.”31 Choosing a site within a host city, its urban layout, and its architectural design all require international institutions to negotiate with national and local authorities. But their power to act can be very limited. For example, the EU, left with a limited set of tools for the siting and design of its institutional buildings, has treated the form of its headquarters as an administrative issue, ignoring impor­tant questions of design and symbolism. Only since 2000 have some of the EU institutions, notably the Eu­ro­pean Commission, begun to show interest in capital planning.32 The role of plans and planners working for the EU is thus limited to a functional one. Similarly, the polycentric UN headquarters is located in numerous cities and countries—­from the Palace of Nations in Geneva to the New York headquarters and the Paris United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural

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Organ­ization (UNESCO) building—­and has sought architectural expression in each location. The history of the UN’s pre­de­ces­sors demonstrates the opposition between visionary concepts on the one hand and limited po­liti­c al power, money, and cross-­cultural agreement on the other. The combination of forward-­looking international ambitions and a lack of national support prevented the UN and other international institutions from creating a single ­ ere not even allowed to select a site and monumental world city. Often, they w or design a single building. Many international institutions similarly work at both global and local levels. The United Nations’ policies on refugee camps, UNESCO’s se­lection criteria of world heritage sites, and World Bank funding indirectly shape built and urban form and function. Many other global institutions, including religious organ­izations, merit further investigation in this context (the Inter-­ American Housing Center; the Organ­ization of American States, as discussed by Amy Offner in chapter 2 of this book). Such institutions usually have par­ tic­u­lar relationships to the localities in which they are active and depend on local forces even as their planning powers on the ground are weak or non­ex­ is­tent. To connect the concepts of transnational urbanism to the interest of planning history, research could go beyond individual plans and planners to consider the role of international institutions in the transmission of ideas.

Intellectual Border Crossings of Planning Tools Books, journals, textbooks, master plans, translations, and reprints also play a major role in carry­ing and shaping planning ideas, but borders have another meaning for them. The spread of ideas often depends as much on the quality of the publication as on the relation between authors and readers, and the ties between sending and receiving countries. Questions of cultural, economic, and po­liti­cal commonalities; of language; and of the state of development all determine how ideas travel. The Spanish-­speaking world, for example, has common cultures beyond national borders, and former colonial ties continue to shape the exchange of ideas. So concepts travel between Madrid and Buenos Aires along common language lines, within professional debates, and where national borders are porous—­but doors to other linguistic spheres remain closed, often allowing ideas to travel through them only de­cades ­later. Similarly, the term “urban design” travels within the Anglophone linguistic system, with a relative absence of crossover to other systems.33



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Transnational or cross-­cultural “exchanges” may be part of intellectual exchanges, but they are often detached from their place of origin, or they occur in parallel with the transmission of dif­fer­ent ideas in the opposite direc­ ere. Japa­nese prac­ti­tion­ers tion. The Japa­nese case provides a good example h have consulted foreign prac­ti­tion­ers, translated Western-­language texts, and integrated Western concepts into their local practice, and si­mul­ta­neously Westerners imported Japa­nese ideas and practices, adapting them to their own needs. Each practitioner looked for what suited his or her specific interests and needs, sometimes exchanging ideas and concepts, but often ignoring the local context in which the respective ideas evolved and adapting the concepts to his or her own needs. Proposals for urban deconcentration stand as examples of the transfer of ideas from Eu­rope to Japan and the adaptation to local conditions. Japa­nese professionals and bureaucrats, like other planners world­ ere their wide, viewed proposals, such as the garden city, with g­ reat interest. H understanding of cities as composed of specific urban units, in line with the traditional Japa­nese concept of machi (town), may have influenced their thinking.34 In 1918, Fukuda Shigeyoshi, a technical officer of the City of Tokyo, developed the visionary New Tokyo Plan to deconcentrate Tokyo over the next fifty years. Fukuda’s proposal resembled Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Diagram No. 5 of city growth, with open country nearby and rapid communication lines, but it also adapted it by locating the new towns on a ring line around Tokyo. In 1936, the Kanto National Land Plan attempted to create greenbelts, moving industrial functions from central areas into satellite towns—­a move that was also supported by military considerations and that led to the 1937 Air Defense Law and the 1939 Tokyo Green Space Plan.35 During this time, Japa­nese planners continued to monitor Western discussions and to consult with prac­ti­tion­ers in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca. Fukuda, for example, discussed the rebuilding plan for Tokyo a­ fter the 1923 Kantô earthquake with the German planner Fritz Schumacher; and Ishikawa Hideaki, at that time an engineer in the Ministry of Home Affairs assigned to the town planning of Nagoya, consulted Raymond Unwin during his trip to Eu­rope in 1923 to seek advice on a master plan.36 The close connection to Eu­ro­pean and notably German planners continued into the Nazi period. Ishikawa’s writings and urban plans continued to be a major conduit of planning ideas from the West to Japan. He reflected on Western planning ideas and influenced emerging practice through readings and interpretation of foreign planning, including the works of the geographer Walter Christaller and professor of planning Gottfried Feder (1883–1941),

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whose work would remain part of standard Japa­nese planning textbooks into the 1990s.37 Border crossing that had been facilitated at a specific moment of po­liti­cal allegiances remained alive in one country, while being criticized and discarded in the other. Japa­nese scholars also combined and compared ideas from other countries that might not have encountered each other elsewhere, and their publications thus throw an innovative light on parallel discussions. Writings by the architect-­planner, historian-­theorist, humanist and avowed Marxist Nishiyama Uzō (1911–94) influenced Japa­nese urban planning theory and practice. They served not only to bring German concepts to Japan but to foster a wider conversation.38 In his articles he effectively brings together a range of dif­fer­ent interpretations, analyzing Eu­ro­pean, American, and Rus­sian concepts in a single article and introducing them to Japa­nese planners in ways that are not paralleled or received in Eu­ro­pean or American discussions.

Conclusion Writing, images, p ­ eople, institutions, and ideas themselves can cross a variety of borders. Readers, citizens, planners, and governments must integrate and translate ­these mi­grants, and in d ­ oing so they both inspire new developments and create disconnected pockets of knowledge. As scholars explore ­these border crossings, it is impor­tant to acknowledge the multiplicity of themes and to understand the truly networked character of the ­matter. Such an analy­sis requires extensive linguistic skills, multicultural knowledge, and academic collaboration that itself crosses borders. Looking at the interplay of transnational urbanist scholarship and the work of planners, we can identify two promising directions of new inquiry into the exchange of planning ideas: on the one hand, transnational urbanism might be studied from the viewpoint of planning history, but it extends beyond individual players and their schools of thought. A single city might still serve as the focus—­not as a locally bounded site but rather as a place of multiple transnational movements including the migratory impact of day workers and expatriates. On the other hand, transnational urbanism might also be well served by looking beyond ­these disciplinary traditions altogether. When considering a single city or site, many urban histories only occasionally acknowledge diverse foreign influences. For planning historians, looking at conflicts like the Cold War in a single city like Berlin is an opportunity



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to investigate transnational issues and shifting networks in planning history and to research the interactions between global transformations and local developments. The Iron Curtain that cut Eu­rope in two pieces, creating two German states, ran through the heart of Berlin. The Cold War framed postwar reconstruction in both parts of separated Berlin si­mul­ta­neously and in dialogue with each other. (This work needs further consideration, despite an increase in Berlin-­related publications around the recent anniversary of the construction of the wall). Many other cities around the world are sites for studying shifting border-­crossing networks and their parallel influences that are vis­i­ble notably in the palimpsest of colonial and postcolonial cities. When thinking outside the disciplinary bound­aries of urban planning and planning history, many other academic fields (and scholars who work across them) are exhibiting a growing interest in networks and flows, discussing urban systems networks, exchange in business communities, transnationalism in colonial and postcolonial networks, and their intersections.39 Analytical frameworks and methodologies are emerging and solidifying. Theories and methodologies developed in dif­fer­ent disciplines are enriching the study of planning history, such as research on exiles and their contributions in art and lit­er­a­ture, and on migration, maritime networks, transnational histories, and other networks and flows. Some geographic areas have been studied more extensively than ­others, inviting scholars to do more balanced research.40 A systematic analy­sis of planning history through the lens of diverse institutional settings of exchange is still lacking, although international institutions—as well as private corporations—­create networks within which planners can exchange design premises. Advancing research in the field of planning history ­will also allow for richer investigations, denser methodological inquiries, and multidisciplinary exchange in the growing realm of transnational scholarship.41

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PA RT I I

Place, Culture, and Power

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chapter 6

Condos in the Mall Suburban Transnational Typological Transformations in Markham, Ontario Erica A llen -­Kim

Assimilation at the Mall In 1995, Markham, Ontario’s deputy mayor Carole Bell complained at a regional council retreat that “we once had one of the finest communities in North Amer­i­ca with enviable business parks and the top corporations of the land. Now all we get are [Chinese] theme malls to serve ­people way beyond ­ ere primarily in response to the development our borders.”1 Her comments w of retail condominium malls in Markham and neighboring Richmond Hill and Scarborough that catered to the unpre­ce­dented number of Chinese immigrating to Canada prior to Hong Kong’s turnover to the ­People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997. In a move reminiscent of efforts to prevent the construction of so-­called monster h ­ ouses by Chinese immigrants in Vancouver, Bell proposed bylaws against the rezoning of industrial areas for retail condominiums in Markham, as well as mandatory English-­language signs.2 Ensuing debates on density and use revealed concerns about the establishment of an ethnic enclave economy in the North York region that appeared to exclude other residents and potential customers. Bell’s comments served as a lightning rod for debates about suburban growth and an increasingly vis­i­ ble minority population in a formerly agricultural and racially homogeneous region of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Questions of assimilation and

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multiculturalism w ­ ere considered in Chinese media such as Fairchild Tele­vi­ sion, as well as in the South China Morning Post, both of which w ­ ere owned 3 by key Chinese developers active in British Columbia. Furthermore, Chinese-­language dailies distributed in Canada linked the retail condominium issue to Vancouver’s residential zoning debates and federal immigration policy, which actively courted eco­nom­ically self-­sufficient applicants through the creation of the Canada Immigrant Investor Program (CANIIP) in 1986, as well as provincial trade missions to Asia and the Vancouver 1986 Expo.4 In this sense, the local planning authority’s response to global economic forces shaping real estate activities was watched by Chinese in Canada and in Asia. The shopping center serves as a weathervane for Markham’s ongoing transformation from a rural township to an ethnoburb located directly north of the Toronto city limits.5 Immigrants and mi­grants have actively altered the landscape of retailing by introducing and adapting commercial spaces and development models such as the condominium owner­ship of a mall. The timing and mechanisms of ­these activities have depended on transpacific and trans-­ American developments, including Canadian immigration policy responses to the handover of Hong Kong, as well as what social geographer David Ley calls the “cultural mobility of property” that links Asia and the Amer­i­cas.6 The development of the retail condo in Canada was directly connected to the minimum investment requirements of CANIIP (1986–2014), with over half the business immigrants originating in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South ­Korea between 1980 and 2001.7 Toronto was at the forefront of retail condominium construction in the 1990s. Condo malls, which are ­either converted or planned developments with individually owned units, occupy a m ­ iddle ground between planned and unplanned shopping centers where a multiplicity of cultural practices intersect.8 The history of the condo mall in Markham, from Pacific Mall to Remington Centre, demonstrates the resiliency and adaptability of the shopping center against shifting geopo­liti­cal alignments, immigration flows, and economic instability. Although the study of ethnic economies is well established, especially in the theorization of enclaves and the cultural significance of homeownership for certain immigrant groups, the role of planned shopping centers with individually owned units in shaping transnationalism has yet to attract scholarly attention.9 My proj­ect seeks to do more than address this gap in knowledge. By situating the development of Asian or Chinese malls within a broader context of urban-­suburban convergences, this study offers a view on how



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global and local forces interact with everyday practices in the designed space of the condo mall.10 In spite of being a relatively new ­legal structure in North Amer­i­ca, originating in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, the condominium has become the dominant development model for multiunit housing in both cities and suburbs, and, more recently, nonresidential proj­ects such as office, industrial, and retail spaces. The owner­ship option has attracted residents and professional businesses seeking the stability of tenure and the financial benefits of equity, yet for the most part retail businesses have avoiding purchasing commercial condominiums except when low interest rates and rising rents outweigh the costs of buying and maintaining the property.11 The disproportionate share of retail condominiums owned by ethnic minorities may be explained by cultural attitudes ­toward real property dovetailing with transnational urban activities such as remittances and the creation of an ethnic enclave economy. The use of real property as an economic and social development strategy is evident in how immigrants and ethnic minorities invest in or construct shopping centers in North Amer­i­ca. The designed space of the condo mall serves as a highly vis­i­ble site of ethnicity, politics, everyday tourism, and cultural community that negotiates between mainstream and ethnic consumption and business practices. As recent theorists of transnational urbanism have argued, place and locality ­matter in discussions of globalization that are often couched in terms of fluid and smooth spaces or networks.12 The development and controversies over retail condominiums in the GTA raise questions about the impact of migration and transnationalism on social relationships, planning theories, and the built environment. In studies of Chinese malls in British Columbia and Ontario, the small size and unplanned tenant mix or­ga­nized in a dense gridiron are noted but not considered in terms of how dif­fer­ent spaces are produced and experienced by diverse groups of actors.13 Geographers Shuguang Wang, Lucia Lo, and David Chuenyan Lai have demonstrated how the development of retail condos in Canada was linked to Chinese immigration and transnational business concerns, and also how ­these developments challenged conventional leasing systems and planning systems in North Amer­i­c a.14 Although retail condos in Canada ­were a product of Chinese immigration practices in Canada, they are also part of a broader history of nonresidential condominiums in the United States and Canada, especially from the 1970s onward, when the push-­pull forces of urban renewal, suburbanization, and aging shopping centers led to the development of unconventional retail models including the condo, kiosk, and swap meet.

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The Chinese condo mall is a significant example of the emergence of the nonresidential condominium as an attractive investment option for foreign capital, as well as for local investors and businesses that sought alternative paths to property owner­ship. Moreover, the model of group-­owned shopping centers was suggested by small-­business advocates as early as the 1970s for ethnic minority ­owners and special retailers typically blocked from shopping malls and other tightly managed commercial developments.15 The retail or office condo also developed in the United States during a period of rising rents that coincided with the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. The new tax law accelerated the depreciation deductions for property investors, thereby making owner­ship more attractive for businesses.16 As noted by urban historian Matthew Gordon Lasner, condominiums and co-­ops promised a “greater security of tenure and control” to homeowners, especially in terms of customizing the interiors.17 In the case of Canadian condo malls, Hong Kong business practices of spatial concentration and competition, as well as the sale of individual retail store units, have influenced the experience of ­these places as distinctly transnational or “Other,” depending on the user’s cultural background.18 An analy­sis of the developer Remington Group’s decision to tear down Market Village, a shopping center leased primarily to Chinese Canadian businesses, and construct in its place Remington Centre, a crossover mainstream retail condominium mall, complicates our understanding of ethnicity, shopping, and development by indicating a growing focus on the changing needs of an acculturating local Chinese population and the growing wealth of Chinese visitors such as tourists and students. As the Chinese Canadian community has grown and diversified, the Chinese mall continues to affect the Canadian suburban commercial landscape. Social geographer Wei Li’s ethnoburb model helps us to see how immigrant settlements operate within global networks of economy, politics, and culture. The ethnic mall serves as both an ideal social space for recent immigrants and a distribution point for transnational business networks by creating a conduit and physical place for capital transfer, employment, and citizenship. According to one of Ley’s contacts, a Chinese Canadian real estate con­sul­tant, Chinese prefer “real” rather than “floating” capital as a more stable form of safety net.19 Ley has suggested that property investment and real estate are especially impor­tant vehicles and objects of transnational cultural practices. He has suggested that the belief in real estate as a primary source of wealth was ­shaped by both cultural preferences and historical events. For example, the announcement of the Sino-­British Joint Declaration in 1984, which detailed the return



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of Hong Kong to PRC rule in 1997, also included the limited release of undeveloped land into the private market, thereby leading to a widespread sense of scarcity.20 With rising property values, Hong Kong Chinese of previously modest means ­were able to fund property purchases in Canada that helped expedite the immigration pro­cess and lead to higher residential and commercial densities in the suburbs. Deputy Mayor Bell’s comments highlighted the ways in which concerns about the urbanization of suburbs ­were intimately tied to concerns about transnational mi­grants and assimilation. The unique spatial properties of the condo mall produce higher densities and greater concentrations of similar tenants. Although they are planned developments, retail condos share qualities of shopping centers with unrestricted clusterings of stores or traditional urban shopping streets that go against the grain of modern retailing rules.21 A key ­factor in the postwar suburb’s reconceptualization as a site of “good density” has been social diversification through immigration, and yet a pressing concern has been potential economic inefficiencies, as well as the perceived lack of order associated with low-­income markets.22 Constructing a history of the Canadian condo mall in which economics and culture are intertwined allows us to understand the “multi-­level nested networks” that link ethnic and main economies.23 Buildings bridge multiple disciplinary and theoretical approaches including urban design, transnationalism, ethnic economies, integration policies, and consumerism. In contrast to sociologists Arent Greve and Janet W. Salaff, I argue that the physical and psychological experience of multilocality that shapes transnational identity must be examined through buildings and places. The Chinese-­themed or Chinese-­style mall emerged in the early 1980s in response to the suburbanization of the local Chinese Canadian population, but it only proliferated ­after the 1984 Sino-­British Joint Declaration generated a large pool of wealthy Hong Kong Chinese seeking investment and citizenship in Canada. Ethnic Chinese commercial activities diversified during this period, developing new categories that responded to the upward mobility of Chinese who desired specialized goods and ser­vices.24 The neoliberalization of the Canadian government in the 1980s, which privileged business-­class immigrants, led to the introduction of CANIIP in 1986. This program granted landed-­immigrant status to applicants with at least $500,000 in wealth and a commitment to investing $250,000 in direct business ventures. Local and ethnic Chinese developers determined the condo unit’s price according to the minimum investment requirements of CANIIP.25

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The creation of the condo mall aligned with Chinese and Asian business customs privileging individually owned stores or retail units; it also accommodated tightening lending policies during the mid-1990s recession. Unable to obtain loans, local developers soon took advantage of federal immigration policies and unconventional financing models to attract wealthy Hong Kong ­ ere Chinese and Taiwanese. A significant number of Asian or Chinese malls w developed by local companies seeking to profit from immigration, particularly during the years before Hong Kong’s turnover to the PRC.26 The number of Hong Kong immigrants increased dramatically u ­ ntil 1997, when the rate dropped sharply. The number of immigrants from mainland China, on the other hand, has continued to grow steadily. It is against this context of immigration policy, shifting demographics, and economic changes that we can examine the ongoing development of the suburban commercial landscape in relationship to dif­fer­ent scales of community. The first example of a condo mall in the GTA was Chinatown Centre in downtown Chinatown West, which was developed by Hong Kong–­based Manbro Holdings Ontario in 1989, replacing China Court, an Oriental-­ themed outdoor shopping plaza that had opened in 1980. Within three years, Manbro went into receivership, thus threatening the investments of over one hundred buyers whose contracts had already expired before the sales could be completed.27 Although this first foray into retail condos exposed significant potential drawbacks to the condominium model, in which developers presell individually owned units, the rapid adoption of this financing model in suburban Toronto suggests that local Ontario developers viewed it as a promising alternative to conventional financing models. During the early 1990s, retail condominiums ­were developed along major roads in commercially zoned areas in Markham rather than adjacent to residential areas typically ser­v iced by neighborhood shopping centers anchored by a midsize tenant such as a drugstore. According to planner Marcia ­Wallace, this strategy helped expedite the approval pro­cess by avoiding residential opposition that typically focused on zoned “neighborhood commercial” spaces rather than arterial roads.28 As would soon be evident in planning controversies in neighboring Richmond Hill, as well as the furor over Bell’s comments, Canadian planning commissions and politicians ­were unprepared for the rapid adoption of this development model rooted in cultural preferences, business practices, and immigration incentives. The arrival of Chinese from Hong Kong also quickly impacted the architectural design practices of local builders, who began to incorporate feng shui



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Figure 6.1. Nonresidential condominium developments in the Greater Toronto Area, including office and retail units. Map by Cathy Ren and Erica Allen-­Kim.

princi­ples, such as avoiding the unlucky number four, in order to cater to the expectations and taste cultures of their targeted clients. By 1995, nearly 30 ­percent of Markham’s 160,000 residents ­were estimated to be of Chinese origin. Population growth placed extraordinary pressures on Markham, especially in the realm of public education. For example, the York Region school board’s program of continuing education began offering ESL adult classes in unconventional spaces such as malls due to outpaced demand.29 ­These pressures reached a boiling point in the case of the condo mall, which served as a target of frustration among whites and both established Chinese immigrants and second-­generation Chinese Canadians, who perceived a threat to their suburban lifestyles and built environments. This controversy, which was ­documented in Lucia Lo and Valerie Preston’s study, raises a key point that

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ethnic affiliation does not necessarily signal active participation in transnational activities and spaces.30

Markham, from Village to Ethnoburb Markham, which was first settled as a village in the early 1800s by British, German, and Swiss farmers, remained a small suburban town of fewer than sixty thousand residents ­until the 1970s. In 1969, when the Regional Municipality of Ontario was established, northern parts of Markham Township w ­ ere annexed to other municipalities, with the remaining area incorporated as the town of Markham. Con­ve­niently located just thirty kilo­meters north of downtown Toronto, the low tax rates and abundant agricultural land attracted multinational corporations during the 1970s and 1980s. The development of office parks and business towers near the intersection of the 401 and 404 expressways (the latter completed in the mid-1970s), as well as along Highway 7, marked the beginnings of an edge city in the mid-1980s. Since the 1970s, the population has quintupled to over three hundred thousand. Currently with over 70 ­percent vis­i­ble minorities, the recently established city of Markham (2012) is considered the most diverse municipality in Canada. Along with neighboring Richmond Hill and Scarborough, Markham has also become known for its concentration of Chinese shopping centers, disproportionate to its Chinese population.31 Prior to the loosening of immigration restrictions in both Canada and the United States in the mid-1960s, researchers assumed that the ethnic Chinese population would assimilate and urban enclaves would soon dis­appear.32 Although demographic changes ushered in by postwar immigration reforms established a greater heterogeneity, as well as a tendency to bypass urban reception centers for middle-­class suburban areas, new concentrations of ethnic groups have also formed in unlikely places.33 Early Chinese concentration in Toronto centered downtown at Queen Street West and York (1910s), expanding north along Elizabeth Street ­until the 1950s, when most of the buildings ­were cleared to make way for the new city hall and Nathan Philips Square.34 By 1967, the city development commissioner proposed relocating the remaining Chinese businesses in order to further expand the civic square as a monumental center of public life. During this period of uncertainty, the majority of businesses moved west on Dundas and Spadina, an area most recently occupied by Jewish and Eastern



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Eu­ro­pean immigrants who w ­ ere moving to newer residential areas. In 1979, ­after successfully fighting the rezoning of the area as high-­density and institutional use, Chinatown West was designated a special identity district, but limited accommodations, due to neighboring restrictions (institutional and density zoning), led both Southeast Asian refugees and wealthier Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants to s­ ettle outside the city center. Scarborough’s Torchin Plaza, the first Chinese shopping plaza developed outside downtown, marked the beginning of the suburbanization of Chinese retail in 1977. The first retail condo in suburban Toronto was established by an Ira­nian Canadian com­pany, Times Development, which was advised by Chinese Canadian realtors to remarket Chal­mers Gates according to the individual owner­ship model common in Hong Kong, as well as the condominium format recently attempted in Chinatown Centre in downtown Toronto. Following its successful completion in the mid-1990s, nearby Scarborough, Markham, and Mississauga passed bylaws for condominium title units in anticipation of growing investor demand.35 Although the municipalities initially embraced Chinese investment, local white residents ­adopted a more adversarial stance. Most notably, non-­Chinese residents and businesses protested the proposal of bilingual street signs in Scarborough and complained about increased traffic and property devaluation.36 As seen in this example, as well as the debates about “monster ­houses” and condo malls, the regulation of the built environment through planning mechanisms is s­ haped by both transnational economic opportunities and social anx­i­eties about changing demographics. Bell’s criticism of Chinese “theme” malls marked a flashpoint in tensions about the exponential increase of Chinese immigration from Hong Kong and the development of shopping center clusters that followed a catalyst strategy in areas like Highway 7 in Richmond Hill, Kennedy Road in Markham, and ­Dixie Road in Mississauga.37 Between 1993 and 1996, local re­sis­tance to condo malls delayed the approval of Pacific Mall and Bayview Landmark, two proposed enclosed shopping centers, as planners, residents, and businesses debated density and land use in suburban communities.38 Unlike retail condominiums in the United States that ­were spatially similar to their conventional counter­parts, Chinese condo malls in Canada ­were intentionally laid out with unusually small units between 150 and 400 square feet in response to CANIIP’s minimum investment requirement. This higher density, along with the clustering of catalyst shopping centers and tenant types, quickly resulted in higher traffic use along arterial roads and in adjacent residential streets. For recent immigrants or mi­grants, this spatial and functional density was also

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perceived as familiar to t­ hose accustomed to Hong Kong’s vertical shopping centers.39 Density, therefore, was itself reflective of transnational urban practices. According to geographers Lo and Preston’s assessment, the Richmond Hill controversy that centered on Chinese Canadian developer Henry Lam’s proposed shopping center ultimately hinged on an ill-­defined planning pro­cess.40 His site plan was initially received favorably by the town’s planning commission in 1994, but growing concerns about increased traffic and parking and questions about regulating retail condominiums ­under the provincial Planning Act led the town midreview pro­cess to propose two amendments to the official town plan, thereby limiting the size and number of stores in retail condominiums.41 In the ensuing uproar Joseph Wong, the president of the Chinese Canadian National Council, contended that restrictions on retail condominiums discriminated against Chinese business ­owners and investors who benefited from the affordability and flexibility of the small-­unit format.42 On the other side of the debate, a significant number of complainants included Chinese Canadian residents who argued that the suburban lifestyle precluded the need for Asian-­influenced malls focused on dining out.43 In light of ­these disagreements among a heterogeneous group of coethnics, Wallace observed that suburban ideals cut across ethnic groups and played a larger role in w ­ hether 44 Chinese Canadians supported a transnational urbanism. During the review pro­cess that dragged on for several years, developer Lam alluded to Bell’s comments as evidence of prejudice against Chinese-­ immigrant business practices in the GTA.45 Bell bristled at accusations of racism, viewing the situation instead as pro-­developer activists playing the race card “for what­e ver reason.”46 At the same time, her views on assimilation ­versus multiculturalism ­were exposed in her claims that Chinese immigrants’ refusal to integrate was unique in the context of Canadian immigration history. She contended, “It’s the first time that ­people have gone into business and basically not been interested in ­doing business with the community at large that they have joined.”47 As has been documented by Chinatown scholars such as Kay Anderson and John Tchen, the perception of Otherness or exceptionalism has significantly impacted the creation of both ethnic economies and place-­based enclaves.48 The growth in Chinese immigration during the 1990s was viewed in part as a threat to an idealized Anglo-­Canadian rural past. Cecilia Chen has detailed the ways in which Anglo-­Canadian residents sought to privilege a sense of place centered on the small town as a way of distinguishing themselves from



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Figure 6.2. Postcard of Cullen Country Barns. Collection of the author.

the city of Toronto and the suburbanization of ethnic minorities.49 Along with heritage efforts and suburban residential proj­ects, three shopping centers—­ Cullen Country Barns, Market Village, and Kennedy Corners—­helped represent this mainstream vision of small-­town life during the 1980s and early 1990s. The redevelopment of Cullen Country Barns as an enclosed retail condominium, Pacific Mall, by Ontario developer Torgan Group was directly affected by the zoning and planning debates sparked by Bayview Landmark and Bell’s comments. Cullen Country Barns opened in 1983 as a tourist attraction with antique shops and other nostalgia-­themed retail. Market Village, an open-­a ir shopping plaza, was constructed directly to the east of Cullen Country Barns in 1990, and Kennedy Corners to the west soon followed in 1992. In 1994 Cullen Country Barns closed, and the Torgan Group, a local Israeli Canadian developer, announced the creation of Pacific Mall, an Asian-­ themed mall, on its site. Due to the Richmond Hill condo mall land-­use controversies, Markham’s planning council requested several changes,

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Figure 6.3. View of village façade at Market Village. Photo by author.

i­ ncluding the redesign of the e­ xterior to resemble the agricultural vernacular of Market Village, which local Remington Group had designed as an idyllic rural town with open-­a ir “streets.”50 Regardless of the theming of t­hese shopping centers, the retail spaces of Market Village w ­ ere quickly filled by Chinese and Asian businesses, including the GTA’s only Hong Kong cinema theater, and it was redeveloped in 1995 to enclose the outdoor “streets” with a steel shed roof. The Richmond Hill land use conflict exposed anx­i­eties about the expanding geographic bound­aries of the GTA and the economic and social costs and benefits of encouraging business and investment ties with Asia. Eli Swirsky of the Torgan Group first proposed Pacific Mall in 1993 but only received its building permit at the end of May 1995 a­ fter addressing concerns about parking, traffic, and the shopping center’s design.51 In an attempt to understand the impact of this unfamiliar owner­ship structure, Markham’s planning department commissioned an in­de­pen­dent study on retail condominiums by John Winter and Associates.52 The report recommended retail condominiums as a means of diversifying developments. Markham’s mayor, Don Cousens, formed an advisory committee with eleven Markham residents and three members of the Markham planning council to address associated multicultural issues affecting planning decisions.53 It is within this context that Bell’s comments represented local re­sis­tance to the purported benefits of ­doing business “beyond our borders.”



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Pacific Mall’s application underwent a relatively short nine-­month review pro­cess, and the 715 retail condominium units ­were presold as early as 1993 for an average of $200 per square foot plus a share of public space.54 The proj­ ect was extensively advertised both in Hong Kong and within the Chinese Canadian communities, and the units w ­ ere priced between $59,800 and $249,800 in response to the CANIIP minimum investment requirements. According to the developer, the units ­were purchased mainly by Hong Kong investors during the first two weeks.55 Stephen Wong, whose firm Living Group of Companies acted as the agent, also claimed that purchasers included Chinatown businesses in downtown Toronto and retirees.56 Torgan Group publicized Pacific Mall as a tourist attraction even before construction began. The proj­ect opened in 1997, the year in which immigration from Hong Kong and Taiwan peaked at twenty-­t wo thousand and thirteen thousand, respectively. Designed by Peter Clewes and Peter Yip of Wallman Clewes Bergman Architects, the two-­story rectangular planned structure, encased in a glass shed, is located on Steeles Ave­nue and Kennedy Road in a large triangular block shared by Market Village shopping center and bordered along the eastern edge by the GO commuter train tracks. Its shops are arranged in a back-­ to-­back grid system common in large Asian markets, and the storefronts are designed to maximize window-­shopping visibility. The majority of the 340 stores average two hundred square feet. The ten-­foot-­tall glass walls dividing

Figure 6.4. General view of Pacific Mall exterior, south elevation. Photo by author.

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(a)

(b) Figures 6.5a and 6.5b. Pacific Mall floorplan, first (a) and second (b) floors.

the units echo the glass shed of the entire structure. This transparency is undermined, however, by the extensive floor-­to-­ceiling method of visual merchandising that resembles Hong Kong market stall displays. The Torgan Group retained owner­ship of 7,500 square feet on the second floor, which they developed into a themed Heritage Town in 2000 in a bid to attract non-­Chinese tourists and visitors. It successfully applied for status as an Official Canadian Tourist Attraction, allowing it to be one of the few malls open during all statutory holidays.57 Whereas the majority of shops in Pacific Mall offered everyday products such as clothing, herbal medicine, jewelry, ­house­wares, and automobile accessories, the tenants managed by the developer in Heritage Town offered typical Chinatown wares of cheap novelty items and food. The commodification of ethnicity operates on multiple levels in ­Pacific Mall and in other Asian or Chinese shopping centers in North Amer­i­ca. According to an ethnic Chinese developer, Heritage Town was also a pragmatic response to lower foot traffic due to insufficient elevator and escalator accommodations on the second floor.58



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Figure 6.6. Interior glass walls and halls. Photo by author.

One of the most commonly expressed concerns about immigration and the creation of ethnic businesses and shopping districts is the question of integration. Wallace observed that “as the new immigrants who came to Markham had money to create their own businesses and social structures, their self-­imposed isolation was seen by some as more threatening than the ­integrative patterns of earlier groups of immigrants.”59 Markham’s growing ethnic diversity challenged longtime residents’ idealized vision of a rural township. The increased density of shops in condo malls, which has been accompanied by vehicular traffic, waste removal, and crowd-­management concerns, has in turn challenged the idealization of suburbia as a low-­ density, traffic-­free landscape. The most common concern voiced by critics was increased traffic, especially spillover parking along residential streets. Due to a general lack of familiarity with the retail condominium, t­hese proposed sites ­were also understood as akin to swap meets or flea markets with bargain-­priced market stalls. According to Wallace, this association of Asian retail condominiums with flea markets solidified opposition to proposed developments, which w ­ ere viewed as antithetical to middle-­c lass consumption patterns that f­avor nationally recognized brands and chain stores.60

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Figure 6.7. Heritage Town entrance, Pacific Mall. Photo by author.

To the dismay of some local observers, the suburban lifestyle desired by established residents, Chinese Canadians, and recent immigrants, which is centered on the single-­family ­house, had been appropriated by an increasingly diverse set of actors during an unpre­ce­dented period of demographic changes. The introduction of new development models, including the condo mall, and the expansion of public transit have accommodated unconventional uses such as extended visits by el­derly immigrants who socialize in food courts or frequent dining out and grocery shopping, practices more common to the dense urbanity of Hong Kong. Transnational scholars such as Ley and Sucheng Chan have detailed the ways in which citizenship does not bind an immigrant to a place, with a significant number of Chinese Canadian citizens returning to their place of origin at dif­fer­ent stages in their lives.61 By its very design as a vehicle for citizenship or transnational investment, the condo mall also challenged the ideal of the Canadian citizenry. Inspired by Richmond Hill’s planning commission and in response to the pro-­business approach of her colleagues, Bell proposed interventionist bylaws to prevent the rezoning of industrial use for retail condos within Markham’s bound­a ries.62 The planning committee led by Ron Maheu, however, argued that the market would determine w ­ hether retail condominiums w ­ ere financially



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v­ iable. Bell, in contrast, interpreted planning as a formula and asked, “What do fifteen per cent of the ­people need in square footage? What is the loose formula? Tell me what fifteen per cent of the [Chinese community] need. . . . ​I submit that they ­don’t need two million square feet.”63 Her question went to the heart of the issue of what Henri Lefebvre theorized as the right to the city.64 Local planners, as noted by Wallace and Cecilia Zhuang, maintained an explic­itly neutral stance, and some retail researchers suggested that the ethnic suburban shopping center’s market-­based hierarchy (first the grocery store, then restaurants, clothing, travel agencies, and jewelry) would revolutionize North American mall design.65 For example, geographer Robert Murdie cited Pacific Mall as proof that specialized stores and subdivided boutiques could survive without a department store anchor.66 When examined within the broader context of de-­malling that began in the 1990s with the emergence of lifestyle centers and big-­box outlets, the Asian retail condominium shopping center can be understood as a significant example of how the mall has been reinvented or appropriated to cater to an increasingly hetero­ geneous population. Since the 1970s foreign investment, immigration, and transnational business and social ties have helped to alter the design and experience of cities and suburbs.

The Retail Revolution: Reinventing the Mall In one of the first published studies of the condo mall in Canada, geographer Shuguang Wang characterized t­ hese developments as a “revolutionary” system “transplanted from Hong Kong, but . . . ​new to Canada and . . . ​associated only with Chinese shopping center development.”67 In his overview of shopping center developments in the GTA, Wang claimed that all new shopping centers ­were condominiums, including conversions of conventional lease-­ structured proj­ects. He explained this proliferation of condo owner­ship as a market-­led phenomenon based in Chinese investor demand.68 Although ­these specific proj­ects ­were directly linked to transnational and domestic concerns, retail and office condos ­were also created in the United States during this same period. The nonresidential condominium was not uniquely Asian or trans­ national. The combination of traditional retailing formats such as the unplanned tenant mix with the modern ­legal owner­ship structure of the condominium was in part a critique of modern shopping center design and management and in part a response to globalizing ideas about social and economic be­hav­ior.

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If the period between the 1960s and 1990s marked the death and rebirth of the North American city, as aided by the implementation of pedestrian spaces of leisure and consumption, the late 1990s ushered in greater scrutiny about the suburbs, especially in terms of sustainability and density.69 A wide array of solutions to the aging or ­dying enclosed mall was offered by developers and planners, including the big-­box power center that further fragmented the retailing landscape with stand-­a lone stores and the simulation of Main Street U.S.A. in lifestyle centers. More recent debates about defining “good density” in urbanizing suburbs have focused on the creation of new town centers or “downtowns” and the importance of economic and social diversity.70 The crowded, narrow aisles and paths of the condo mall grid layout, along with the sensory overload of glass partitions filled with merchandise, convey an urbanism that is potentially both comfortably familiar for coethnics and alluring for local tourists, that is, non-­Chinese friends, neighbors, and fellow residents who seek more au­then­tic spaces of difference than the tropes of Orientalism on display in Pacific Mall’s Heritage Town or in urban Chinatowns throughout North Amer­i­ca. Regardless of the popularity of this retailing and merchandising strategy, developers in pursuit of a more mainstream local or upscale transnational market have been wary of the association of the unplanned tenant mix of condo malls with the laissez-­faire structure of the swap meet. The use of retail condos as a pathway to citizenship has also been connected to the high turnover rate of businesses at Pacific Mall compared with conventional malls in the GTA.71 The redesign by Markham’s largest developer, Remington Group, of Market Village as Remington Centre, which includes both conventional anchors and a tight grid of retail condos, has sought a vision of cosmopolitan urbanism that has more in common with the festival marketplaces of James Rouse and Jon Jerde even as the primary market remains explic­itly transnational.72 This mainstream orientation was already pres­ent in Pacific Mall according to Zhuang, who notes that between its opening in 1997 and 2005, businesses with explicit markers of Chinese identity (signage, products, and customers) declined from 98.2 ­percent to 43.9 ­percent, regardless of the ethnic affiliation of shop ­owners.73 In this way Pacific Mall and Remington Centre adapt to local customer demand even while retaining and reproducing the condominium format; in its hybridity, the ongoing transformation of the mall represents the complexities of transnational urbanism, in par­tic­u­lar the adaptation of social practices to the particularities of place. The development of automobile-­centric retail typologies was marked by informality and inventiveness on the one hand and codification and strategic



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restructuring on the other hand. For example, Richard Neutra’s semicircular layout for a proposed drive-in market during the late 1920s exemplified the shopping center as a site of experimentation,74 but the majority of designs fol­ ere distributed through lowed complex formulas for minimizing risk that w professional organ­izations like the International Council of Shopping Centers (founded in 1957). By the 1960s, the planned shopping center was presented as an alternative to what architect Morris Ketchum Jr. criticized as the ware­ house space of “monotonous acres of merchandise” arranged around traffic aisles that echoed the gridiron streets of the city.75 By the early 1990s, developers and planners targeted strip malls and aging shopping centers as underperforming and unattractive blights hindering the “massive restructuring of (sub)urban space” by globalized financial and technological innovations.76 The recent ascendancy of big-­box power centers in Canada and the United States is one example of this restructuring in which “­dying” malls used as community spaces by lower-­income and ethnic minority populations are targeted for redevelopment as warehouse-­size, free-­standing retail outlets.77 During the 1980s, more informal uses in retailing environments, including shopping center carts and kiosks, which ­were seen as “incubator” tenant opportunities, ­were promoted by trade organ­izations.78 Particularly in enclosed regional malls, whose profits declined as superregional (Mall of Amer­i­ca, West Edmonton Mall, and so on) and lifestyle malls attracted an increasing share of the market, temporary, portable carts and kiosks allowed small businesses to test products or ser­vices with short-­term leases.79 Another alternative for small businesses was the swap meet, which, along with the retail condominium, attracted a disproportionate number of ethnic minority or immigrant merchants, most notably Korean and Mexican immigrants in Southern California.80 The swap meet emerged in the early 1990s as a semi-­informal commercial space. The requirements for renting a space ­were minimal, often ­little more than a business license and tax permit, and booth rental was on a weekly basis. The property man­a g­er oversaw booth rental but would not focus on overall merchant retail mix or profitability. During the early 1990s recession, one swap meet man­ag­er claimed that the swap meet was the “marketplace of the ­future,” noting that even regional malls w ­ ere adopting a similar approach ­ ere ­dying through the short-­term leasing of kiosks.81 The belief that malls w during the 1990s and early 2000s fueled a move ­toward more flexible, informal, and individualized business models such as the retail condo, which also benefited from immigrant and transnational capital and business knowledge transfer.

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Along with themed pedestrian shopping centers and mixed-­use lifestyle centers, mall kiosks and swap meets attempted to reimagine spaces of consumption as urban, lively, and crowded, as evident in the new category of the festival marketplace ­adopted by trade journals. The owner­ship system, however, remained conventional, with no more than a few o­ wners leasing their retail spaces as part of their investment portfolios. What has been less studied in urban and suburban business history has been the condoization of shop­ ere marketed alongside ping centers. Although co-­operative office spaces w apartments as early as the 1930s in the United States, the concept of group owner­ship of nonresidential uses only took on significance in the 1970s and 1980s during a period of deindustrialization and an increase in economic migration and immigration from Asia and South Amer­i­ca.82

In Pursuit of the Property Dream The rise of the retail or office condos was intimately connected to globalization and neoliberalism. The owner­ship structure in both ethnic Chinese and mainstream nonresidential condos has catered to small businesses and investors other­wise lacking access to mainstream shopping centers, as well as wealthy international firms seeking to expand their investment holdings and facilitate the expansion of foreign businesses in North Amer­i­ca. As discussed at the beginning of the chapter, small-­business advocates viewed group owner­ ship of shopping centers as a potential solution to the displacement of shops by urban renewal proj­ects and discrimination against ethnic businesses and enclaves.83 The popularization of nonresidential condos, however, was fueled primarily by the Economic Recovery Tax Act in the United States and the Immigrant Investor Program in Canada. The importance of homeownership for many immigrant groups has been well documented and analyzed in studies of ethnic economies, adaptation, and acculturation.84 Particularly in cases of immigrants arriving with less equity or capital, the narrative of economic success is tied to tropes of a strong work ethic, an informal economy of rotating credit associations, and reliance on ­family for ­labor. In the specific case of Chinese in Canada, residences and businesses ­were both viewed in terms of real property. According to Ley, “With the idea of property so deeply embedded in East Asian culture, it is no surprise that overseas Chinese display very high levels of homeownership,” with business immigrants in Vancouver owning homes at a rate double that of other



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immigrants.85 My study of retail condos indicates that the cultural propensity to own property or land also extends to the commercial landscape. Although ­there have been numerous studies of the revitalization of aging suburban malls and shopping centers by immigrants, the impact of owner­ ship on t­ hese buildings and economies has yet to be understood as a conduit for citizenship, long-­term investment in an area, and opportunities for collective planning and organ­ization. Although a comprehensive history of the nonresidential condo has yet to be constructed, my research suggests that in the United States, industrial and ­ ere most commonly reported beginning in the early 1980s.86 office condos w One of the earliest examples from this period was a colonial-­design office building constructed in 1981 in Lexington, Mas­sa­chu­setts. The local developer, Mark Moore, reportedly believed that the benefits of homeownership could also be attractive to small businesses.87 With the passage of the 1981 Tax Act, the benefits of nonresidential condos w ­ ere debated by developers, investors, and retailers who ­were ­eager to take advantage of the accelerated depreciation rates.88 Many analysts recommended the conversion of shopping centers, along with commercial spaces in co-op or condo apartment buildings, into retail condos, thereby helping ­owners to raise cash without resorting to traditional financial sources.89 The practice soon expanded beyond urban centers like Boston and New York to suburban areas such as ­Virginia and Wisconsin.90 Drawbacks to the commercial condo are similar to t­ hose of the residential condominium, with flexibility and autonomy most consistently cited as a concern by retail con­sul­tants. Significant concerns included the difficulty of relocation for small businesses that invested their capital in the down payment and mortgage.91 Although the malling of North Amer­i­ca has been recounted as a smooth pro­cess in which the perceived ugliness and chaos of early twentieth-­century downtowns and emerging suburban developments ­were successfully challenged by the model of retailing first introduced by J. C. Nichols at Kansas City Country Club Plaza in 1923, hybrids combining individual owner­ship and the shopping center plan persisted in the United States. Th ­ ese early examples lacked the orga­nizational structure legalized by l­ater condominium acts.92 Although mainstream retail and office condos featured more conventionally sized units compared with the Chinese Canadian developments, t­hese investors have recognized the incentive to subdivide property into smaller spaces. For example, the real estate investment trust W&M Properties’ purchase of retail space in Union Square’s Zeckendorf Towers in 1996 was framed

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in terms of small versus large businesses. Anthony Malkin, the president of W&M, viewed the investment as a way of diversifying the retail mix of Union Square with smaller businesses, citing the large numbers of national chain anchors like Toys “R” Us and Barnes & Noble that had recently transformed Union Square into a “big shopping center.”93 The use of suburban analogies by retail investors is not unsurprising among planners and developers. As discussed by both Richard Longstreth and David Smiley, the complex relationship between automobile, pedestrian, and store was addressed by design and business strategies including the pedestrianized urban shopping street, or pedestrian mall, which was proposed as a panacea during the 1950s and 1960s.94 Investors like Malkin and Francis J. Greenberger of Time Equities reasoned that owner­ship of multiple retail units in a single building, along with larger spaces, could potentially transform downtowns into “the urban equivalent to suburban strip shopping centers.”95 The opportunity to own office or retail space within a larger development attracted not only national chains but also foreign investors, as well as local small businesses threatened by rent increases. Historians have noted the propensity of foreign companies to purchase large shares of downtown office buildings in North Amer­i­ca beginning in the 1980s.96 For example, retail space was purchased by the Tokyo-­based Mitsui Real Estate Development Com­ pany, which bought five stores in a historic co-op conversion on Madison Ave­ nue, with the intention of selling shares to other Japa­nese investors seeking high returns on upscale retail leases.97 This strategy of long-­term investment has persisted in major North American cities such as New York, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, fueled in part by investors and multinational retailers seeking a secured retail space. ­These transnational economic activities combined characteristics of unplanned retail street and planned shopping center to reconfigure downtowns as spaces that are more mall-­like, as well as increasingly connected to the mobility of global capital. Similar to the case of the Chinese Canadian condo mall, immigration and transnational businesses have helped revitalize aging suburbs in the United States. The earliest examples of retail condos in Sunbelt regions like California, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida ­were fueled by immigrant businesses, especially Asian and Hispanic businesses and investors. The “cultural mobility of property” detailed by Ley is also pres­ent in Latin American transnational and immigrant business practices. For example, Sing Hsieh, a Chinese developer, financed the Chamblee Commercial Center in DeKalb County’s International Village district outside Atlanta in 1998.98 Atlanta-­based Cuban



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American developer Manuel Guillen, of McMullen real estate com­pany, noted ­ ere selling for $135 per square foot, which was comthat retail condominiums w parable to Atlanta’s class-­A office space, in contrast with the $15–­$25 per square foot lease on Buford Highway, where a significant number of immigrant businesses ­were also opening in the 1990s. Based on his work experience in Mexico, Guillen suggested that a cultural preference for owning the building drove retail condo demand in suburban Atlanta.99 Peggy Levitt and Sarah Lopez have examined the ways that remittances and frequent travel have altered North and South American built environments.100 In Canadian cities with significant Asian populations such as Toronto and Vancouver, the condominium owner­ship model has been marketed primarily to immigrant small-­business ­owners and investors. Individual retail units are rarely larger than 600 square feet, with the majority ranging between 150 and 500 square feet.101 Following the economic downturn of 2007, shopping center developers and investors focused on diversifying the retail condominium mall format by adding larger anchor tenants to the retail condominium units. Developed by local Ontarian firms such as Remington Group, Fieldgate Commercial, and Plazacorp, ­these recent proj­ects have re­imagined the shopping mall, in some cases retrofitting dead malls and shopping centers. Market and social forces informed the combination of established store chains, department stores, and big-­box anchors with the small retail condominium unit. The challenge of remaining relevant to the target cultural community, as well as serving the mainstream population, has been a constant in ethnic and immigrant economies since the early twentieth ­century.102 The most significant feature of the condo mall has been the pricing, which was directed at small investors and business ­owners. For example, Westwood Square, in Mississauga, Ontario, was marketed in 2013 as “the largest indoor South Asian mall in Canada,” with retail units priced at $830–­$1,100 per square foot.103 The proj­ect consisted of the adaptive reuse of a two-­story Zellers big-­ box store. For $130,000, a small-­business owner or investor could purchase a 130-­square-­foot unit, which had the potential to be leased and subdivided into even smaller units. During this same period, a typical retail unit in Mississauga’s shopping centers would be leased at $20–­$70 per square foot.104 Renderings of Westwood Square indicated minimal design modification of the exterior. The interior was subdivided into smaller units laid out in a dense grid with additional access from a circular pathway, with a food court and additional shops on the second floor. Although initially introduced by and connected to geopo­liti­cal tensions in East Asia, the condo owner­ship model has

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Figure 6.8. First-­floor plan of Westwood Square.

also been a­ dopted by other immigrant and transnational groups in Canada such as South Asians, who make up a sizable population of educated, middle-­ class immigrants in the GTA. This reuse of big-­box architecture introduces higher use densities and economic opportunities in urbanizing suburbs. Another example, Aberdeen Square, which was a recent addition to Aberdeen Centre in Richmond, British Columbia, outside Vancouver, has attracted primarily mainland Chinese investors. According to Cecilia Tse of Asia Pacific for Colliers International, 95 ­percent of the retail condominium units ­were purchased by Chinese. With more than three hundred stores on six levels of retail and office units, the proj­ect was anchored by the Royal Bank of Canada and featured modestly sized stores averaging four hundred square feet.105 The market-­stall dense grid of back-­to-­back shops has persisted in all three proj­ects, which raises questions about why this design persists even in combination with traditional anchors, large atriums, and other features of conventional shopping malls. Does the experience of small, crowded shops in ­these condo configurations play a significant role in the developer’s decisions, or does financing take pre­ce­dence over any aesthetic or cultural design issues? Although the stand-­alone mall has dominated the commercial condominium landscape in the GTA, mixed-­use proj­ects including residential and commercial condos have developed in Toronto.106 As with a residential condo,



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the developer would sell each unit to an investor or business owner. The o­ wners would then form a corporation and draft a declaration specifying governance, maintenance, financial reserves, and property uses. In some cases of mixed residential and commercial or retail condominium developments with fewer units, a single corporation was created to manage the joint interests. In the case of a larger development, separate corporations might be formed according to zoned use. The condominium declaration often specified restrictions and permitted uses, but for the most part, the retail condominium allowed for greater flexibility in terms of owner­ship, tenancy, and the design and function of the unit’s space. One concern with the street-­level retail condo had been extended vacancies in units owned by speculators rather than property man­ag­ers or businesses.

From Chinese Theming to Crossover Mainstream During the early 1990s, the municipality of Markham began to shift t­ oward a more urban vision of suburbia when it hired Duany Playter-­Zyberk to design a master plan for Cornell Village in east Markham. Per New Urbanist planning princi­ples, the residential fabric was denser than the surrounding conventional subdivisions, with townhomes with rear-­lane garages, neighborhood focal points like parks or squares, small setbacks, and street-­ level businesses along the main street. Nearly twenty years l­ater, Cornell Village is still ­under construction, and it is unclear ­whether its design ­will successfully encourage mixed-­use pedestrian activity. Although the architectural idioms are rural heritage Ontario, many of the residents are vis­i­ble minorities. This diversity has also affected the appearance and planning of institutional buildings. The Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care, which opened in 2002, was founded by Chinese Canadians in search of culturally attuned medical care. Around the corner from Yee Hong is the Woodhaven, an assisted-­ living residence managed by Chartwell Retirement Residences. The Woodhaven shares similar design features as the first Yee Hong Centre in Scarborough, with its symmetrical plan, green glazed tiles, and monumental porte cochere topped with a tiled pyramidal roof. Although marketed as a mainstream fa­cil­i­t y, the Woodhaven’s design effectively communicates with the Chinese Canadian families who make up a significant segment of the l­ocal population.

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The upscale ambitions of Remington Group’s Remington Centre to create a destination for a transnational Chinese market was inspired by Aberdeen Centre in Richmond, outside Vancouver, as well as new Canadian and Chinese luxury malls. Remington Centre’s redesign must also be understood in relationship to developer Rudy Bratty’s other Markham proj­ects, most importantly his ambitious Downtown Markham mixed-­use proj­ect, which promoted a vision of the city as urban and cosmopolitan. This conceptualization of Markham stands in direct opposition to over half a c­ entury of the township’s desire to distinguish itself from Toronto. However, as Chen notes, Markham was already a “hive of industry” in the 1800s thanks to the railroad. The proliferation of high-­technology and multinational corporations in Markham such as IBM, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric is in many ways a continuation of Markham’s historic role as an industrial and business center.107 Interviews conducted in 1997 with Markham developers by Wallace indicated that developers w ­ ere concerned about an oversaturated market during the high point of retail condominium construction. The combination of conventional leased stores and condominium units recently proposed in Remington Centre and Mississauga’s Westwood Square (both designed by Kohn Partnership Architects) has been part of a general strategy of attracting a tenant mix beyond the ethnic community. According to a person involved in the Remington Centre proj­ect, Mr. Y, the condominium owner­ship model challenges the oligarchy of shopping center ­owners in North Amer­i­ca.108 A market research survey conducted by the developers revealed a waiting list of three hundred lease applicants for each of the ten major malls in the GTA. Remington Group has planned to serve as the property man­ag­er for the board of condo directors, and the developer w ­ ill retain owner­ship of the larger units as part of its rental portfolio.109 The redesign of Market Village as Remington Centre has been in development since 2009. Plans ­were originally announced for construction in 2012, but Remington Group has continued to push back its starting date ­because it has yet to obtain approval to tear down the existing structure. Part of the delay has also been due to plans to bury Steeles Ave­nue ­under the proposed GO station extension adjacent to the complex, which would increase train frequency.110 The proj­ect, designed by Kohn Partnership Architects, consists of a two-­story triangular plan with four circular and elliptical atriums that function as hinges that redirect the interior’s orientation. Each of the four atriums is a Chinese-­themed court: Bamboo, Orchid, Lotus, and Pine, with functions



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Figure 6.9. Remington Centre general plan or aerial view of model. Kohn Partnership Architects.

ranging from food court to stage, and the main pathway on the upper floor is named the Silk Corridor. In stark contrast to the pseudo-­traditional theming of Pacific Mall’s Heritage Town, the interior has been marketed as upscale con­ temporary modern to attract Chinese in Canada and abroad. The arrangement of shops consists of a primary north-­south axis, with a system of secondary east-­west corridors accommodating the dense grid of shops. The entire proj­ ect includes seven hundred stores in 800,000 square feet. The areas designated as the night market and smaller units or­ga­nized in back-­to-­back grids are retail condos averaging 234 square feet. In 2013 Mayor Frank Scarpitti proclaimed that “Markham is the Chinese capital of the GTA. And this [center] is at the centre of the Chinese community. This w ­ ill be truly a one-­of-­a-­k ind Asian destination outside Asia.”111 In comparison to this expansive geographic reach, the promoters of Pacific Mall addressed the local Hong Kong and Anglo-­Canadian target groups, and other ethnic shopping centers are popularly known for catering to specific subgroups, such as a Chinese mall filled entirely with Taiwanese businesses. The global ambitions of the Remington Group, and Markham in general, are a bid to distinguish the area from other high-­end shopping centers by focusing on the city’s status as a prominent ethnoburb. Their ambitions are oriented ­toward a vision of an upwardly mobile and transnational Chinese population, as evidenced in the high numbers of Chinese consumers and store employees in

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Figure 6.10. Remington Centre plan showing retail unit sizes and locations. Kohn Partnership Architects.

mainstream Canadian shopping centers. Although an official list of tenants has not been confirmed, promotional material has asserted that the tenant mix ­will include internationally “well known and bespoke retail options ranging from boutique to anchor stores.”112 One of the features of the Chinese-­dominated ethnoburb in North Amer­i­ca has been the densely configured shopping center, in many cases an enclosed plaza or minimall that serves as a social gathering space for a decentralized population. The Asian mall, which is modestly sized around thirty thousand to seventy thousand square feet, is anchored by a supermarket with a food



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court accessed primarily from a parking lot—or garage in high-­density areas like Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Many of ­t hese minimalls are developed and managed as a single unit and leased. Often ethnic commercial strips are targeted for redevelopment as higher-­density transit-­oriented proj­ects as cities and investors envision an urbanized suburb. As planner Orly Linovski has noted in her study of two-­story mixed-­use commercial strips in Toronto, which are frequently presented within the planning discourse as “ugly,” their redevelopment into transit-­oriented midrise blocks has ostensibly generated “good density” that reduces the availability of low-­rent and flexible spaces for thriving ethnic economies.113 Dead or ­dying malls frequently used by immigrants and other minority groups have also been targeted for redevelopment into big-­box power centers. In both cases, critics of this suburban gentrification have argued that redevelopment is fueled by aesthetic and po­liti­cal structures that disregard the importance of affordable and accessible spaces for small immigrant businesses.114 ­W hether individually owned or leased, ­these properties are viewed as undesirable by planners and investors attracted to mixed-­u se, midrise, transit-­oriented developments that pres­ent a more uniform and upscale vision of urbanism. Redevelopment proj­ects like Remington Centre next door to Pacific Mall have sought to address questions of assimilation and the long-­term viability of ethnic retail developments catering to the unique needs of recent immigrants and the el­derly, as well the ongoing heterogenization of the Chinese population in Canada. The orientation ­toward local conditions was already pres­ent in Pacific Mall, where businesses began to market their goods to a mainstream or more diverse clientele as early as 2000. Condo malls, which ­were developed and marketed primarily to Asian and Hispanic immigrants in North Amer­i­ca, have occupied an unusual position in that qualities of informality and looseness ­were cultivated rather than repressed by local and transnational developers, investors, and entrepreneurs. The condominium format is structured for flexibility, such as the subdivision of an individually owned unit into smaller subtenanted shops that approximate a marketplace density far more urban than even the new suburban redevelopments at the basic level of square footage. This flexibility of owner­ship has accommodated local small businesses that other­wise strug­gle to find a suitable lease, which is influenced not only by rent pricing but also by tenant mix policies viewed by shopping center management companies as essential to ­preventing competition.

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Concern about competition has also encouraged the purchasing of ever-­ larger swathes of land to safeguard against encroaching businesses taking advantage of proximity to an established shopping center.115 The unplanned tenant mix of the condo mall, in which businesses are able to set their own operating hours and types of goods and ser­vices, approximates the traditional retail street.116 What has been less examined is the influence of the ethnic economy enclave and its business mores on the development of the suburban commercial landscape. The creation of specialized trade or business districts has been a common feature in historic and con­temporary cities worldwide. The revival of urban special districts such as the fashion or jewelry district in the late twentieth c­ entury was partially rooted in a renewed awareness of the mutual benefits of vis­i­ble concentration. Immigrant and ethnic minorities also benefited from proximity, according to more recent positive reassessments of the enclave economy.117 Sociologists have noted a phenomenon of “resurgent ethnicity” in ethnically diverse suburbs, where strip malls, shopping center plazas, and enclosed malls are developed or leased by coethnics who create miniature business districts. The redesign of Market Village from a rural Ontario specialty shopping center to a food-­dominated Chinese mall, and now a proposed crossover mainstream, high-­end, mixed-­use development, highlights Markham’s ongoing pro­cess of defining place in the suburbs, as well as the evolution of transnational urbanism since the early 1980s. Remington Group has staked its claim on the increasing affluence of Chinese in the GTA, a heterogeneous group that includes immigrants, students, tourists, and business visitors. However, the rhe­toric of civic boosters does not often match the everyday experience and function of spaces such as Pacific Mall, whose man­ ag­er once claimed that “many Chinese tourists in the U.S. visit Toronto for two ­things, The Niagara Falls, and Pacific Mall.”118 Weekend visits over the past two years suggest that Pacific Mall functions primarily as a social space for recent immigrants, Asian Canadians, and especially the el­derly, who congregate in the large central stage areas and food courts that serve as unofficial community centers. The concentration of Chinese malls in the suburbs has also complicated the articulation of downtown Chinatowns as centers of tourism and investment. By examining the development of Markham as an ethnoburb with global aspirations, it becomes clear just how multifaceted tourism has become. Gary McDonogh and Cindy Wong have asked ­whether “the symbolic registers of the center, of inclusion and exclusion, monumentality and connection, are actually transferrable to proj­ects [like “New” Chinatowns] that seek to



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Figure 6.11. Pacific Mall Central Atrium. Photo by author.

insert central spaces on a world map.”119 Chinatowns, w ­ hether created w ­ holesale or historic districts, or in cities or marketed as suburban Chinatowns, serve as “icons of globalization.”120 Remington Centre seeks to be a new icon of globalization that is explic­itly oriented ­toward China while located in the ethnoburb’s articulations of place for an increasingly heterogeneous Canadian population.

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The redevelopment of Market Village also raises questions about the social function of ethnic shopping centers in maintaining or creating trans­ national ­imagined communities. Mr. Y has claimed that Remington Centre ­will offer the con­ve­nience and comfort of an upscale mainstream mall even while offering opportunities for in­de­pen­dent businesses that have strug­gled to obtain leases in conventional shopping centers.121 With the closure of CANIIP in early 2014, which angered many applicants who viewed the move as a breach of faith, it is likely that fewer ­owners with transnational business connections ­will purchase properties.122 When originally constructed for an Anglo-­Canadian customer, Market Village was a conventional outdoor plaza, but it was soon enclosed and expanded to accommodate Chinese tenants and shoppers.123 By the mid-1990s, Market Village functioned as the “town square” of the newly arriving Hong Kong Chinese population in Markham, Scarborough, and Richmond Hill. For example, the shopping center includes an upper level for cultural activities such as mah jong, folk and line dancing lessons, and a for-­profit education center.124 Although t­ here are many forms of transnationalism pos­si­ble, recent immigration policy changes may accelerate the pro­cess of acculturation. Chinese malls in the GTA have also served as a staging ground for transnational po­liti­cal mobilization. CANIIP took advantage of po­liti­cal and economic uncertainty in East Asia by offering a path to citizenship. The financing, construction, and use of condo malls in Vancouver and Toronto w ­ ere tied to the rejection of the PRC by Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s. The influence of Chinese politics also transformed t­hese malls into prominent gathering spaces for local immigrants to meet Hong Kong po­liti­cal leaders, as in the case of Martin Lee’s visit in 1996. Lee, the head of the Demo­cratic Party of Hong Kong, conducted a tour of North Amer­i­ca during the colony’s final year ­under British control. The first stop of his tour was Market Village, at an event or­ga­nized by Toronto Chinese Radio.125 Another Hong Kong politician, Yok-­Sing Tsang, a member of the Demo­cratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, also visited Market Village in 1996 to assure former residents with Canadian passports that they would continue to be welcomed in Hong Kong following the transfer of control to Beijing.126 In its re­imagined state as a luxury, mixed-­use, crossover mainstream mall oriented ­toward the rising economy of the PRC, it is questionable w ­ hether the design and the management of Remington Centre ­will encourage or accommodate the flexibility and personalization that has characterized the Asian condo mall up ­until now.



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More so than the mainstream nonresidential condo, the Chinese condo mall has challenged the formula of North American shopping centers developed and codified over the past ­century. Uniform or complementary signage, “styled” win­dow displays, and spacious interiors that ­were standardized first by mall developers such as Victor Gruen and John Graham Jr., and ­later disseminated by trade organ­izations including the International Council of Shopping Centers, are confounded by the informality and adaptive design of Asian malls and shopping centers. The redesign of Market Village as Remington Centre seeks a sanitized vision of Chineseness that is remarkably banal. As journalist Doug Ward notes, “­There is something very familiar, very North American, about the new Chinatown. A mall is a mall, a­ fter all. It’s not as if some cynical cop in a noir movie is ever g­ oing to say: ‘Forget it Jake. It’s Aberdeen Centre.’ ”127 In a way, the closure of CANIIP due to concerns about corruption and inefficiency forms one pos­si­ble ending to the Bell controversy. It appears that Remington Centre’s intended tenants, businesses, and customers are drawn from an increasingly heterogeneous population that speaks to the ongoing negotiation of difference and community in the suburbs. During the period of the investor program, the bound­aries of Markham ­were expanded through the transnational urbanism of Chinese economic mi­grants and immigrants. Local developers such as the Remington Group continue to respond to and proj­ect an urbanizing ­future that triangulates the desires of economic, physical, and cultural mobilities in spite of the continuing re­sis­tance of some residents.128

chapter 7

Requiem for a Barrio Race, Space, and Gentrification in Southern California Mat t G a rcia

Residential segregation and community formation have been defining features of life for many Spanish-­speaking ­people living within the United States. So common is this experience that “the barrio”—­t ypically an urban, segregated space—­has assumed a metonymic quality in studies of U.S. culture and lit­er­ a­ture, articulating in geo­graph­i­cal terms the socioeconomic conditions of U.S. Latinos. Linda Chavez, for example, in her controversial 1991 book Out of the Barrio, uses the term as a negative referent for the practice of self-­segregation and self-­victimization that she accuses most Hispanic leaders of practicing since the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s. Conversely, Chicano scholars and artists have articulated ambivalence ­toward the barrio as a space where, despite material deprivation and governmental neglect, Mexican Americans cultivated “a geo­graph­i­cal identity” and a “feeling of being at home.”1 Historian Richard Griswold del Castillo, for example, places the onus of the barrio’s creation on the pressures of discrimination and segregation from outside the Mexican community, which produced “a traditional place, that offered some security from the city’s social and economic turmoil.”2 From ­these margins Latinos have articulated critical “barriological” perspectives on the consequences of urban planning and social policies in many U.S. metropolitan areas.3 The case of metropolitan Los Angeles constitutes both an affirmation and a challenge to the accepted theory of Mexican spatial, economic, and cultural



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marginality. From the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Mexicans living in Greater Los Angeles experienced both economic marginalization and racial discrimination, which led to their displacement east of the Los Angeles River. Yet, as Victor Valle and Rudy Torres argue, the formation of the überbarrio of “East Los” did not happen in isolation from other migrations and barrio formations on the Greater Eastside extending as far out as Claremont and Pomona, approximately forty miles from Los Angeles’s city center.4 For example, my great-­grandfather Daniel Martínez moved to the small Mexican settlement of Arbol Verde on the edge of Los Angeles County when the minidepression of 1922 forced him to shutter his struggling carni­ ceria located near Los Angeles’s Union Station. Although many Mexicans chose the short trip across the river, the formation of suburban Mexican villages—­referred to alternately as “colonias” or “barrios”—­throughout Greater Los Angeles revealed a patchwork of Southern California’s early economic and po­liti­cal development, as well as the Mexican ­labor that this development depended on. In the case of Martínez, the promise of employment at Pomona College secured in advance by his compadre Enrique Soto drew him to the dusty, barren settlement straddling the railroad tracks. Soto and Martínez’s relationship demonstrated the transnational confianza among Mexican immigrants who looked a­ fter compatriots regardless of blood kinship, and found each other jobs then as they do now.5 On his trip east from Union Station on the Pacific Electric red car, Martínez prob­ably passed dozens of “Mexican” settlements, from the large, industrial East Los Angeles, to the moderately sized and mostly rural Hicks’ Camp in El Monte, to the smaller, citrus-­based colonias in Covina, La Verne, and Pomona. Far from being concentrated in one barrio, first-­generation Mexican immigrants like Martínez and Soto constructed numerous settlements that comprised a network of barrio spaces throughout the Southland, often linked together by familial ties, entertainment (from dance halls to baseball diamonds), and the common experience of immigration and discrimination. Some scholars interpret the post–­World War II suburban development of Southern California as a prime example of “white flight,” whereby thousands of Angelenos who could lay claim to the privileges of whiteness evacuated the inner city for racially homogeneous neighborhoods on the city’s perimeter and in county areas. Juxtaposing the “choco­late city” with the “vanilla suburbs,” this thesis depends on an interpretation that depicts the suburbs during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as a “white spot” devoid of communities of color and integrated neighborhoods. The migration of ­people in search of whiteness

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sheds light on how racial identities became linked to geography and how redlining and other forms of residential segregation facilitated by government programs, local realtors, and a white electorate shifted po­liti­cal clout from the cities to the suburbs.6 Nevertheless, the existence of segregated neighborhoods founded by immigrants throughout the Southland prior to, during, and ­after World War II raises questions. What happened to Mexicans and other nonwhite ­peoples in the face of suburbanization? How did developers, city governments, and new residents displace them? Moreover, the current ethnic and racial heterogeneity of the suburbs should give us reason to ponder where this diversity came from.7 Are t­ hese diverse settlements the product of immigration, the growth of craft-­specific industries, and relatively low-­priced suburban home construction since the 1970s, or did residents in preexisting suburban colonias or barrios and segregated spaces serve as a kind of beachhead for ethnic suburban development? This chapter provides preliminary answers to some of t­ hese questions by evaluating the life—­and imminent death—of Arbol Verde, a suburban barrio located at the crossroads of Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties. In my book A World of Its Own: Race, ­Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970, I document the formation of this barrio, ending with a discussion of the successes and failures of Claremont community leaders, college students, and Mexican residents to create an integrated neighborhood—­ the Intercultural Council of Claremont (ICC) neighborhood—­w ithin the western portion of the barrio during the 1950s. Since then, the barrio has under­gone several changes, including the purchase of more than 80 ­percent of the homes on the barrio’s west side by Claremont’s largest employer, the Claremont Colleges, among them the most aggressive developer, Claremont McKenna College (CMC). During the summer of 2005, CMC broke ground in the park known to longtime local residents as El Barrio Park for the eventual construction of housing and playing fields for students of a seven-­college campus complex. For some, the demise of the park—­which survives only as a small green space buffering the campus from the traffic of a four-­lane highway and the remaining Mexican residents—­symbolizes the death of a dream and the completion of “Mexican removal” begun over fifty years ago. O ­ thers, however, have not conceded defeat so easily, refusing to leave their community and insisting on maintaining homes and relations that cut against the grain of Claremont’s gentrified culture. The colleges’ aspiration of becoming a world-­renowned institution of higher education has fueled their growth, contributing to the conflict with



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Figure 7.1. A map of Arbol Verde and its surroundings.

the surrounding community.8 Over the last half ­century, members of the consortium have developed international programs to distinguish their curriculum and increase enrollments. Pomona College initiated this transnational turn with Oldenborg Center, an international h ­ ouse and coeducational residence built in 1966 for the practice and use of foreign languages.9 Oldenborg has earned Pomona its reputation as a campus for language residents from China, France, Germany, Japan, Rus­sia, Spain, and Latin Amer­i­c a. Such international diversity has become more valuable recently, as the numbers of U.S.-­born applicants have declined while interest from wealthy international students has grown. For example, over the last ten years, Claremont McKenna College embraced this trend by courting students abroad. In that time, international students went from being one out of e­ very eleven students to nearly one in seven ­today.10 The need to appeal to educational consumers overseas and the overall increase in the student population necessitated a physical expansion of the campus that contributed to the erosion of Arbol Verde. It

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has also produced an awkward tension between the traditional definition of diversity, based on the recruitment of nonwhite, usually working-­c lass students, and one that is derived from the addition of new, international students who frequently come from more affluent backgrounds and have ­little or no understanding of the history of racial discrimination in this country or their ­adopted community. As a consequence, “students of color”—­ including and maybe especially international students—­unwittingly have contributed to the displacement of local residents of color in the surrounding neighborhoods as their ranks expand on campus. I document the rise and fall of Arbol Verde and the strug­gle of local residents to resist CMC’s encroachment on their neighborhood. The fate of this “small place” demonstrates the colonial relationship the Claremont Colleges have had with the local Mexican community, drawing on the barrio as a source of ­labor while assuming unmitigated access to the land and resources of that community.11 Although some within city government have raised objections to CMC’s policies over the years, the pressures on officials to create affordable housing and live up to a “progressive” image have contributed to the transformation of the barrio. The decision ultimately to support CMC’s expansion reflects the economic pressures brought to bear on city officials by the primary industry in Claremont—­higher education. The competition among suburban municipalities to assert and protect a unique economic strategy for their success has produced mixed results for Mexican ­people living in Southern California.12 Whereas some municipal governments have embraced immigrants and converted ­dying downtowns into thriving central business districts dominated by Latino and Asian entrepreneurs,13 ­others like Claremont have fiercely defended their objectives of remaining white and ­middle class by sacrificing the brown periphery for the ivory center.

Tierra de Nadie: The Making of the Second Barrio Arbol Verde is one among many citrus colonias whose identities evolved into barrios as agriculture receded and new businesses came to dominate the local economy during the mid-­t wentieth c­ entury. The settlement was the second of two colonias in what is now Claremont, the first being a company-­run ­settlement known as “La Colonia” or “West Barrio,” owned and controlled by the local packing­house on the west side of town. Found at the crossroads of three cities (Upland, Claremont, and Montclair) and two counties (Los



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Angeles and San Bernardino), Arbol Verde, by contrast, lies in the path of Mount San Antonio’s dry riverbed, in an unincorporated area adjacent to the eastern edge of Pomona College and southern corner of Claremont McKenna College. On rare occasion, torrential rains turn the area into a raging river, as they did in 1938, when two cyclones hit the region, sending debris and granite boulders cascading into the settlement. Many residents ­ ater carried their ramshackle climbed trees to escape the devastation as w homes away. Anti-­Mexican discrimination s­ haped the location of the Mexican settlement. As the West Barrio swelled to capacity, many Mexican workers looked for alternative places to live. Johnny Dominguez, a longtime resident of the settlement, recounted the arrival of his grand­father in Claremont in 1912. Through hard work and savings, his grand­father attempted to purchase a home inside Claremont proper during the Depression, but encountered residential restrictive covenants that forced him to buy in the unincorporated area on the east side. Dominguez recalled that his grand­father had enough money to purchase a new car, but such funds could not overcome local prejudice. Consequently, Dominguez’s ­family purchased property in the only place available, Arbol Verde. He recalled, “My grand­mother and grand­father bought right ­there on Blanchard [Street], right on the county line. They ­couldn’t buy in Clare­ mont ­because of the covenants.”14 Many residents believe that the marginality of Arbol Verde served a purpose in the years leading up to the war. Dominguez, for example, believed that the counties and cities split the barrio in order to escape responsibility for its upkeep. “The Mexicans w ­ ere pushed all into the outskirts of town on the county line and pushed into the next county [San Bernardino] so that Claremont would not have to deal with the social ser­vices and all that.”15 In 1948, Mexican American journalist and civil rights leader Ignacio López called Arbol Verde “tierra de nadie” (land of no one), a title he bestowed on it to describe civic neglect.16 Both the county and municipal governments refused basic ser­vices to the settlement, leaving such ­things as trash removal, road maintenance, and sewage for residents to manage. Such neglect made Arbol Verde a challenging place to live, although it also granted the community a level of autonomy not sanctioned in West Barrio, where the watchful eyes of citrus foremen ­were always on residents. Mexican families maintained a school where Spanish-­speaking community elders taught c­ hildren Mexican history and culture to c­ ounter the ethnocentric curriculum offered in English-­ only, segregated schools. Arbol Verde shop­keep­ers sold food and spices not

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Figure 7.2. The Arbol Verde colonia as it was between 1920 and 1949, featuring places of importance to the community and the names of resident families, from a 1997 hand drawing by longtime resident Alfonso Sevilla.

available to Mexican residents in local stores, most of which w ­ ere off limits to them due to segregation and discrimination. Arbol Verde also served as the site of the only Catholic church in Claremont, Sacred Heart, prior to the 1960s. The community maintained a popu­lar pool hall where the consumption of alcohol, some of it locally brewed, bucked the preferences of municipal leaders to keep Claremont dry. It did not help that the pool hall, standing adjacent to the church, also served as a rendezvous point for prostitutes and their would-be johns, creating a “heaven” and “hell” scenario that piqued the interest of local newspapers. Such practices frustrated government officials and local teachers who accused Arbol Verde residents of clannish be­hav­ior, mischief, and unsanitary conduct. At best, ­these beliefs ­were consistent with the assimilationist views held by government officials and academics who sought to corral immigrant expressions of fidelity to race, nation, or church. Instead, liberal civic leaders encouraged them to embrace a place at the ­table, even as second-­class citizens. Among academics, the Chicago school and urban sociologist Robert S. Park best represented the dominant trend of mea­sur­ing successful race relations by the degree to which immigrants and minorities accepted the dominant culture.



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­ ese views found their way into public policy, sometimes with the help of Th local professors. The Claremont Colleges played an impor­tant role in mediating the relationship between the white majority and Mexican minority communities. During the 1930s, an organ­ization, the Friends of the Mexicans, led by Claremont College professors and local teachers intensified Americanization efforts to expedite the assimilation of Mexican c­ hildren. During the 1950s and 1960s, well-­meaning white volunteers set up health and “well-­ baby” clinics to address what they perceived as a “health crisis” in the barrio. College students also established after-­school programs and “teen centers” for local Mexican American youths to curb juvenile delinquency. Volunteers became scandalized when some of the more disaffected youths inhaled glue intended for art proj­ects to get high. Often, local white residents attributed their failure to “improve” the conditions in the barrio to Mexican culture rather than the per­sis­tence of discrimination in local schools and the material neglect of the city and county. Although the “prob­lem” of the barrio frustrated local officials, early on, dependence on Mexican l­abor constituted a reason not to question Arbol Verde’s existence. As the local economy changed, so did white attitudes about the necessity and permanency of Arbol Verde. Before World War II, the health and wealth of the citrus industry persuaded local officials to accept the complications associated with an un­regu­la­ted enclave of Mexicans who, by and large, made ­ fter the war, agriculture moved from the hintheir living as farm workers. A terlands of Los Angeles to fields further east and in the Central Valley, making way for suburban housing construction and industrial development. In the east valleys, most of this new industry happened around Claremont with the existence of defense contractor General Dynamics in Pomona, General Electric in Ontario, Associated Ready Mixed Concrete in Montclair, and Kaiser Steel in Fontana. By contrast, Claremont relied more heavi­ly on the Claremont Colleges as its primary industry, embracing the image of “the Oxford of the orange groves” and the increased land values that came with it. In this context, the need to address the “Mexican prob­lem” took on a new urgency.

Divide and Conquer The Claremont Colleges have always had a love-hate relationship with Arbol Verde. Since the 1920s, the colleges have drawn on the community as a source

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of ­labor for janitorial, cooking, and grounds-­keeping positions. The Mexican residents possessed useful though unappreciated skills in t­ hese areas, and the colleges allowed workers to come in and out for their jobs with relative ease. This past year, my grand­mother, now ninety years old, retired from her job in the dining hall at Claremont McKenna College, making her the longest-­ employed employee of the Claremont Colleges at sixty-­three years of ser­vice. Besides ­labor, Arbol Verde has been an endless source of research and fascination for the academic and arts community, serving as a kind of petri dish for the study of race relations, immigrant culture, and ethnic studies. Beginning in the 1930s, students conducted ethnographic research in the community and wrote ­theses about it. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Claremont Gradu­ate School professor Henry Cooke collaborated with Scripps College artist Millard Sheets, Congregational minister Harland Hogue, and community or­ga­ nizer Ruth Ordway to create the ICC. The group purchased land in Arbol Verde in order to create an integrated neighborhood as a model for “intercultural” relations in Southern California. The neighborhood continued to be a source of inspiration for artists, professors, and students who produced paintings, sculptures, and research proj­ects based on their interactions with the residents. In terms of art, the barrio and its residents served as a common subject for the many sculptors and paint­ers who distinguished themselves as the “California School” from the 1920s through midcentury. During the 1960s, avant-­ garde rock ’n’ roll artist Frank Zappa honed his love of Chicano-­inspired doo-­wop in Arbol Verde garage bands. Arbol Verde also served as a placeholder for ­future collegiate and urban development. The significant sediment and granite in the area made for a rich vein of material related to concrete production. In fact, in a space just east of Pitzer College and north of the Mexican settlement lies a gaping hole, one mile wide and a half mile deep, where Associated Ready Mixed Concrete com­ pany once extracted rock for their products. The colleges have located athletic fields on the edge of the crater, and are now seeking plans to fill or use the postindustrial space. During the 1930s and 1940s, as the colleges began to build state-­of-­the-­art research facilities, Pomona and Scripps College relocated bungalow homes from the interior of the campus to the vacant lots in Arbol Verde. Parts of the unincorporated area also served as a dumping ground for toxic waste and debris from the early to mid-­t wentieth c­ entury, making for a dangerous playground for local Mexican c­ hildren. The per­sis­tence of Mexican residents in occupying this space in the face of industrial development prevented



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other uses of the land, and forestalled industries that would have further compromised the expansion of the colleges. Arbol Verde’s identity as “prob­lem,” research subject, and placeholder for expansion coalesced during the 1960s. In 1963, Claremont City man­ag­er Richard Malcolm approached a young Pomona College sociologist, Bob Herman, to conduct a survey of the barrio. The city had attempted to move the Los Angeles–­ San Bernardino county line eastward to incorporate the Mexican settlement within Claremont bound­aries. The move would have granted the city more influence over the area and increased the size of Claremont; however, officials encountered insurmountable jurisdictional challenges. Instead, the city deci­ded to pursue the construction of a four-­lane highway that would follow the county line and run through the heart of Arbol Verde. Malcolm turned to Herman for a study of the impact of the road construction on the Mexican residents of the area. Herman invited eleven volunteer students from his course on race relations to participate in the proj­ect. Although Malcolm requested the study as part of a planning pro­cess, Herman understood the county-­line road to be a fait accompli and conducted his research with this in mind. The road promised to serve many purposes, including access to the Claremont Colleges from suburbs developing north and east of the campus, as well as to the Interstate 10 freeway from Los Angeles just to the south, completed in 1954. Called Claremont Boulevard, the road would serve as a clear eastern boundary for Los Angeles County, and incorporate what had been regarded as a “no man’s land” into a f­ uture site for Claremont development. The county-­line road also promised to address the concerns of the white majority in Claremont who worried about the apparent lawlessness of the en­ eople clave. Herman recalled that, although the colleges employed many p who po­liti­cally identified as “liberal,” the majority of his colleagues ­were “socially conservative” when it came to addressing the local prob­lem of segregation.17 David Garcia, born on the east side of the county line in Upland recalled moments of panic among white Claremonters whenever Mexican boys from Arbol Verde roamed onto the college campus.18 ­These attitudes belied the progressive self-­image many college professors maintained. Herman saw his study of the Mexican community as an opportunity to get beyond the willful neglect practiced by his city and peers ­toward the creation of an integrated society: “I thought I was sticking my neck out just saying let’s find a way of getting all of ­those ­people on the other side of the line over into Claremont.”19

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Herman approached the study of Arbol Verde with Jane Jacobs’s new book and soon-­to-be urban studies classic, The Death and Life of ­Great American Cities (1961), in mind. Jacobs argued that city formation necessitated border formation, “and borders in cities usually make destructive neighborhoods.”20 Citing the areas bordering railroad tracks, waterfronts, and universities as classic examples, she saw the border space as the “terminus of generalized use” and therefore a “deadened place.” She theorized, “­Because few ­people use the immediate border street, the side streets (and in some cases the parallel street) adjoining it are also less used as a result.” She argued that residents of the “ordinary” city avoided the border, resulting in “vacuums of use” that contributed to neglect and deterioration.21 Jacobs recommended that urban planners treat borders as “seams” rather than “barriers” by creating structures that invited all residents into and through them. In the case of universities, she opined, “[they] have given no thought or imagination to the unique establishments they are. Typically they ­either pretend to be cloistered or countrified places, nostalgically denying their transplantation, or ­else they pretend to be office buildings. (Of course they are neither.)”22 On the face of it, the presence of railroad tracks, a college campus, and a barrio on the edge of Claremont made this “small place” an ideal location to test Jacobs’s new ideas. Although the rock quarry made it difficult to facilitate a west-­east corridor from Los Angeles to San Bernardino County, the goals of increasing the flow of traffic on a north-­south axis, building parks, and inviting ­people into a settlement where previously they had been kept out seemed pos­si­ble. The last goal required overcoming historic racial tension and mutual distrust. Additionally, for Herman, it required an interpretation of Arbol Verde as a living place rather than the “dead place” Jacobs saw most, if not all, border areas as.23 In their final report, Herman and his students championed the construction of the county road and a new park at the expense of the Sacred Heart Church, the pool hall, and a handful of ­houses that lay in its path. Seeing the decision as a choice between developing “a separate-­but-­improved” space and embracing an “integrationist” approach to urban planning, Herman and his team favored the latter. They wrote, Mexican-­A mericans . . . ​­w ill be unlikely to develop positive self-­identities while confined to segregated barrios; the most likely mixtures of ele­ments from two cultures are the most dubious rather than the most affirmative (Mexican emotionalism and hedonism



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and Yankee materialism and vulnerability to consumer debt); and while Anglos are perhaps wrong in assuming the superiority of their own ways, they still constitute the majority in both numbers and power. This view holds that Mexican-­A mericans ­will remain separated, isolated, under-­educated, fearful, and ­under motivated as long as they are left to their own devices.24 Herman’s group fully embraced the idea of improving and integrating the border space controlled by Claremont into the life of the town. They recommended, “The Claremont side of the Barrio should be physically improved. . . . ​ We think street improvements w ­ ill make the Claremont portion seem more an integral part of the rest of the City.”25 ­These street improvements entailed the construction of a neighborhood park, including basketball courts, barbecue facilities, and a 3.4-­acre green space that could accommodate full-­field soccer matches and football games. For them, the value of the secular and civic spaces of a park and a highway outweighed the pain of destroying the institutions that had held the Mexican community together. Herman and his team made a case for the construction of the road: We think the county line road should be built. It should not curve west into Claremont any sooner (­going south) than it must. Any part of Claremont left east of the road and north of the Santa Fe tracks ­will always be a prob­lem area—­unless zoned for commercial use only. We think the Catholic chapel in the Barrio serves as a symbol of the separateness of the area, and its destruction by the road ­will require that its parishioners move out of the Barrio to ­Father Barry’s church [Our Lady of Assumption, known locally simply by its acronym, OLA, in the West Barrio area].26 ­ ather William Barry, the latest priest to be sent to Claremont by the Los AnF geles Diocese, assumed responsibility for a parish whose Anglo membership increased to one-­third of the total parishioners, thanks in large part to the construction of suburbs a­ fter World War II. As a result, the diocese invested in the relocation of the church to a site accessible to the predominantly white Catholic homeowners near downtown Claremont in 1952.27 Herman’s group deviated most dramatically from Jacobs’s vision by arguing for a hardening of the border between Claremont and its more industrial neighbors, Upland and Montclair, to the east and southeast, respectively. They

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recommended, “We believe the Upland and Montclair segment of the Barrio should not be improved beyond a level necessary for safety. We recommend that both Upland and Montclair zone the Barrio for other than residential use and that home improvement and building permits be denied (We understand that Montclair has already zoned the area for industry). Anything that would encourage ­people on the east side of the line to stay put should be discouraged.”28 Whereas Jacobs recommended developing borders that would encourage “circulation of ­people ­going beyond them,” Herman and his group saw impediments to such plans, primarily due to the heavy industry that had taken root on the Upland and Montclair side.29 Instead, they recommended the construction of Claremont Boulevard as a mechanism for both containing and removing Mexicans. While the former signaled a new commitment to inclusion and incorporation, the latter confirmed and perpetuated the belief that Mexicans ­were disposable and easily manipulated. The construction of the county-­line road forced residents directly in its path to decide ­whether to fight or make peace with it. Much like the ­residents of the Los Angeles urban barrio Chavez Ravine, who had myriad responses to the imposition of Dodger Stadium on their community in the 1950s, Arbol Verde residents had mixed reactions to the road. In Chavez Ravine, some families accepted a buyout at paltry sums, while o­ thers held out u ­ ntil Los Angeles used eminent domain and the Los Angeles Police Department to drag them from their homes. Although some in Arbol Verde agreed with Dominguez that the destruction of the church was a tragedy, ­others within the barrio questioned w ­ hether to defend Sacred Heart. By the mid-1960s, the construction of OLA had moved regular daily masses to the west side of town, reducing ser­vices at Sacred Heart to weekends only, mostly for “old timers” who refused to make the trek to the new facilities. According to Marciano Martínez, a resident who grew up in a ­house adjacent to the church and who served as an altar boy in the 1950s, Sacred Heart had been reduced to a “hang out” space for boys in the neighborhood. He remembered, “We ­were having so many prob­lems . . . ​­because ­these fellows would just come and drink beer, and make themselves at home.”30 Poor schooling and segregation contributed to the youths’ disaffection; however, for ­those such as Martínez, who had to contend with it in his own backyard, the idea of eradicating the prob­lem with the removal of the church appealed to him. Martínez shared Herman’s impression that the city had already committed to the destruction of the church and the construction of the road well before they engaged the community. Martínez was the rare Mexican American



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who gained ac­cep­tance as a master’s student in fine arts at Claremont Gradu­ ate School. During his studies, he obtained a position as an art teacher at a local m ­ iddle school. Given his success and his relationship to the church, ­Father Barry asked Martínez to serve as a member of a committee to evaluate the plans to destroy Sacred Heart and manage the displacement of residents. According to Martínez, the plans ­were in place when he accepted the assignment from Barry. “It was ­going to ‘be’—­whether we liked it or not. If the city said, ‘We are ­going to make the road,’ we ­didn’t have a choice.”31 Martínez had a vested interest in the plans since his m ­ other, Guadalupe Martínez, owned property in the path of the road. He recalled, “That property was bought by my dad back in 1924.” Although city officials doubted the ability of residents to produce their deeds, all of them eventually did. ­Martínez recalled, “She was very proud of the fact that she owned that ­house, that that was her piece of property.”32 Municipal officials underestimated the historic tenacity with which Mexican Americans hold on to their homes, businesses, and land, manifested succinctly in the popu­l ar Spanish expression, “¡Aquí estamos y no nos vamos!” (We are ­here and we ­w ill not go!). The proof of owner­ship prevented the city from laying claim to the land that would become Claremont Boulevard. Instead, the city worked with the church, its committee, and the colleges to move the residents. The colleges’ practice of moving unwanted homes from the center of campus to the periphery played a role in resolving the prob­lem. The colleges moved homes to a section called Blanchard Place to create a new neighborhood that bordered the Intercultural Council community to the south, the new park to the north, and the new county-­line road to the east. In exchange for their property, residents such as Guadalupe Martínez received one of the transplanted homes on Blanchard. The church committee was asked to weigh in on the exchange and render an opinion of the deal. Marciano Martínez approved of the deal with some trepidation. Although his ­family had been forced into the area by redlining, much like Dominguez’s ­family, he also recognized prob­lems in the community. “I was in f­ avor of d ­ oing something ­there, what­ever that something was.” While he would have preferred to sell the property, he acknowledged that it was not worth more than $5,000 at the time, well below the average price of $15,000–­$20,000 for a home in Claremont in the 1960s. “I was trying to take care of my ­mother, as well as the other ladies that w ­ ere ­going to be displaced. The land w ­ asn’t worth very much at that time.”33

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In the end, Martínez voted for the most sensible solution for his ­family and the community. In the deliberations of the committee, he recalled thinking, “OK, ­Father Barry is giving us ­those ­houses, you know, t­ hose ­people that ­ ouses, are being displaced, and the city is g­ oing to help in the moving of ­these h in exchange for the land t­ here.” Saving the church was a moot point since Barry conceded the property to the city, and, as Martínez said, “­Father Bar­ ather Barry spoke, God spoke!” ry’s word was ‘law.’ ” He added, “When F 34 (laughs). Martínez also worried that Sacred Heart and its surroundings would continue to deteriorate as the older members of the community died off and the disaffected youths congregated in the space to drink and take drugs. During the 1960s, Martínez became involved in the teen center, in hopes of addressing this be­hav­ior through arts education. Unfortunately, the Mexican portion of Arbol Verde continued its precipitous decline in the wake of the decision to build Claremont Boulevard. In 1967, a nineteen-­year-­old white sailor, on leave from the Vietnam War, took a detour into the barrio while searching for a friend. The Mexican youths from the nearby teen center attacked the sailor and his car with rocks, killing him on the scene. “The [white] community was outraged,” recalled Dominguez. The assault tapped into a deep vein of fear among white Claremonters, who believed the prob­lem of juvenile delinquency within the barrio threatened to overwhelm the college town’s pristine reputation. According to Dominguez, the murder of the sailor unleashed a tirade among white residents: “Let’s get rid of ­those Mexicans, murderers, thieves, rapists.”35 Given their investment in the area, the Claremont Colleges, chief among them Claremont Men’s College (soon to be renamed Claremont McKenna College), would take a more aggressive approach to gentrification in the 1970s.

“An Attractive, Well Landscaped, Com­pany Town” By the 1970s, Arbol Verde was no longer the “land of no one” or the “Mexican village.” Years of home dumping, college expansion, intercultural experimentation, and urban development transformed this corner of Claremont into a contested and diverse space. Herman discouraged continued occupancy of the Mexican community east of the county line even though many Mexican families (including my own) lived ­there. Consistent with his 1964 report, the city and counties neglected this portion of the Mexican neighborhood, neglect that included failing to pave access roads to homes, refusing to provide



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adequate street lamps, limiting front-­door postal ser­vice, and selectively extending the septic line to the community. Associated Ready Mixed Concrete successfully advocated for industrial development on the southeastern corner of the barrio, further compromising the community “on the other side of the tracks” in Montclair. On the west end of Arbol Verde, the Intercultural Council homes created diversity heretofore unknown to the area. Although many of the white (and black) homeowners w ­ ere transient gradu­ate students, their sharing of this neighborhood with permanent Mexican o­ wners created a small but power­ful symbol of potential unity across racial lines. The c­ hildren of ­these families grew up in a dif­fer­ent world from that of their parents, embracing and articulating the tenets of integration that ­were fought over during the civil rights movement a de­cade before. Additionally, the uniqueness of the homes, designed by Millard Sheets in a midcentury “international” style, made the community an architectural trea­sure that compelled historic preservationists to defend it. The Claremont Colleges’ practice of relocating homes to this portion of Arbol Verde also added residents with college ties. Students and faculty occupied many of ­these homes and joined the intercultural world created by the ICC community. Among them, Jennifer Jaffe, a gradu­ate of Pitzer College, became an out­spoken advocate for the neighborhood. She attended Pitzer during the early 1970s, and became active in the antiwar protests on campus. ­A fter graduating, she remained in the community, working as a grade school teacher in a nearby suburb. In 1977, she received an eviction notice from CMC, which planned to raze the home she lived in to make way for the construction of a parking lot.36 She protested to Jack Stark, the president of CMC, requesting a meeting with him. Jaffe’s objections reflected her general disapproval of the transformation of the campus from a collection of craftsman bungalows used for classrooms and administrative buildings into a development in which the construction of spaces was incompatible with the oeuvre of early California architecture.37 Stark honored her request to meet. As an undergraduate at Pitzer in the early 1970s, Jaffe had confronted Stark about his support of ROTC at CMC. In 1977, on this issue, however, they had a meeting of the minds. Jaffe asked Stark to reconsider his plan to destroy the homes and, instead, move them to a vacant lot owned by the college elsewhere in Arbol Verde. To her surprise, Stark did it.38 CMC moved several structures to Brooks Street and Harwood Street, just south of Sixth Street, adjacent to Blanchard. CMC rented most of ­these homes to students and college gradu­ates, including

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Jaffe, who lived in a relocated two-­story bungalow on the southernmost portion of Brooks Street.39 Stark invested in the relocation of ­houses despite his concerns about the ­ ouse that a bunch be­hav­ior of some of the residents. He recalled, “I had one h of gradu­ate students chopped down. ­There ­were a ­couple of guys living t­ here, they got their draft notice. They had a big wild party, and—­and it had a l­ ittle porch, and they actually, literally cut [it] down!”40 In spite of such incidents, Stark remained committed to owning property with the understanding that it could be developed ­later for campus use. The city’s zoning of the neighborhood as “semipublic” (or, as Stark told me, “transitional”) rather than “residential” allowed CMC the flexibility to claim the space at any time for alternative uses, ­whether as classroom facilities, athletic fields, or parking. Residents of Arbol Verde maintained dif­fer­ent perspectives on their community from the ones often articulated by college administrators. Whereas Stark and ­others saw the place as “transitional” and a location for ­future development, many residents formed an attachment to the unique, multicultural community that took root in the area. For example, Jim Woller, a resident of the college-­owned portion of Arbol Verde in the 1970s and 1980s, told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “What we have ­here is something very rare: a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural neighborhood, where p ­ eople care about one another.” He added, “This is a neighborhood that works, just like an old New ­England village.”41 Such a description betrayed the Mexican origins of Arbol Verde and belied the inequalities between the settlements east and west of Claremont Boulevard, Mexican and non-­Mexican. Nevertheless, the common residential experience of all ­those living in the area, and the shared belief that the college had designated their neighborhood for f­uture development, created an esprit de corps among residents. In essence, the white and educated mi­grants in the western portion of Arbol Verde had begun to understand a bit what it felt like to be “Mexican” and “expendable” in Claremont. The communal space of El Barrio Park helped bridge the distance between Mexican and non-­Mexican residents regardless of which side of Arbol Verde they lived on. The park had been in the original plan shared by Herman’s team and became a part of the general plan for Claremont in 1956.42 In 1972, Ben Molina, longtime Montclair resident and Pitzer gradu­ate, worked with the city to create a ten-­year “joint powers agreement” among the cities of Claremont, Upland, and Montclair to rent the land from the Claremont University Center and manage the neighborhood park. Molina joined with longtime barrio residents Al Villanueva and Albert Gutierrez and led Claremont High School



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students and homeowners in a successful protest and petition of the city council to construct the park.43 ­A fter Molina died in 1974, Villanueva served on the El Barrio Park Authority and became the park’s primary defender against proposed changes by CMC. Although the college raised the ire of some residents with evictions during the 1970s, on the issue of the park, they continued to cooperate with the city, leasing the space at the discounted price of one dollar per year. The stalemate between Arbol Verde residents and CMC at the end of the 1970s gave way to open conflict in the 1980s. In 1982, CMC again began to evict longtime residents from homes owned by the college. Prior to the evictions, the residents working with historic preservationists successfully pursued a reclassification of the college-­owned section from “semipublic” to “residen­ nder Claremont’s general plan. Stark recalled, “I was mad as hell, b­ ecause tial” u I thought I’d been kind of done in.”44 Rather than concede defeat, Stark doubled down on his investment, refurbishing homes that, in his words, ­were “in terrible shape [and] prob­ably ­shouldn’t have been redone.” By this point, CMC had purchased 75 ­percent of the homes in the western portion of Arbol Verde. According to Stark, “Once we started ­doing that, it became kind of a money-­ losing operation.” As the landlord of the property, he believed CMC had the right to replace the current residents with “our own faculty and staff.”45 Additionally, CMC proposed a fee of $40,000 rather than the $1 it had charged for the use of the land where El Barrio Park resided. Residents regarded both acts as retribution for the zoning change. The evictions included Jaffe and a handful of Mexican residents who resided west of Claremont Boulevard. This time, Jaffe appealed to the City of Claremont to defend her and other tenants’ rights. To her astonishment, Marcia Goldstein, the community liaison officer of Claremont, responded by offering Jaffe assistance in locating “emergency food or short-­term housing” but no help in defending her against the actions of CMC. In closing, Goldstein counseled, “Sometimes ­people just need to talk to someone in order to identify their needs and the alternatives for having their needs met.”46 The reaction of the city compelled Jaffe and several Arbol Verde residents to form a new community organ­ization, Arbol Verde Neighborhood United (AVNU, pronounced “ave­nue”), and take their case to the public via the newspapers. Jaffe shared the eviction letter and city response with Los Angeles Times urban affairs critic Sam Kaplan, who visited Claremont and published an article on the “David and Goliath” story. Kaplan interviewed both sides, including Stark, who expressed his dis­plea­sure about the zoning change. “I intend to

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fight for the change and win,” he told Kaplan. He added, “It’s g­ oing to happen ­because we intend to keep growing.”47 The statement confirmed the intent of the college to eventually replace the neighborhood with the same type of development that resulted in the relocation of the homes in the first place. Jaffe responded to Stark’s plan by recommending expansion elsewhere. “If they want to grow,” she told Kaplan, “they should build on vacant land across Claremont Boulevard to the east or on land they own north of Foothill Boulevard, not in a vital neighborhood.”48 Although a sharp response to the college, Jaffe’s suggestion would have displaced the threat of CMC expansion to lands abutting Mexican residences on the east side of the barrio. For their part, Mexican American residents evoked history in their fight against CMC. Rosa Gutierrez, a resident of Arbol Verde since 1926, told Kaplan, “We ­will never sell to the college.” She added, “We came ­here ­because this was the only place Mexican Americans could live. It was like a village then. It still is.”49 Another Mexican resident, José Rubio, saw the city and the colleges as complicit in the mistreatment of the Mexican community: “To the city and the college, we have always been like garbage.” He added, “They think just ­because we do not have big homes they can do what they want to us.” Kaplan affirmed this sentiment. “Stripping away the academic veneer of the colleges,” he concluded, “Claremont turns out to be simply an attractive, well landscaped com­ pany town.”50 The article galvanized the community and inspired more organ­izing by Jaffe. Dominguez participated in AVNU and saw it as a credible, though not completely organic, community movement. He recalled, “­There ­were ­people that ­were fighting together, but basically Jennifer Jaffe started it and controlled it and ran it.” Dominguez encouraged his f­ amily to support the group, which printed anti-­CMC T-­shirts and posters, held block parties, staged letter-­writing campaigns to the city and the local newspaper, the Claremont Courier, and or­ga­nized an elaborate float for the annual Fourth of July parade in Claremont each year. Dominguez remembered that residents who owned property had a par­tic­u­lar interest in the group. “­People who ­were homeowners generally went along and backed the goals [of AVNU] ­because we wanted basically CMC out of the neighborhood.”51 AVNU communicated a sense of community to Greater Claremont that defended its identity as a unique neighborhood. They counted as foes the mayor of Claremont, Enid Douglass, a Claremont Gradu­ate School professor who had come to office with the help of Jack Stark’s wife, Jil Stark, who campaigned for her. Jaffe countered such po­liti­cal power with appeals to newspapers



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and historic preservationists like Herman who a­ dopted AVNU’s cause and turned the tide of public opinion against CMC. Herman, feeling remorse for his role in the county-­road development, joined Claremont Heritage, a local historic preservation organ­ization committed to protecting historic buildings against the kind of development the colleges practiced in the 1960s. He remembered, “I was fully committed to their cause [of] keep[ing] this a residential neighborhood as much as pos­si­ble. CMC has already made some inroads to it, and . . . ​they [had] their beady eyes on the ­whole neighborhood.”52 Other residents affiliated with the colleges also turned on them, including Marilyn Noble, a Pomona College gradu­ate and former owner of an Intercultural Council home on First Street. In a letter to the Courier, Noble wrote, “I ­really hope that the citizenship that the colleges are exhibiting is not an example of the citizenship they teach.” She added, “Over and over they have used the argument that the Arbol Verde community d ­ idn’t exist, even when the evidence has been strongly to the contrary.”53 AVNU’s defense of Arbol Verde secured the designation of the neighborhood as a residential space by the city council, temporarily thwarting CMC’s plans to reverse the decision. Dominguez recalled, “The city was pretty much in the ­middle and that’s how the development agreement came around. It was a good ­thing for the neighborhood. In fact, it was the best t­ hing for the neighborhood, and Jennifer Jaffe [should] take all the credit and deserves it.”54 Saving the homes and saving the neighborhood, however, proved to be separate issues. CMC still owned two-­thirds of the homes on the west side of Arbol Verde. Stark postponed his fight against the residential designation and instead embraced his role as a landlord. CMC a­ dopted a new policy of renting to faculty for 20 ­percent below market value. He conveyed the plan: “If you ­were a professor, you could rent it for six years. At the end of six years, ­you’re ­either tenured or not tenured.”55 Many accused CMC of blockbusting by artificially depressing prices in the neighborhood so that homes not owned by them would not increase in value. CMC allegedly took advantage of the situation by buying up more property. Stark vehemently denied this practice, arguing that he typically paid 10 ­percent above the appraised value of homes. “I kept bidding myself up,” he explained. “­Because the last h ­ ouse [that] was sold was the one I bought.”56 Dominguez, however, saw it differently: “In this neighborhood it was always you can sell your h ­ ouse to the colleges, ­because you’d always have a buyer when you want to sell. But I think they always gave it the lowest price that they could get away with.”57 One way or another, the colleges successfully continued to accumulate property, owning

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approximately 80 ­percent of the homes in Arbol Verde by the end of the 1980s. The agreement in 1982 privileged newcomers to the college and the com­ eople with deeper roots in munity, and gave CMC the argument to displace p the neighborhood. In his decision to support the residential zoning, Claremont councilperson Gordon Curtis reminded residents, “We cannot say that a ­house owned by the college can only be rented to a nonstudent.” Consequently, although Jaffe and other renters had their evictions rescinded in 1982, CMC reminded them of their temporary status, indicating to each resident the possibility of eviction within three years.58 As CMC bought property and prepared to evict nonfaculty residents, it also sought to reclaim El Barrio Park. When CMC tried to alter the terms of the expiring agreement in 1982, Al Villanueva or­ga­nized the Arbol Verde Preservation Committee to fight the changes. Like Jaffe, Villanueva took to the pages of the local newspaper to relate the history of Mexican displacement and humiliation. Recounting the construction of Claremont Boulevard, Villanueva wrote, “Knocked down, the ­people of the barrio got off the canvas determined to prevent a disappearing act of what remained of the neighborhood.” Seeing the park as the last stand against the colleges, he or­ga­nized barrio residents to successfully appeal to the City of Claremont to accept 50 ­percent of the cost of the park’s upkeep and rebuff CMC’s plans to reduce the park size from 3.2 acres to 1.7 acres.59 Similar to the fight to defend the homes, the victory to preserve the park in 1982 proved temporary. Stark saw the park as a home for gang activity and pursued a name change in advance of efforts to rezone the area. He argued that “El Barrio” conjured images of marauding gangs and was bad for the city’s image. He recommended calling it “Arbol Verde,” telling the Courier, “What El Barrio meant 20 years ago has a dif­fer­ent connotation in ­today’s society.” Villanueva objected, arguing, “Arbol Verde was a term that was widely named by the white Claremonters.” In the end, Villanueva succeeded in preserving the name, but failed to prevent CMC from shrinking the park.60 The reduction of the park came at the same time CMC renewed its efforts to change the zoning of the neighborhood. U ­ nder California law, the city had to produce an environmental impact report outlining the consequences of changing the designation back to “semipublic.” Although CMC now proposed to change only the designation of portions of the neighborhood bordering the campus and reduce the size of the park to the north, Arbol Verde



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residents in the southeastern portion worried that such changes would undermine the entire neighborhood. In the end, the report confirmed their fears: “The stability, viability and integrity of the remainder of the neighborhood ­will be compromised since the private landowners in the southern portion of the neighborhood ­will be uncertain about the ­future viability of the neighborhood.”61 In spite of t­ hese findings, the city council agreed to a partial rezoning, which included permission to use some areas for nonresidential institutional purposes such as offices and athletic fields. Although the council made de­mo­li­tion of homes more difficult and recommended bound­aries dif­fer­ent from what the college preferred, it affirmed CMC’s right to reclaim and develop half of El Barrio Park. By 1990, CMC had evicted Jaffe and other residents for a third and final time. Kaplan returned to Arbol Verde, documenting the evictions in an article he called “Requiem for a Claremont Neighborhood.” Many of the changes sought by CMC had commenced, while a number of residents, including Jaffe, had relocated to other areas. “It was an example not just of bad planning,” she told Kaplan, “but also of bad government.” In the end, Kaplan lamented the death of a once-­vibrant neighborhood: “Gone . . . ​is the neighborly spirit, sense of place and history that once distinguished the modest six-­block enclave as an evocative vestige of this college town’s post-­graduate bohemian community and barrio.”62

Conclusion The story of Arbol Verde provides just one example of a larger phenomenon of urban development and gentrification in the hinterlands of Southern California. While some historians have wanted to see the network of suburbs extending out from Los Angeles as a vein through which whiteness traveled, the real­ity is far more complicated and diverse. Mexicans, like whites, pursued the bucolic world of the citrus colonies, although their occupational opportunities varied dramatically. The substantial presence of Mexican colonias in advance of postwar suburbanization demonstrates that we need to account for a long history of Mexican suburban, as well as urban, community formation. In some cases, the diversity, not monoculture, of ­these places appealed to residents. The desire to experiment with intercultural communities and homeownership challenges the assumption that suburban residents preferred to

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live among their own kind. For some educated, liberal whites, the creation of multicultural neighborhoods like Arbol Verde provided an opportunity to practice what they preached. For ­others, like Bob Herman, the barrio ­provided a testing ground for urban policies geared t­oward integration. The creation and consequence of Claremont Boulevard was a sobering reminder that, despite best intentions, such policies deepened Mexican resentment and distrust ­toward the white majority. Mexican Americans are all too familiar with white interventions, well intentioned or other­wise. Far from docile or accepting, Mexican residents stayed in their communities despite attempts to dislodge them. To survive, they endured condescension and ingratitude from their white employers and neighbors. They also formed co­a li­tions to thwart attempts to remove them from their homes. Such co­ali­tions required patience, too, as white friends made recommendations that sometimes ran against their understanding of the prob­ lem or the ­will of their communities. In the case of Arbol Verde, conflict and cooperation ­shaped the Mexican response to urban planning. The city’s decision to bulldoze Sacred Heart, the first Catholic church in Claremont, and build a road through the heart of the community precipitated angry responses that gave way to new approaches to survival. While Marciano Martínez worked within the confines of his relationship with the church and city to do the best for his ­family and community, Al Villanueva, Albert Gutierrez, and Ben Molina sought to create a park that would help their community to thrive ­under less than ideal conditions. ­These efforts w ­ ere not enough, as the place once labeled a “land of no one” became a site of competing interests. In the face of Claremont McKenna ­College’s expansion, Mexican and white residents worked across racial and class lines to no avail. The failure of Villanueva and Jennifer Jaffe to find common cause prevented the community from creating a more unified front. Although the dogged determination and ability of Jack Stark to achieve his goals may have rendered any effort insufficient, Johnny Dominguez noted that the division did not help. He lamented, “The major players ­couldn’t get together and bring all the issues of all the neighborhood, both sides, and have one format and one complete plan, one platform, so to speak. I know Al and Jennifer ­didn’t get along.”63 ­These shortcomings notwithstanding, they both made a valiant effort to save Arbol Verde. Perhaps the greatest irony of Arbol Verde’s death is that it came partly as a consequence of the Claremont Colleges’ ambition to become an international



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place of learning. “Transnationalism” has become a selling point for many universities across the United States, including the Claremont Colleges, where students of diverse cultures and deep pockets help make up the shortfall in domestic college-­eligible students. Such a push for international students has made ­these and other U.S. institutions multinational corporations of a dif­fer­ ent sort, with investors and beneficiaries spanning the globe while providing a very localized, even traditional, education. In Claremont, the expansion of facilities to accommodate ­these students has often required new construction and new programs that further erode the neighborhood around them. This erosion has replaced a diversity—­and even an organic transnationalism—­that predated the colleges’ attempts to manufacture it. Although it did not produce profit, the creation of a Mexican school, the per­for­mance of Mexican plays (including for white patrons at Padua Hills Theatre), and the anchoring of the Catholic Church through the creation and maintenance of Sacred Heart all should be regarded as transnational acts and institutions that ­were pres­ent long before the term was en vogue. The road to this new, diverse student body, however, has not been a smooth one. Claremont McKenna College—­a nd the wider Claremont College community—­became one of the primary sites of student protest in 2015 when CMC dean of students Mary Spellman pledged to help ­those who “­don’t fit our CMC mold.” 64 Her unfortunate e-­mail message went to a Latina student, and followed an embarrassing “Mexican costume” incident during a Halloween party on campus. Students of color or­ga­nized a swift and defiant response, resulting in a public shaming of Spellman and President Hiram Chodosh that went viral on social media. Within days, Spellman tendered her resignation, but the damage was done: CMC had its worst public relations crisis in history. International students joined with domestic students of color in protest; they also participated in a countermovement that questioned some students’ tactics and generated a debate about how to ­ ese differences notwithstanding, achieve a more inclusive campus.65 Th Spellman’s attitude and words betrayed the de­pen­dency that CMC has had on Mexican American ­labor for its entire existence. In many ways, Spellman gave voice to a sentiment that the community and some students already knew to be pres­ent. In the end, perhaps Dominguez chose the most ­viable option for survival. Following a drive-by shooting and drug arrest at one of the Intercultural Council ­houses in 1991, Dominguez purchased the home. Resisting the impulse articulated by Linda Chavez to “get out of the barrio,” or the tendency of his

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peers to abandon the strug­gle, Dominguez bought the troubled property from CMC at their asking price. He stood his ground, invested in his community, and refused to concede more land to the colleges. While Arbol Verde has dramatically changed since his grand­father took the first brave step of buying a ­house years ago, his act ensures that a member of the ­family that built the barrio ­will continue to shape its ­future.

chapter 8

Transnational Per­for­mances in Chicago’s In­de­pen­dence Day Parade A ri jit S en

The appearance of a man dressed as Jesus on the sidewalks of Devon Ave­nue in Chicago broke every­one’s rhythm on a languid Saturday in August 2009. The man was dressed in a long white robe and a golden cape. A ­giant cross hung from a chain around his neck, and he held a bound book called Povitr Pustok, a Konkani Bible written in Kannada script.1 In his right hand he carried a spear, the weapon of choice of Hindu gods. Almost every­body who passed the man skipped a beat in their step, stopped, turned, and stared, if only for a fraction of a second. His appearance generated so much interest ­because popu­lar repre­sen­ta­tions of Jesus in the United States are almost always white, sometimes blond and blue-­eyed—­not brown and swarthy with curly black hair. The man walked over to a parade float sponsored by the Saint Thomas ­ ere, other members of the congregaSyro-­Malabar Cathedral of Chicago. Th tion waited dressed in traditional costumes: the men wore the white mundu, a long, unstitched cloth wrapped around the waist; the ­women ­were clad in white and pale yellow silk saris with red and gold ornamental borders. The men seemed restless as they practiced playing their traditional chenda drums and as the w ­ omen gathered in front or sat on the float holding brightly c­ olored muthukudas, or festive umbrellas. Their garments and accouterments represented a proud regional, linguistic, and religious heritage. The Syro-­Malabar Catholic Church is one of the oldest Christian organ­izations in ­India, claiming as its

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Figure 8.1. An Indian man dressed as Jesus was part of the India In­de­pen­dence Day parade on Devon Ave­nue, Chicago, in August 2009. Photo by author.

origin the landing of Saint Thomas the Apostle on the western Malabar Coast of India in 52 c.e. While in full communion with the Catholic Church, this eastern ecumenical organ­ization has retained unique and distinct visual and material cultures and ecclesiastical practices. The immigrant community in Chicago actively maintains relations with the ­mother church in Kerala. Devon Ave­nue was waking up that day in preparation for the India In­de­ pen­dence Day Parade, an annual event that brings in large crowds and turns the street into a theatrical stage where choreographed activities honor the statehood of this South Asian nation. The parade celebrates ethnic unity and singularity, but its “perfect landscape” also renders vis­i­ble the operations of power and social conflict that underpin immigrant life along Devon Ave­nue, including divisions of gender, age, ethnicity, class, and religion. In his performative moment, the man dressed as Jesus temporarily created a space in which he



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Figure 8.2. Members of the Saint Thomas Syro-­Malabar Cathedral of Chicago pose for a photo­graph at the 2009 India In­de­pen­dence Day parade on Western Ave­nue, Chicago. Photo by author.

presented a hybrid and partially indigenized image of Christ. He and his coreligionists ­were participants in a transnational pre­sen­ta­tion of complex identities held by immigrants from the South Asian diaspora—­a per­for­mance involving multiple forms of belonging that transcended conventional borders of nation, geography, politics, and identity.2 This essay focuses on the India In­de­pen­dence Day parades in Chicago in 2009 and 2010 in order to explore questions of transnationalism, urbanism, identity, per­for­mance, and material culture. What is transnational identity, and how is it expressed in the space of the city? How do immigrants practice and reproduce complex subjectivity in everyday life? I am not as concerned about the production of transnational architecture or urbanism as I am interested in understanding how city spaces influence the crafting of transnational identities and practices: How can a quotidian street setting in Chicago actively shape the production and negotiation of belonging and peoplehood among

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immigrants? I also explore embodied and sensate practices that took place during ­these events ­because focusing on the micropolitics of the parades reveals how material culture, activities, and experiences frame the participants’ national and transnational identities. Indeed, individuals participating in this parade negotiate their identity in ways that complicate the very concept of “transnational” in studies of urbanism.3 A key aspect of my analy­sis is an examination of how the audience participated in this parade in diverse ways and how such participation rendered a very complex real­ity. First, as I carefully unravel and dissect ­these engagements, I hope to identify a complex choreography made of intentional, unintentional, accidental, and habitual acts. ­These acts, where the ­human body, the material world, activities, and events combined in contrapuntal motions, mediated the complex real­ity of the parade. Second, I examine the ethnic storefronts and neighborhood block parties laid out within the strict organ­izing geometry and rationale of the American urban grid. How do we account for the location, the parade route, and the physical landscape in this story? What roles do the city streets, with their close-­k nit urban fabric and familiar parade material culture (floats, flags, fans, handouts), play in this account of place and identity? The material world remains central to this discussion ­because the physical setting of Devon Ave­nue speaks of values, cultural forms, and practices that are intensely local, while the rhe­toric and name of the parade refer to a global diaspora. Third, in order to excavate beyond the binaries of transnational thinking—­that is, to go beyond a conversation around “nation one plus nation two”—­this chapter switches its scale of analy­sis from the national to the intimate, focusing on tempo, pace, rhythm, and sensory atmospheres around everyday urban pre­sen­ta­tions of ethnic identity by immigrants. Such a focus begins with the somatic and affective engagement of the ­human body with its near environment. Granted, such a discussion may ­sidestep pro­cesses and powers that are larger than the individual—­capitalism, neoliberal politics, and transnational economic and ­legal structures. Indeed, while ­these structural issues frame how everyday life is experienced and practiced, our focus on the body mediating t­ hese larger forces w ­ ill help us focus on nitty-­gritty issues of how transnational identities are produced, practiced, and sustained. What is at stake ­here? What does this discussion tell us that accounts of transnationalism and everyday practices may not? My primary goal is to examine the unevenness of transnationalism. Dif­fer­ent social groups and stakeholders do not share transnational urban practices in uniform and equal ways.



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I also want to point out how the transnational framework renders certain in-­group differences and social inequities invisible to us—­contradictions that may be unveiled when we see this parade, or any event, through the frame and scale of the ­human body. Fi­nally, I want to underscore that talk about transnational urbanism has always been about the social, the po­liti­cal, and the psychological. It has been about how ­human agents belong within multiple locales and how they re-­create their worlds in more than one national space. The built environment typically enters this discussion as a by-­product of culture, an artifact, or an empty container where life drama plays out. In this chapter, I intend to consider the built environment as an active agent, an “American actor” in an ever-­evolving life drama.

The India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade The India In­de­pen­dence Day parades are just the most recent incarnations of a long history of ethnic parades in Chicago: as early as 1843 the Saint Patrick’s Day parade became a regular event in the city. Annis Sengupta argues that parades like ­these have served as “an integral part of Chicago’s urban life,” offering “a win­dow into the transformation of nationalism among Amer­i­ca’s immigrant populations.”4 The rationale and choice of parade routes have changed over time, reflecting the development of immigration and ethnic demographics in the city. Current neighborhood ethnic parades are part of a post-1965 trend that exemplifies a distinctive form of “transnational po­liti­cal activism” among con­temporary immigrants in Chicago.5 Comparing current parades to ­t hose in previous eras, Sengupta asserts that recent parades are mostly located in ethnic neighborhoods. Th ­ ese events “embody the transnational aspirations of local ethnic communities” and “showcase the desire of ethnic communities to maintain dual national loyalties and retain transnational citizenship rights.”6 In order to explain how the location of the parades and the rationales for organ­izing them changed over time, Sengupta identifies three distinct historic periods of parading in Chicago. The first era, which began around 1860 following a surge in immigration and urban population growth, often “highlighted immigrant participation in military and civic organ­izations and associations,” as well as “promoting national aspirations for their homelands modeled in part on the American revolutionary experience.” By the year 1900 ­there ­were recurring parades celebrating Eu­ro­pean ethnic groups, and three

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among them—­the Irish, Italians, and Greeks—­paraded downtown. For many of ­these groups, including the Irish and the Norwegians, parades demonstrated their national identity and their po­liti­cal aspirations for their homelands; but they also used displays of ethnic militia and police and fire departments to highlight their groups’ contributions to life in Chicago. Th ­ ese parades therefore became a way for Eu­ro­pean immigrants in the twentieth ­century to advocate for greater inclusion in the host society.7 The second era of parading began in 1950 and continued into the 1960s. During this second period, Mayor Richard Daley promoted downtown ­ethnic parades in order to proj­ect Chicago as a multicultural, multiethnic metropolis. As a result, such parades proliferated, and according to Sengupta, this “also meant that the ethnic identity expressed in the parade was largely divorced from the community bound­aries within which ethnic cultural identity was being preserved such as neighborhoods, religious organ­izations, families, and cultural associations.”8 The third era was characterized by a resurgence of parades that took place in neighborhoods and w ­ ere predominantly or­ga­nized by the nonwhite ethnic communities whose populations exploded a­ fter the 1965 immigration law removed exclusionary rules that had sought to keep nonwhite immigrants from entering the U.S. mainland. Newcomers from East Asia, South Asia, Mexico, and Central and South Amer­i­ca have since settled in Chicago neighborhoods and or­ga­nized their own ethnic parades to mark their presence. By showcasing community business leaders, many of whom are leading organizers and sponsors, t­ hese parades highlight the economic power of the community and advertise ethnic businesses. Local government officials join t­hese parades, their presence legitimizing the visibility and power of the parade organizers and sponsors. In this way, neighborhood parades continue to serve as visual displays of immigrant assimilation into American life. What makes this third era distinct is the transnational politics of the ­parades. The organizers of neighborhood ethnic parades commemorating India In­de­pen­dence Day or Mexican In­de­pen­dence Day also invite cultural and ­po­liti­cal leaders from their native countries, consulates, and embassies. Sengupta’s research demonstrates how parade organizers of the India ­In­de­pen­dence Day Parade often coordinate visits to India by Chicago government officials, influence and fund Indian po­liti­cal parties, and conduct transnational economic and trade transactions between India and the United States. Their transnational activities occasionally lead to conflict, as was seen during the 2009 parade when tension between the organizers, the Federation



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of Indian Associations (FIA) and the Indian Consulate General in Chicago, led to the absence of any official repre­sen­ta­tion from the Indian consulate in the event. The following discussion of repre­sen­ta­tions, activities, and social dynamics during the India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade therefore serves as a good case study of the transnational politics, culture, and identity of con­ temporary Indian immigrants in Chicago. The Devon Ave­nue India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade started in 1995 a­ fter the event moved from its original downtown location. This northward shift to the West Ridge neighborhood corroborates Sengupta’s periodization of Chicago parades. By the 2000s, the parade had become an extraordinary display along Devon Ave­nue, the center of Chicago’s most prominent South Asian immigrant neighborhood. The pro­cession was touted as a national day cele­bration rather than as an ethnic, cultural, or religious event. However, the floats said nothing of the po­liti­cal, economic, or military might of the Indian state. Instead, they represented businesses, religions, languages, and cultures and emphasized the transnational and global networks that sustain the Indian diaspora. If this public cele­bration of Indian nationhood seemed ambiguous, odd, or out of place, the rationale ­behind the event got murkier as the parade paid tribute to forms of identity and served a variety of purposes that may have had nothing to do with what it purported to commemorate. ­ ere filled with advertisements For instance, the 2009 and 2010 parades w for banks, international airlines, money exchange companies, and travel agents—­a ll of which stridently and per­sis­tently addressed their audiences as global or diasporic consumers rather than as immigrants from India. The placement and pre­sen­ta­tion of ­these businesses’ floats ­were part of a carefully crafted proj­ect to encourage the immigrant audience to become loyal customers irrespective of where they lived. Western Union claimed to keep immigrant families connected across distances: “Yes! I can send money to my loved ones from anywhere!” (emphasis mine).9 The parade was also part of the social life of a local marketplace. Just as transnational corporations sponsored floats, nearby stores used the event to attract customers, many of whom had come from the Greater Chicago region and from the neighboring states of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana. Street-­side activities and storefront decorations addressed the local ethnic consumer, and a careful examination of t­ hese spaces showed the role of “ethnic entrepreneurs” in the success of the parade.10 Yet the transactions in this marketplace went beyond the formal business conducted in the stores and included the informal transactions and street-­side conviviality of peddlers,

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Figure 8.3. The Western Union float at the 2009 India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade on Devon Ave­nue, Chicago. The slogan “Yes! I can send money to my loved ones from anywhere!” is prominently displayed. Photo by author.

hucksters, and hawkers. This juxtaposition of ethnic stores and informal hucksters, as we ­shall see, provided a glimpse into alternative practices in the marketplace during the parade. Within the po­liti­cal context of Chicago, the parade also appealed to the audience as potential voters within the municipal polity. Local politicians courted the audience with flyers, showered them with gifts, and eagerly shook their hands during the parade. Audience members sportingly played the role of citizens within a body politic as they chatted about civic issues and governance. The parade was a site for intragroup politics as well. The parade ­organizers ­were movers and shakers within the immigrant community, and their presence in this parade as leaders and power brokers was not lost on the audience. And then the ­people, the bodies, the masses: the appearance of so many ­people of color in ethnic dress was a sight that was out of place for most generic Chicago neighborhoods. And as if on cue, neighborhood groups made up of white middle-­class residents set up stalls to connect with their “new” neighbors. They ­were a well-­meaning lot, but the messages that their activities sent out ­were clearly didactic and spoke of assimilation, homeownership,



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Figure 8.4. Ethnic entrepreneurs, peddlers, hucksters, and hawkers used the sidewalks in order to engage the audience at the 2010 India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade on Devon Ave­nue, Chicago. Photo by author.

conviviality, and domesticity. O ­ thers pres­ent at the parade—­the Mexican food vendors, the Muslim ­women in hijabs, and the elderly—­seemed out of place for dif­fer­ent reasons: b­ ecause their presence questioned the framing of this event as prosperous, youthful, culturally homogeneous, and predominantly Hindu.

Devon Ave­nue: The Role of the Physical Context The site and location of the parade are essential ele­ments in understanding its many meanings. Devon is often portrayed as a homogenous ethnic enclave—­ Little India, an urban village or a territorially defined neighborhood where one group of immigrants have concentrated their residential, cultural, economic, and po­liti­cal institutions. But this is a description of a fictitious landscape that merely organizes an untidy real­ity for tour groups and parades. It does what social categories and cultural landscapes often do: hide the messy underbelly of belonging and identity ­under neat categories and ordered geographies. ­A fter major changes in U.S. immigration laws in 1965, immigrants from the South Asian subcontinent ­were admitted into the country in far greater numbers, and by the 1990s Devon Ave­nue was known as an ethnic Indian retail

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street. But the physical character of this street had for many de­cades been conducive to immigrants and ethnic groups ­because it accommodated streams of new residents and supported a variety of startup businesses typical of neighborhoods that serve as immigrant ports of entry. The street was heavi­ly Jewish u ­ ntil the mid-1960s, and remnants of Jewish delicatessens and synagogues pepper the neighborhood. The buildings have been reoccupied and repurposed by newcomers, and by the 1980s, the neighborhood’s older Jewish denizens had moved to the adjacent suburb of Skokie or to the northern edge of West Ridge, to be succeeded by South Asian immigrants.11 Despite a large number of South Asian immigrant stores, this street remains, in real­ity, a more multicultural and multiethnic space. Within a de­cade, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rus­sian Jewish émigrés arrived and opened newer stores. One also finds more recent businesses with proprietors who hail from Mexico and Central Amer­i­ca, as well as older Assyrian cultural institutions. The street’s abundant signage, which clamors for the attention of the “shopper in a car,” is heavi­ly South Asian, rendering t­hese other groups largely invisible. But if one looks at Devon’s ­people and storefronts more carefully, from the vantage point of a pedestrian—­what I ­will call the street-­side view—­then the current diversity of residents becomes evident.12 ­Today, the urban grid, landownership practices, and tax financing have accentuated the presence in one neighborhood of multiple conflicting worlds—­a multiethnic marketplace, a white middle-­class residential bungalow district, and an ethnic residential enclave. Often ­these dif­fer­ent worlds coexist with limited interaction. The area’s longtime white residents frequently speak of a lack of interaction between the neighbors and the immigrants. They protest that storeowners are focused on their businesses and have no re­spect for the residents living north and south of the retail district. ­These residents also complain to city authorities about the absentee landlords and crowded rental units along Ridge Ave­nue, arguing that the conditions of life and living in ­these spaces are incompatible with the family-­oriented, domestic gentility of the Rogers Park and West Ridge communities.13 (­These grievances are not new; they existed when Jewish stores lined the street and middle-­and upper-­middle-­class Jewish families lived on dif­fer­ent sides of California ­Ave­nue.)14 Meanwhile, the internal diversity of South Asian immigrants is hidden by the visually homogeneous character of store signage along Devon Ave­nue. If you ask a local storeowner about the street’s demographics, the stock answer is that every­thing east of Western Ave­nue is Pakistani and every­thing



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west, between Western Ave­nue and California Ave­nue, is Indian.15 Even the City of Chicago has used this logic in vesting honorific titles along the street, and the neighborhood’s parades reenact this mythical geo­graph­i­cal logic that divides the street along national lines. The India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade route begins at the crossing of Western Ave­nue and Devon Ave­nue and terminates on California Ave­nue and Devon Ave­nue. This stretch of Devon Ave­nue was given the honorary designation of “Gandhi Marg” in 1991 following an ordinance sponsored by Alderman Bernard Stone to honor Mahatma Gandhi and to acknowledge the presence of the Indian immigrant community. Immediately following this renaming, the stretch of Devon Ave­nue between Western Ave­nue and North Damen Ave­nue was named ­after Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and first governor-­general of Pakistan. The Pakistan ­In­de­pen­dence Day Parade courses its way on the opposite end of Devon, ­beginning at Ridge and ending on Western. More than sixty years ­a fter in­de­pen­dence, on a street thousands of miles away from the South Asian subcontinent, the geography of the parades resurrects the fratricidal divide that partitioned the two countries in 1947. This is particularly ironic b­ ecause the cognitive map that divides Devon between Indians and Pakistanis is factually incorrect. Neither the national origins of storeowners nor the constantly changing demographics of the street or­ga­nize themselves so neatly. ­There are Indian American stores on the eastern side and Pakistani American stores in the western section; and more recent Bangladeshi-­owned stores appear and dis­appear with regularity along the street. Nationality is not the logic that explains the layout of Devon Ave­nue. Rather, the layout is the product of immigrant cultures driven by automobility and class mobility.16 The street’s concentration of South Asian stores is patronized by middle-­class and well-­to-do South Asians who live in the suburbs. Many off-­site customers also come from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa—­a ­dispersed middle-­and upper-­class landscape of the kind that Wei Li describes in her work on ethnoburbs.17 However, a large number of newly arrived, eco­ nom­ically vulnerable, working-­class South Asians live in the adjoining neighborhood. They are seldom mentioned in studies and academic accounts of Devon Ave­nue, and they remain invisible in community events and cele­ brations. Since the 1980s a large number of Muslim immigrants from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have migrated into this neighborhood and joined the many South Asian el­derly who w ­ ere already pres­ent in the area.18 The ­allegiances and origins of all ­these residents and property ­owners cut across

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multiple permutations—­Indian American, Indian Pakistani, Pakistani American, Bangladeshi American, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Sunni, Shia, Ismaili, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi. The list is never-­ending and a single ­individual or ­family may display multiple backgrounds and origins. Ultimately, the frequency of business turnover, store size, and real estate prices determine the geography along Devon Ave­nue.19 The distinctive elongated, gridded layout of the properties along Devon Ave­nue distinguishes the grain of the street from that of the adjacent neighborhoods. The residential grid remains disconnected from the street grid ­because they are dimensionally dif­fer­ent from each other. By that I mean that Devon Ave­nue is made of property lots whose rectangular footprints are deeper than the bungalow lots along the neighborhood streets. The upper stories (if any) of the buildings located on Devon Ave­nue ­house apartments, and the street level is rented out

Figure 8.5. This “figure-­ground” diagram shows the footprint of buildings in black and streets and open spaces in white. Such a diagram helps us understand the built and unbuilt fabric of the city. It shows that the shapes of buildings facing Devon Ave­nue are rectangular and elongated, with the narrow sides facing the main street. The homes along the interior streets are smaller in size and produce a dif­fer­ent pattern. Figure-­ground by Kelly Adrian with assistance from faculty and students participating in the 2008 Devon Ave­nue studio as a part of Architecture 855 (Spring 2008), University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee.



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to stores. The frontage width of a store is narrower than the apartments above, and as a result each building has multiple store spaces. When a business grows and prospers, the storeowner tends to take over the next-­door space, spreading out in the pro­cess. Thus the street itself accommodates multiple forms and sizes of businesses. Smaller sandwiched stores are run by new and poorer entrepreneurs, while corner properties and large blocks are owned by more established businesses. In the last de­cade many recent immigrants have used this neighborhood as a launching pad for their lives in the United States, and as a result ­there is a constant turnover of immigrant residents in the area. The newcomers live in affordable housing rented out from landowners and slumlords also of South Asian origin. The landlords and storeowners have moved up in the class hierarchy by migrating out to Greater Chicago suburbs while renting out their properties along Devon Ave­nue. In order to understand this more disarrayed real­ity, we ­will need to change our point of view from the or­ga­nized perspective of a map—­a view from the top—to the more intimate standpoint of a ­human bystander on the sidewalk watching the parade—­the street-­side view. From this vantage point, national identity and transnational belonging seem more complicated. It is a point of view that ­will let us into a “dance of life” that unfolded along this street.

The Street-­Side View: The Experience of the Parade During the 2009 parade, the floats w ­ ere ready and waiting an hour before noon, decked with green, white, and orange vinyl floral sheeting representing the Indian tricolor. The floats ­were generic American parade material culture rented out for a day; the following day, during the Pakistan In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, the same floats would reappear decked in the green of the Pakistani flag. The importance of t­ hese generic ele­ments of American parade culture in re-­creating this ethno-­national moment is part of my argument about transnational practices. The plastic flags, vinyl tents, Greek Ionic facades on the floats, and street-­side crowd-­control railings made this event l­ittle dif­fer­ent from a local Fourth of July parade. The street setting previously described resembled any American ethnic retail street, such as nearby Argyle Boulevard. What, then, made this parade Indian? I argue that it was the lived ambience of this event, produced by the acts, be­hav­ior, appearance, and pace of the parade participants, that made it an Indian parade.

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­People wearing traditional costumes and ethnic dress stood in front of ­ ater ­bottles the floats taking photo­graphs, chatting with friends, and filling w to last the entire eight-­city-­block-­long route. ­There ­were floats representing specific regional, religious, cultural, and linguistic groups from India and its diaspora. Floats sponsored by airlines, money transfer agencies, insurance companies, and banks advertised transnational businesses catering to immigrants. They included social ser­vices, nonprofit groups, and travel ser­vices to India. Also pres­ent ­were floats sponsored by medical and immigration law firms advertising their ser­vices to the local community. Elected representatives, local politicians, officials from the aldermanic district, and judges also joined the parade. The pace on the street was dif­fer­ent ­today as storeowners opened their shutters late and carefully laid out chairs in front of their storefronts for f­ amily members and visiting friends to watch the parade. By noon, the sun was high. Crowds of bystanders collected in front of the stores along the sidewalks. Many leaned against the rails along the sidewalks, while ­others stood ­under awnings. ­These rails ­were put in by the city, and paid for by the parade organizers, as crowd-­control mea­sures. On the street, at the crossing of Western and Devon Ave­nues, ­grand masters, parade coordinators, community leaders, and anxious organizers tried to begin the pro­cession. The crowd was getting restless since ­there was no sign of the advertised grandmaster. For the previous few months, posters and advertisements had declared that the parade’s grandmaster would be a famous Bollywood superstar named ­Sharukh Khan. Snaring him was quite an achievement for Niranjan Shah, CEO of the Chicago-­based Globetrotters Engineering Corporation, and Dr. Hyder Mohammad, president of the FIA, since Khan’s presence would give legitimacy and visibility to the event they had planned and the organ­ izations they led. An emerging rivalry between vari­ous ethnic associations in Chicago had come to the fore that year. A splinter group of the FIA had attempted to host a parallel parade, but was denied permission by the City of Chicago; they threatened to take ­legal action. In a departure from past ­practice, Indian consular officials ­were missing from this parade due to the misunderstanding mentioned previously. Meanwhile, another group, the Association of Indians in Amer­i­ca, had or­ga­nized a rival India In­de­pen­dence Day event a few days earlier in Chicago’s downtown. State po­liti­cal bigwigs and consular officers from countries such as Serbia, the Czech Republic, Honduras, the Philippines, and Ireland had attended that event. Soon the word passed that Sharukh Khan would not attend. He had been temporarily detained at New York immigration a day earlier, held and



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Figure 8.6. The city erected crowd-­control guardrails along the sidewalk. Many bystanders collected in front of the stores along the sidewalks, leaning against ­these guardrails. ­Others sat in chairs dragged from inside the stores and placed along the store entrances. Photo by author.

questioned ­because of his Muslim name. This profiling event created a firestorm of sorts between the United States and India. It was part of the new regime of border control and racial profiling that emerged ­after 9/11, a sign of a new world of transnational politics and border control that sought to limit the freedom and mobility of mi­grants.20 It ultimately turned out to be a case of mistaken identity: Khan, whose name is very common among South Asians, was held ­because that same name appeared on a no-­fly list. The larger world of geopolitics and national security had thus impacted the per­for­mance of identity and belonging on Devon Ave­nue. The prob­lems would soon multiply. Governor Pat Quinn would g­ ently refuse to serve as a ­grand marshal, and Niranjan Shah would be tainted by Governor Rod Blagojevich’s corruption scandal. Nevertheless, the Federation of Indian Associations would once again show its po­liti­cal and economic clout

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by getting Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois state trea­surer and U.S. Senate nominee, to lead the parade at the last minute. As the day proceeded in 2009, individual floats moved sequentially from Western Ave­nue along Devon Ave­nue. The National Republic Bank of Chicago float rolled by. A group of animated el­derly South Asians waved miniature Indian flags, and another group made up of young adults and ­children held up a banner advertising a local nonprofit’s offerings in immigration, citizenship benefits, ­legal ser­vices, and En­glish language classes for new and el­derly immigrants. An older man shouted nationalist phrases from the float as it approached and went by, his piercing slogans including “Bharat mata ki jai,” “Bande Mataram,” “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai,” “Sardar Patel ki Jai,” and “Jai Hind” (Salutation to ­Mother India; Long live ­mother; Victory to Mahatma Gandhi; Victory to Sardar Patel; Victory to India). Some, as if by rote, returned his gesture or completed the last part of the slogan. Another float sponsored by Globetrotters Engineering Com­pany also shared space with Metropolitan Asian ­Family Ser­vices se­nior center members. Large swatches of bright tricolor enlivened the visual field while another animated older man walked alongside the float waving a big Indian national flag. He moved t­oward the audience, bringing the swirling, swooshing, vortex-­like banner close to the bystanders lined up along the street. He came up to them and shouted partial and incomplete slogans, then made eye contact and waited in anticipation of a response from someone in the crowd. And someone always obliged; they responded to him with a cheer, a slogan, or a wave. It was as if the crowd had been waiting for this interactive drama. ­ usic appeared next, punctuating the soundBlaring Bollywood movie m scape. The float from the local grocery store chain Dominick’s had young adults and ­children dancing to Bollywood ­music. The “Big Cinemas” float, sponsored by a movie theater that shows Indian movies, passed by, blaring songs from films such as Kaminey and Do Knot Disturb, and some in the audience hummed along. Other floats followed, including t­ hose from linguistic subgroups such as the Gujarati Patidhar Samaj and Maharashtra Mandal, generating their own interactive soundscapes. Dressed in colorful costumes, members shouted out slogans in their native Gujarati and Marathi languages. The Saint Thomas Syro-­Malabar Cathedral float, which showcased the man dressed as Jesus, also sported a local Kerala chenda drum band, adding a smooth, syncopated beat to the drawn-­out sloganeering as it faded in and out, matching the speed of the gliding float. Another Keralite drum band appeared at a short distance on the All American Bank float.



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Figure 8.7. A se­nior participant from the Metropolitan Asian ­Family Ser­vices se­nior center shared space with the Globetrotters Engineering Com­pany float. He walked alongside the float and engaged sidewalk audiences by shouting slogans and waving a ­giant Indian flag. Photo by author.

Unlike the previous one, this group drew attention to a worldlier domain of money and loans. The sounds came in waves; the loud chants of slogans creeping up slowly, capturing the atmosphere for a few moments only to fade away as a new float with dif­fer­ent sounds appeared. Sometimes the pattern broke and a quiet moment established its presence. The crowd palpably felt that momentary silence as a break from the cascading soundscape. One float, promoting Judge Yehuda Lebovits, passed by silently ­after a particularly cacophonous moment. It was an odd juxtaposition: a restrained Cook County Ninth Judicial ­Subcircuit contender following a loud nationalist per­for­mance. A man stood below the outsize banner b­ ehind a large muddy-­colored American ea­gle. He chatted quietly with his colleague. Adults and c­ hildren on the float wore T-­shirts featuring the judge and displaying an Indian flag logo on the breast pocket. I asked the bystanders if that was indeed the judge and at least seven

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of them thought it was: “How do we know what Judge Lebovits looks like?”; “He looks Jewish to me!” But this was not Judge Lebovits—it was merely a stand-in, an ambiguously brown and ethnic-­looking placeholder. Like the judge’s float, the floats from Etihad Airways and Air India ­were distinctive by their silence. Other than Indian and American flags, Etihad’s float was devoid of the milling humanity that occupied the preceding display platforms. Two lone ­women dressed in airline uniforms stood smiling as the float glided silently by. A man wearing an Etihad T-­shirt walked alongside the float handing out paper fans with airline advertisements to onlookers. ­These floats ­were distinct from t­ hose sponsored by the ethnic and cultural groups ­because, rather than yelling slogans and chants from the float, individuals communicated with ­people lined up along the sidewalk by coming into di­ ater ­bottles, and rect contact with them while passing out flyers, baseball caps, w hand fans. The more tactile exchanges involving a handshake, a touch, or the offer of a flyer seemed to dominate groups that ­were not connected to the audience via common cultural and religious backgrounds. Thus, while the first set of floats merely needed to communicate aurally from the street to the sidewalks, ­ ere engaged in more physical interactions. The second set the latter groups w included American politicians, who ­were preceded by South Asian “handlers” who handed out symbolic gifts: typical parade paraphernalia such as wristbands, fans, flyers, and cards. Most ­people did not seem to read the materials but accepted them nevertheless, and as the parade moved on, shimmering fans animated the visual field as ­people fanned themselves to escape the oppressive midday heat. Local politicians, especially the ones standing for upcom­ ere making direct contact with the audience as they moved to ing elections, w the sidewalks. They shook hands, posed for photos, and chatted with bystanders about neighborhood ser­vices, parking, and city politics. In 2009 Dorothy Brown, the cir­cuit court clerk, was physically pres­ent, while a group of volunteers carried the “Oberman for lieutenant governor” and “David Orr for Cook County clerk” banners. Bernard Stone, the alderman and vice mayor, was pres­ ent too. He did not get down from his fancy convertible sedan. Stone was not standing for election and thus did not need to shake hands, but he has been a familiar fixture in the Devon Ave­nue Indian and Pakistani In­de­pen­dence Day parades since their inception, and his absence would have sent the wrong message. So Stone participated just like ­every other year. In the following year, 2010, despite the prob­lems discussed previously, the number of American politicians doubled ­because of impending elections. Local



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Figure 8.8. Local politicians, especially the ones standing for upcoming elections in 2010, made direct contact with the audience as they participated in the parade. They shook hands, posed for photos, and chatted with bystanders. ­Here you see the 2010 ­grand marshal, Alexi Giannoulias, who served as Illinois trea­surer from 2007 to 2011. He was ­running a losing ­battle for the U.S. Senate as the Demo­cratic contender. Photo by author.

electoral cycles brought out new politicians intent on appealing to the ethnic vote bank lined up along the street. Pres­ent ­were Joe Moore, alderman for the Forty-­Ninth Ward; Toni Preckwinkle, current Cook County Board president and a former alderman in the Chicago City Council representing Chicago’s Fourth Ward; David Miller, candidate for the comptroller of the State of Illinois; and Steve Kim, the Republican nominee for attorney general of Illinois. In 2010, G ­ rand Marshall Giannoulias, who had served as Illinois trea­surer from 2007 to 2011, was r­ unning a losing b­ attle for the U.S. Senate as the Demo­cratic contender. Giannoulias ran up to the sidewalks at cross

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streets at a sprightly pace, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with curious, and sometimes astounded, bystanders. Audience members standing on the sidewalk moved forward to take photo­graphs with the candidates. Th ­ ere was always a South Asian aide who walked ­behind the politician introducing him or her to the audience. In the case of Steve Kim (who was of Asian origin), the aide shouted to the audience that Kim was one of them—­“Hamara aadmi hai” (He is our man), or “Yeh apnea jaise hai” (He is just like us). Many bystanders did not know who Kim was, but they nevertheless leapt forward for a handshake or a photo opportunity. One onlooker explained to me that ­ atter who is on the street.” Giannoulias lost and Kim won “it ­really ­doesn’t m the elections that followed. But ­here, for a moment, when their sweaty hands pressed in an awkward handshake with a stooped Indian Muslim man in a salwar kameez (a body shirt and baggy pants), the audience experienced po­ liti­cal theater at its very best. At this moment their specific po­liti­cal persuasion did not seem to ­matter to anybody. What mattered was that photo opportunity. It would become a moment that would live in perpetuity in ­a lbums, storefront advertisements, and sales c­ ounter displays. The photos would spur conversations about a public encounter with an elected official. Local community leaders, professionals, businessmen, and members of the Federation of Indian Associations such as Rohit Maniar, Babu Patel, Anil Pillai, Veer Doshi, Kanti Patel, Sohan Joshi, Dr. Kamal Patel, C. K. Patel of the Asian American ­Hotel ­Owners Association, and Anil Patel from India got to walk with the elected officials and be seen with them. The following week, local ethnic news media would splash their images across the newspapers, and their high visibility next to po­liti­cal bigwigs would be worth all this effort. The sight of families, youths, and the el­derly, the sounds of Bollywood ­music, the beat of ethnic rhythms, nationalist cheers, vernacular-­language slogans, and the advertisements of nonethnic regional and global businesses created a unique intertwined juxtaposition of multiple worlds—­domestic, community, secular, sacred, regional, global, local, and transnational.

Mimicry: The Performative Logic of the In­de­pen­dence Day Parade Transnational identities are identities in motion, constantly formed and reformed by the context within which an individual body meets the sensate world. It may be simply unproductive to cata­log static dimensions of such



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identities b­ ecause they change from place to place, moment to moment, activity to activity. A fine-­grained description of this parade shows how in a given moment multifarious identities are negotiated and reproduced like an unfolding drama. The spatial affect of transnational urbanism translates very differently for dif­fer­ent immigrant groups. Significant work has been done on Latino (mostly Mexican) and Chinese transnational urbanisms and their impact on the physical landscapes of their respective countries.21 When we talk about transnational urbanism in the case of India-­born immigrants, we are talking about a situation that is very dif­fer­ent from the former groups. Although immigrants from the entire South Asian subcontinent and the extended global diaspora are numerous in the Chicago area, they have rarely transformed urban physical space by building new edifices. Except for places of worship, usually located outside city limits, immigrants from India have not altered the urban spaces of North Amer­i­ca architecturally. But if we look at place making as a performative and embodied practice in which individuals deploy their bodies, often transiently and temporarily, in order to create a sense of place and location, then transnational urbanism takes on a very specific relevance for immigrants from India. Examining how identity was negotiated during the parade, from moment to moment in theatrical sequences, gives us a glimpse into the making of transnational selves. Place and setting ­were impor­tant variables in this story of tempo, rhythm, and sensory atmospheres, and a carefully rendered thick description of the spatiotemporal attributes of this parade captures the nuances of this ephemeral per­for­mance. The reflexive relationship between identity and everyday practice suggests that daily life and be­hav­ior, repeatedly enacted and practiced ­under similar circumstances over time, can influence our identity. As this parade recurs ­every year, the same practices are repeated over and over. Transient but habitual somatic experiences—­sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and sights—­a llow users to or­ga­nize, differentiate, and re-­create their familiar worlds. ­These events and per­for­mances imbue the street with new meaning through intangible practices, be­hav­ior, and use, a veritable habitus, as Bourdieu would term it. Indian movie stars, popu­lar culture, m ­ usic, and images mix with American street patterns, parade paraphernalia, Chicago politicians, and their advertisements, while global corporations and businesses promote their goods beside fluttering U.S. and Indian national flags. Transnational identity is a product of such complex and contradictory life experiences.

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Maurice Merleau-­Ponty shows us that the corporeality of our bodies frames and determines our experience and engagement with the external world.22 Thus, the way we situate ourselves within a collective is not merely via cognitive acts described by speech and writing, but by spatial experiences that depend on our embodied engagement with the world. If transnational subjectivity is a creative reenactment of a series of culturally embodied practices, then such per­for­mances are acts of mimesis. Individuals mime and perform multiple pos­si­ble roles as Indians and Americans, each slightly dif­fer­ent from the ­others. The term “mimesis” itself has been used within diverse contexts, mostly referring to actions of copying practiced by a mime. An act of repre­sen­ta­tion through imitation is generally seen as a playful act, not meant to be real or au­then­tic, often producing caricatures of an original. According to Michael Taussig, mimesis also involves adaptive be­hav­ior during which ­humans become like ­others through assimilation and play.23 The presumption is that individual subjectivity and identity are malleable, and mimesis allows one to negotiate that porous and flexible boundary between self and other. Michelle Puetz, explaining the term in the “Keywords Glossary” of the University of Chicago’s Theories of Media website, states that “rather than dominating nature, mimesis as mimicry opens up a tactile experience of the world in which the Cartesian categories of subject and object are not firm, but rather malleable; paradoxically, difference is created by making oneself similar to something ­else by mimetic ‘imitation.’ Observing subjects thus assimilate themselves to the objective world rather than anthropomorphizing ­ umble dissolution of it in their own image.”24 Mimesis, to Puetz, involves a h the self into something e­ lse. This term is often applied in the context of colonization. Mimicry allows the colonial citizen to resemble her colonizer only partially. Due to their racial and ethnic difference, the attempted mimicry remains incomplete, rendering vis­i­ble the very failure and ambivalence of such an attempt.25 In the current context, however, “mimesis” refers to the enactment of cultural practices in diaspora. It refers to acts that retain, resuscitate, and reproduce contextually appropriate identities, practices, and traditions from both the past and other places. My use of the term “mimicry” is dif­fer­ent from that of individuals who apply it within a colonial or postcolonial discourse. I argue that the act of mimesis not only allows an individual to mime the other, as is seen by a colonized individual’s attempts to mimic the colonizer, but also gives her an opportunity to reenact her own complex subjectivity with subtle adaptations and creative modifications to suit her purpose. Sometimes ­these



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immigrants act as Indians, adapting practices, be­hav­ior, memories, and experiences that make them distinct and dif­fer­ent from native-­born Americans. At other times they blend in or assimilate as new Americans. None of t­ hese per­for­mances is ever perfect—­they are not expected to be so. Their ambivalence emerges from the fact that ­there is no perfect emulation and no seamless assimilation pos­si­ble. Yet this perpetual per­for­mance of subjecthood and belonging is central to the experience of being an immigrant. One may won­der how individuals routinely maintain this constant chameleonlike appearance and be­hav­ior, and with such efficiency. They are able to do so ­because mimetic be­hav­ior is generally automatic and routine, not premeditated. Mimesis is generated by its context. Mimicry becomes second nature; a pre­sen­ta­tion of self sans deliberations. Mimicry allows an immigrant to reproduce myriad expressions of Indianness while si­mul­ta­neously expressing a sense of belonging as an American.26 While, in theory, mimicry could be intentional, Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh argue that the “chameleon effect refers to nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other be­hav­iors of one’s interaction partners, such that one’s be­hav­ior passively and unintentionally changes to match that of o­ thers in one’s current social environment.”27 As a mimetic act, ethnicity is a social construction. The category “Indian” is never fixed; its autochthonous origins are always questioned. The contexts of the 2009 and 2010 parades triggered such per­for­mance acts. (My references to immigrant adaptability and per­for­mance should not be read as fungibility; rather, being Indian in the In­de­pen­dence Day parade was constrained by larger social structures, strictures, material culture, and rules governing parades.) The parade was a site of multiple per­for­mances of overlapping mimetic acts, and such acts had their own hierarchical spatial logic. If, for the sake of discussion, we simplified and disassembled this very complicated event, we would find four per­for­mance stages with distinct physical dimensions, participating actors, and acts. First, the street with moving floats and its soundscape served as a front stage. Each float carried with it a primary spatial ­bubble that reached out to the bystanders along the sidewalk and engaged ­those who shared some commonality with the message. Loud noise, ­music, large waving flags, posters, and richly dressed bodies painted the sensory contours of this stage. The sounds and images ­were discursive currency of this space that produced par­tic­u­lar performative responses.28 Scholars of parades have described the spatiality of such front stages in ­great detail.29 Crowd be­hav­ior invokes mimetic responses

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that emerge from “incorporating practices” or “affective responses to the environment generated from internalized values, accepted maxims, and customs that are deeply cultural in nature.”30 Along Devon Ave­nue, the drums, slogans, and ­music reminded some in the audience of familiar cultural practices, and when they hummed back they unconsciously mimed that identity and sense of self that made them part of an ­imagined community. ­Others ­were spurred by the nationalist actions of the parade participants, and displayed a sense of Indian peoplehood. The space between the street and the sidewalk, which was traversed by politicians, ­people handing out flyers, and mobile vendors, produced the second zone. It generated purposeful and interactive per­for­mances addressing the bystanders as consumers and active agents within economic and po­liti­cal systems. This space also encouraged acts that Michel de Certeau would characterize as poaching or tactical in nature.31 For instance, the occasional tinkling of ice cream pushcarts punctuated this sensory environment in order to declare the arrival of some very enterprising entrepreneurs who w ­ ere taking advantage of the parade to engage in informal commerce. ­These mobile vendors ­were nimble, weaving in and out of the parade. The carts ­were from Paleteria Jalisco, a store that supplied ice cream to many Mexican pushcart vendors in this area, as well as the Albany Park neighborhood.32 Another enterprising vendor from Central Amer­i­ca was able to use her brown skin color in order to merge into the crowd and poach space. She tactically took over an Indian restaurant sign and advertised her wares: fresh corn, fresh juices, chicharrones (fried pork rinds), and tamales. The stall did brisk business. The presence of ­these Hispanic immigrants was a reminder that this neighborhood had become very culturally diverse. The third stage involved the sidewalks along the parade route, a transient setting for momentary transactions. Customers collected along this and other olfactory nodes, drawn by the smell of food, to consume hot tea, samosas, and ­water. ­Others stayed back and chatted with storeowners and complete strangers around special sales racks brought out to the sidewalk for the occasion. This was not a static space, but one of intense transactions and intimate interactions. It involved buying and selling, reading storefront sales posters, and occasionally being handed a handbill by hustlers while in motion. Men solicited religious lit­er­a­ture and handed out sales announcements. One hawker gave out empty plastic bags with a store’s name on them. ­These momentary ­exchanges seemed habitual, automatic, and routine. ­People would take a handbill and then drop it in the garbage a few steps away. Few would look at



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Figure 8.9. The space between the street and the sidewalk remained highly animated. Politicians, peddlers, and ­people handing out flyers and advertisements engaged the parade audience along this zone. Photo by author.

it; ­others would fold it and keep it. The sturdy plastic bags seemed odd. But the person handing them out explained to me that they ­were not for the casual suburban visitors. Instead t­hese bags ­were for local residents who had practical use for them. They used ­these as shopping bags and for storage. Seamless choreographed per­for­mances animated t­ hese spaces. One’s eyes, hands, and ears voluntarily (and often involuntarily) participated in a series of acts that ­were geared ­toward hearing, speaking, buying, selling, and desiring merchandise sold in the streets and on pushcarts. ­These interpersonal exchanges ­were taking place at more intimate personal and social distances. According to Edward Hall’s definitions of proxemics, distances of 1.5 to 12 feet involve increased bodily engagement and sensory exchanges, reflected in the interactions between the sidewalk audience and the parade floats.33 ­People stood close to each other and engaged in face-­to-­face exchange. At such ­proximity, bodily odor, temperature, and facial expressions ­were discerned.

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Figure 8.10. Ice cream carts selling paletas (popsicles) from Paleteria Jalisco weaved in and out of the side streets. The sounds of their cart bells punctuated the sensory environment of the sidewalks. Photo by author.

Culturally acceptable codes of the visual, thermal, olfactory, tactile, and auditory took effect. This zone produced an active sense of being-­in-­the-­marketplace, an experience that Miles Richardson describes in his study of plazas in Costa Rican cities.34 The fourth stage was located along the side streets lined with residential bungalows. ­Here, interactions ­were neighborly, domestic, and ­family oriented—­a completely dif­fer­ent form of belonging and socializing. For instance, the Talman Ave­nue Mela (fair) was set up along a residential street perpendicular to Devon Ave­nue. The typical material culture of parades, ­including plastic tents and folding ­tables, held food stalls, portrait artists’ stands, ­children’s game ­tables, raffles, balloons, and hand painting stalls. Local residents wearing shorts and T-­shirts chatted with young girls wearing headscarves, salwars (pants), or skirts. The number of immigrant w ­ omen and



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Figure 8.11. An enterprising vendor from Central Amer­i­ca was able to merge into the crowd and poach space. This image shows how she used an Indian restaurant sign to advertise her wares: fresh corn, fresh juices, chicharrones, and tamales. Photo by author.

c­ hildren (many of them Muslim) exceeded that of men. The demographic diversity of the neighborhood was also evidenced by the friendship stands set up by the neighborhood’s white residents in hopes of connecting with their low-­income Muslim neighbors. It was a moment that brought together two groups who seldom met other­wise. ­These four stages w ­ ere not inhabited by dif­fer­ent groups of ­people. They did not take place separately. Rather, the same crowd participated almost si­ mul­ta­neously in each staging. The crowd presented a high level of comfort and ability to negotiate t­ hese multiple scenes—­effortlessly becoming ethnic, American, consumer, neighbor—­with multiple spatial personas fading in and out as they negotiated the world around them. ­These seamless mimetic

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Figure 8.12. A view of the Talman Ave­nue Mela (fair) set up along Talman Ave­nue, a residential street off Devon Ave­nue. The stalls and ­tables, manned mostly by local white residents, engaged the parade audience, especially ­women and ­children of South Asian origin. Photo by author.

­ er­for­mances produced a symphony of h p ­ uman bodies synchronously engaged in what William Forsythe describes as contrapuntal motion.35 This ability to perform in multiple worlds, simultaneous social events, and to act out dif­ fer­ent personas describes immigrant world making on Devon Ave­nue. This theatrical whole—­people, situation, site, context, actions, emotions, meanings— is key to understanding immigrant identity within a transnational framework. It allows us to capture malleable immigrant subjectivities as individuals straddle multiple worlds, near and far, intimate and large, tangible and abstract. What does this microanalysis of the India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade tell us? The parade communicated myriad messages of nationalism, consumerism, global business practices, information and media products, local politics, and neighborhood conviviality. The parade also revealed sights that remain hidden other­wise, akin to Victor Turner’s anthropological accounts of public rituals.36 The appearance of the Mexican pushcart entrepreneur and the Central American chicharrones stall gave us a glimpse into the multiethnic nature of this street and the existence of a vibrant Mexican and Central American



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population that remains invisible in popu­lar accounts of Devon Ave­nue. The ­ eople gave us a glimpse into the low-­ presence of large numbers of el­derly p income, aged residents of Devon Ave­nue, many of whom live ­here ­because they do not know En­glish, are unable to afford higher rents elsewhere, or need culturally sensitive social ser­vices not available in other parts of the city. The parade revealed the presence of grassroots institutions, local immigrant self-­ help organ­izations and nonprofits such as Zam’s Hope, the Medinah Society, and the Indo American Center. ­These organ­izations are impor­tant to this neighborhood ­because they provide essential social ser­vices, ­legal advice, En­ glish language courses, and citizenship classes to newly arrived immigrants, the el­derly, indigents, and minorities within the South Asian community. As a model minority, the members of the eco­nom­ically well-­off South Asian community reside in the upmarket suburbs of Chicago. Most discussions of the South Asian community focus on the latter’s economic success and assimilation into American society.37 Yet the South Asians residing around Devon Ave­nue challenge this assumption, and the presence of ­t hese grassroots organ­izations reminds us of the less well-­off and less valorized members of this community. The events in the neighborhood block parties also rendered vis­i­ble some of ­those neighbors whom we almost never see—­veiled ­women, el­derly individuals, and immigrant c­ hildren from poorer h ­ ouse­holds living 38 around Devon Ave­nue.

What About Transnational Urbanism? The Indian man dressed as Jesus on the 2009 Saint Thomas Syro-­Malabar Cathedral float was d ­ oing more than simply role-­playing the Christian messiah: he was borrowing from a hybrid system of repre­sen­ta­tion that circulates in global and transnational cir­cuits and defines immigrant identity and diasporic geographies. Despite the global nature of this system of repre­sen­ta­tion, context ­matters in the way repre­sen­ta­tions in specific urban locations produce unique and locally inflected meanings. Jesus in Chicago is dif­fer­ent from Jesus in Ernakulam, Kerala. This man’s appearance alongside other symbols, signs, images, and ephemera marked a unique moment in time and space that bridged myriad national geographies and diverse cultures. It also delineated a geography that, although made of global and diasporic images, was nevertheless local, nuanced, and urban. The India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade demonstrates how culture and difference are reproduced in con­temporary global cities.

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The notion that ethnic enclaves are circumscribed geographies of cultural difference has captured the popu­lar imagination for de­c ades.39 Countless repre­sen­ta­tions of ethnic enclaves have incorrectly suggested that ­these neighborhoods ­were and are homogeneous “geographies of exclusion,” ignoring ­these neighborhoods’ internal diversity or not accounting for dispersed ­ethnic communities.40 Twentieth-­century portraits of Chinatowns, ­Little Italies, and Irish enclaves with well-­ordered social, po­liti­c al, and economic organ­ izations are ­etched in our minds. This false isomorphism of place and culture has po­liti­cal implications ­because the assumption of ethnic homogeneity has rendered in-­group differences invisible, producing singular narratives of class, gender, and peoplehood. Indeed, cities such as Chicago have used the trope of ethnic enclaves to promote certain neighborhoods as exotic tourist destinations and economic generators. Yet Devon Ave­nue has resisted attempts by local politicians and business groups to promote the neighborhood as a homogeneous enclave. Around 1997, a­ fter trying to find a way to market and brand the street, the West Ridge Chamber of Commerce acknowledged its cultural diversity and settled on banners advertising it as an “International Marketplace,” not a ­Little India or ­Little South Asia. According to Padma Rangaswamy, ex-­a lderman Bernard Stone, who represented the neighborhood for many years, promoted Devon Ave­nue “as an international rather than a South Asian marketplace. The upshot of this international identity is that City Hall has ­little interest in improving or reshaping the built environment since, ­unlike Chinatown or Bronzeville, it does not fall neatly into an identifiable ethnic category. The residents of West Ridge are well aware of ­these anomalies, which make them a part of Chicago but also distinguish their neighborhood from ­others.”41 ­Today, the street remains a ground for multiple groups and nationalities to enact their own sense of identity and peoplehood through parades and other forms of repre­sen­ta­tion. The City of Chicago, too, has marked the neighborhood streets with at least twenty-­t wo honorary street names acknowledging the presence of Indian, Pakistani, Jewish, Assyrian, Bangladeshi, and other ethno-­national groups. The Bangladesh Day Parade, Assyrian New Year Parade, India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, and Pakistan In­de­pen­dence Day Parade take place in ­these honorary streets on dif­fer­ent days. In his article “Ephemera, Temporary Urbanism, and Imaging,” J. Mark Schuster argues that urban ephemera or “or­g a­nized, momentary, repeated urban public pre­sen­ta­tions” such as parades contribute to the image of the city.42 According to him, “Being together in a large public space with other



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­ eople may be a defining characteristic of signature ephemera,” and makes a p place distinctive. Parading on Devon Ave­nue does precisely this, and what is in­ter­est­ing about this con­temporary ethnic pro­cession is that its identity and symbolism draw widely from pop-­culture imagery, sensory cues, symbols, and repre­sen­ta­tions from multiple diasporic locations: m ­ usic from global Bollywood popu­lar culture, log­os of the national airlines of the United Arab Emirates, parade paraphernalia made in China but typical of North American ethnic parades, Mexican popsicles, the built form of Chicago’s retail streets, and a kaleidoscope of ethnic clothing and racialized bodies. Thus the social construction of a uniquely local and parochial ethnic street is actually a complex pro­cess that draws on globalized imagery. The twenty-­first-­century ethnic enclave represents a transnational urban geography. The term “trans” produces, si­mul­ta­neously, the greatest intellectual challenge and potential for a new scholarship on immigration and urban immigrant cultural landscapes. According to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, “trans-” refers to a sense of “across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from one place, person, t­ hing, or state to another.”43 In their seminal 1992 article, anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson explained the impact of cultural practices performed by p ­ eople who straddle multiple worlds, cross bound­aries, and occupy more than one national space. The authors argued that a generally assumed, but mistaken, isomorphism ­between nation, culture, and place should unravel in new scholarship.44 ­According to them, erstwhile assumptions that national cultures w ­ ere located within the physical bound­aries of nation-­states (Chinese culture from China, Indian culture in India) ­were being rendered irrelevant in the context of diasporas and within the context of the increasing mobility of ­people, ideas, money, goods, and technologies across national borders.45 Since then, terms that emphasize the transnational such as “diasporic landscapes,” “suburban Chinatowns,” “ethnoburbs,” and “networked urbanism” have become part of our lexicon.46 Scholars who use transnational frameworks of analy­sis demonstrate that immigrants make new spatial forms and transform built environments across social, national, and geographic bound­aries.47 Devon Ave­nue therefore marks a self-­consciously multiethnic, culturally diverse, and cosmopolitan geography representative of emerging pluralistic ethnic geographies of the twenty-­first ­century.48 It also raises issues of attribution and authorship that lay ­behind the question, Who builds our environment? Historians traditionally ascribed the built environment to t­hose who built it—­architects, business interests, government agencies, policy makers,

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urban planners. The new scholarship argues that while histories of the physical construction of buildings, streets, and interiors are impor­tant, accounts of rituals, per­for­mances, be­hav­iors, and other sensate and transient acts of world making and place making are equally relevant. Users and immigrants remake place by taking over existing sites and by “bringing places to life,” as we observed during this parade. Accordingly, the transnational turn in thinking about urban geographies requires a broader and more fluid understanding of culture as dramaturgical, place based, mobile, and mutable—­a paradigm shift that requires us to rethink our methods of studying the cultural production of urban immigrant geographies.49

chapter 9

Transnational Urban Meanings The Passage of “Suburb” to India and Its Rough Reception Ri ch a rd H a rri s

The need for local language repre­sen­ta­tions of the city is an absolute prerequisite to represent subaltern perspectives. Anthony King, 2007 [South Asia] stands . . . ​at the very limits of translatability by Western codes. Ranajit Guha, 1997

At the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, urbanization was reshaping much of Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca. ­Today it is a striking trend or an accomplished fact worldwide, driven and articulated most obviously by flows of ­people, capital, and information but just as importantly by cultural meaning.1 We may usefully debate ­whether the flows in question are best understood through the languages of postcolonialism, globalization, or transnational urbanism. But regardless, now more than ever it is clear that no city—­and no place within any city—is an island. For a variety of very practical reasons, all of the flows that shape cities are elusive: difficult to document, harder still to assess and interpret. Perhaps the most challenging of all, b­ ecause inherently difficult to quantify, are ­those of cultural meaning. And yet surely they are

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among the most impor­tant. It ­matters what all ­these new urbanites make of their lives and environments, so unfamiliar in their rhythms and requirements. What new discourses—­marriages of thought and action—­a re they borrowing, adopting, inventing, and resisting? One of the better ways of answering this question is to examine the words they use to define and facilitate their daily lives.2 Words, ­after all, are the ­bearers of meaning. They also travel easily, insolently crossing the policed borders of nations and the more permeable barriers of language while ignoring hierarchies of all kinds. In so ­doing, they carry, acquire, change, and lose meanings. Informed by such an understanding, this essay explores the passage of one word—­“suburb”—to one country—­India—­suggesting how its rough reception ­there can illuminate the larger pro­cesses of transnational urbanization. The word and the place are significant. Urbanization necessarily entails the expansion of cities to create what, at least in Anglo-­A merica, are routinely referred to as “the suburbs.” In recent years, its scale and pace have created an urban world that, in a statistical sense, is largely suburban. India is a major part of that story: soon to be the most populous country in the world, its cities have been growing rapidly. We might suppose that Indians would speak freely of “suburbs.” For many de­cades a British colony, it is now the largest nation in the world where En­glish is an official language. But in fact the story ­t here is fraught and complex. En­glish is the language of the elite, not the streets. Then, too, India is a nation of many languages whose dominance varies regionally, a context into which En­glish has been inserted variously. And its urban fringe areas are themselves highly varied; very few look like the Anglo-­A merican ste­reo­t ype. “Suburb,” then, has faced material, as well as linguistic and cultural, challenges, making it an intriguing illustration of the manner in which words carry and negotiate meaning. Much of this story, including the indigenous languages of urbanism, remains undocumented and obscure in any tongue. How, then, to assess the impact of “suburb”? A proper answer to that question could only be provided by a multilingual researcher or, more prob­ably, a linguistically diverse team. Although able to call on the assistance of several Indian colleagues, as a unilingual Canadian I can offer only a speculative sketch that, rather than providing clear answers, suggests the usefulness of certain transnational lines of enquiry.



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The Silence About Words Pierre-­Yves Saunier, joint editor of the Dictionary of Transnational History, has suggested that one of the main features of transnational research it that it loosens up the hierarchical manner in which we often think about how the world works. Although he does not point it out, a fine illustration of his point are the varied routes and networks through which words travel. To be sure, ­there is a hierarchical ele­ment to this, as flows of businesspeople, immigrants, and tourists help to constitute global hubs. To some extent this is reinforced by the centralization of media conglomerates. But conversations happen everywhere, on the streets and in the stores where p ­ eople mingle; words travel through news and m ­ usic, on the Internet, and now via social media, which famously know no hierarchy. In India, for example, real estate advertising produced by major agencies may promote global norms of production and consumption, but the popularity of songs such as “Kolaveri di” propagate local understandings even when, as in this case, the lyr­ics are part nonsense!3 Unfortunately, the Dictionary is s­ ilent about everyday words and their meanings, and that is typical. Although extensive and in many ways wide ranging, recent academic conversations about how our world is changing have skipped over the subject. This is least surprising from t­ hose who focus on flows of capital, goods, and l­ abor.4 This includes most of t­ hose who have thought specifically in terms of transnationalism: the editors of an authoritative reader identified seven groups of research questions, among which “How are transnational values and meanings articulated so that they make sense to local ­actors?” rated as only a minor ele­ment in the seventh. Postcolonial writers, notably within cultural studies, have given more attention to ­ atter language. ­Indeed, Arjun Appadurai has suggested that “the subject m of cultural studies could roughly be taken as the relationship between the word and the world.” Within South Asia particularly, t­ here has been a fruitful interdisciplinary exchange about culture and meaning that includes historians in the subfield known as subaltern studies. Perhaps the group most consistently alert to the issue, however, are anthropologists such as Ulf Hannerz, who has advised that we start by asking, “How widely throughout society is a certain system of meaning shared?” Jan Pieterse speaks of “intercultural transaction” and James Clifford of the “dynamics of dwelling/traveling,” while ­others have discussed the typically hybrid outcomes. ­These are intellectual circles in which everyday speech should get re­spect.5

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But even ­here writers have focused on lit­er­a­ture—­high culture—or on social theory, rather than on vernaculars. As a result, as Dane Kennedy puts it, “meta­phor has metastasized into meta­phoricity, narrative into narrativity, origin into originary, fact into facticity.” The relative neglect of everyday speech has also been apparent in South Asian studies, even though the core assumption of the subaltern studies group was that British rule depended more on persuasion than coercion, an idea captured by the phrase “dominance without hegemony.” In this vein, and influentially, Bernard Cohn has dissected the language of colonial administrators, arguing that “the command of language is the language of command.” But even he paid ­little attention to the changing discourse of the streets and bazaars.6 ­These general observations also apply to urbanists.7 Even among urban anthropologists, vernacular speech has not been much of a concern, including in recent collections that speak “from below.”8 Researchers, like colonial administrators, recognize the value of non-­English words to denote local meanings ( favela, barrio, bustee, banlieue), but they rarely trace semantic ­trajectories within the respective languages, w ­ hether Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, or French, while local borrowings from En­glish fly ­under their radar. The linguistic limitation of most Anglophone scholars, myself included, does not help. This ­matters ­because, internationally, En­glish is the dominant language of social science and, to a lesser extent, of history.9 It is difficult for unilingual Anglophones to trace En­glish words in foreign tongues, and impossible for them to interpret the subtleties of meaning. When borrowed, has a word retained its sense in British (or American, or Australian) En­glish? Has it displaced or disturbed terms in the indigenous language? Has it been welcomed? Or has its adoption been disputed and resisted, perhaps ­because of unwelcome connotations? The answers are impor­tant, and not only to t­ hose who sell real estate. They can provide clues as to how locals think about their places of residence, to the meanings that they attach to ­those places, and to their pattern of response to the broader cultural changes that are shaping their lives and environments. “Slum,” and the way that its use has changed over time and place, suggests the potential of this line of inquiry. It was used widely through the first half of the twentieth c­ entury, but in the 1960s En­glish speakers became sensitive to this word ­because its negative connotations ­were perceived to be critical of local residents. Within the developed world, its use declined sharply in the 1970s and has not recovered. Applied to the developing world, in contrast, the term has persisted and remains ubiquitous. In recent years, however, a few



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writers have raised questions as to w ­ hether it is appropriate, or in practice useful. Its stigma may be deployed in ways that are mean or unhelpful.10 As Amitabh Kundu has also pointed out, it can obscure impor­tant ­legal, social, and economic differences between, for example, Turkish gecekondus and ­Peruvian barrios, or, for that ­matter, Indian bustees, jhuggis, and jhonpdis. However, many ­others have defended the term, ­whether as a meta­phor or metonym that can attract attention and galvanize action. This argument carries par­tic­u­lar weight in India, where “slum” is an official term that some communities welcome (and ­others fear) b­ ecause it qualifies them for special treatment.11 ­Here, then, is an En­glish word whose use has attracted some debate. But the discussion has not yet affected the way most academics write about cities, and, except perhaps in India, it has paid ­little heed to vernacular usage and meaning. This is doubly true for “suburb,” the term that historically was framed almost as the counterpoint of “slum.” If ­there is an En­glish word whose dispersal deserves attention, then surely this is it, as one of the major and, for two centuries, enduring terms in the En­glish urban lexicon.

The En­glish Empire Vernacular usage is impor­tant. Nothing travels, and adheres, more easily than everyday words: unobtrusive, ubiquitous, and f­ree, they are necessary social tools. Wherever ­people travel, read, listen, or talk—in person or on the phone—­words move. Words are much more mobile, ­because so much more easily picked up, than the languages of which they are a part. In recent years, ­there has been much discussion about the globalization of English—­“Globish” is the world’s lingua franca for business, politics, entertainment, and the professions—­but the effects are judged variously.12 Recently, for example, ­under the title of “The En­glish Empire,” the Economist’s Schumpeter columnist noted that even Chinese companies such as Lenovo have made En­glish ­ eople who are native En­glish speaktheir everyday language.13 The number of p ers, or who use it extensively as a second (or third) language, is enormous. And yet many more, even illiterates, have learned a handful of En­glish words ­because it is necessary for business, to get ahead, or simply to negotiate their daily lives.14 In large part, the growing hegemony of En­glish is rooted historically in Britain’s colonial reach and then the power—­hard and soft—of the United States. It is a notorious hybrid, prob­ably ­because it has traveled so widely. It

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has ­adopted and adapted words from other languages: “pundit” from Hindi, “kindergarten” from German, “caribou” from Mi’kmaq, “salon” from French, and so on. Often En­glish had no equivalent, sometimes a borrowed word was used for display or snob appeal, and frequently to denote a distinctive ele­ment in another culture. It is for that reason Anglophone urbanists refer to favelas or banlieues. Some nuances may be lost on an international audience but the gesture is meaningful: such terms would lose far more in translation, for example, as “slum” or “suburban ghetto,” respectively. That is why Anthony King, one of ­those rare urbanists with an appreciation for the power of everyday words, has argued that “the need for local language repre­sen­ta­tions of the city is an absolute prerequisite to represent subaltern perspectives.”15 Speakers of En­glish have borrowed terms from all sorts of languages and places, in the pro­cess often changing or robbing them of meaning. A prime example is the Spanish “plaza,” which, in his role as coeditor of the only substantial survey of everyday urban words, Christian Topalov has singled out as having had an especially complex history. As he concludes, “The ghost of the Spanish plaza real is not haunting pres­ent American speakers,” which is why it is pointless to seek the essence of a word.16 Borrowings have been continuous, often subtle, and nowhere more active in the modern era than in India. Some Anglo-­Indian words have retained a local flavor and reference (ayah, bustee), but many have lost their provenance (“juggernaut,” “bungalow”). ­Those words with par­tic­u­lar local meanings are especially valuable. Braj Kuchru, a leading student of Indian En­glish, has pointed out that they enable a “contextual nativisation” that speaks to par­tic­u­lar historical and cultural circumstances. They indicate the user’s familiarity with a local scene. Kundu and Somnath Basu make the same point specifically about urban words, which allow En­glish speakers “to capture the local specificity of the situation.” That is why borrowings ­were so common in British India. Administrators used native terms to exercise power, implicitly conceding that local conditions mattered; expats found it con­ve­nient or colorful to “interlard their conversation with native words”; while writers such as Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster knew them to be indispensable in evoking a milieu.17 For words that have not been thoroughly assimilated into En­glish, the borrowing is often messy or partial. ­There are prob­lems of transliteration. In India, bustee often appears as basti or busti, while kutcha may appear as katcha, kacha, kachha, or even cutcha. And then meanings may shift. Kutcha—­ roughly, “imperfect”—­has been stable in counterpoint to pukka: applied to buildings, for example, it has long meant temporary, cheap, mud walled, or



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poorly built. But bustee has evolved: at first meaning “village” or “inhabited place,” then becoming, and in some parts of India apparently remaining, a neutral term that denotes a block of modest dwellings on the property of a single landowner; now most commonly meaning “slum.”18 Singly and in groups, such words may be thrown into writing and conversation. We can observe this everywhere. A nice urban example of such code mixing is the text of a real estate advertisement from Puerto Rico in the 1970s: “Buy your home in Levittown Lakes, donde la Buena vida comienza” (where the good life begins). It is difficult to know ­whether this was directed at native speakers of ­ atter: mixing goes in En­glish or of Spanish, or both. In a sense it does not m many directions. In India for de­cades, the insertion of En­glish into Hindi advertising has been routine: although most products have an En­glish name, ­ ere is no rule about this; En­glish may be used copy is generally in Hindi. Th to connote higher status, but in general advertising agencies write what they think ­will work best.19

Strange Words in a Strange Land It is into this stew of linguistic hybridity that “suburb” has been carried. Elsewhere, outside Anglo-­A merica, English-­speaking experts commonly use this word and its derivatives to refer to the urban fringe. They generally adopt one of two strategies. The first is to use “suburb” regardless, implying that, at least for pres­ent purposes, local usages do not ­matter. They may try to justify their strategy, as I have done myself elsewhere, but many do not. A typical example is provided by James Moore’s recently published study of Cairo around the turn of the twentieth ­century. Cairo, of course, was a multilingual city in which the majority spoke Arabic, while significant numbers knew French or En­glish, or, in the case of the educated elite, all three. It is not clear how, or even ­whether, most locals had a generic term for the urban fringe; the closest term in Arabic was dâhiya, although this was most commonly used for neighborhoods in general rather than just suburbs. But Moore speaks only of “suburbs,” and of a pro­cess of “suburbanisation” that produced a collective “suburbia.” This way of speaking effectively communicates certain general facts about what was happening at the time, but it glosses over much of the meaning in local coffee ­houses.20 The alternative, rarer strategy has been to be choosy about which areas to call suburban. In this regard, writers follow the example of Robert Fishman

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in his history of the elite, low-­density residential suburb as a “bourgeois utopia.” Having defined his subject precisely, Fishman suggests that much of what North Americans now refer to as “the suburbs” does not in fact meet t­hose criteria and should be spoken about differently. (He suggests “technoburb.”) A similarly discriminating approach has been taken by ­those who have written about, or lived in, colonial settings. John Archer, for example, speaks this way about the early history of Anglo-­Indian suburbs in India, while South Africans long reserved “suburb” for areas occupied by whites.21 ­There is a logic to this approach, which leaves a space for the use of other names to refer to other types of places. But it may lead to the neglect of ­those places, or to a failure to recognize that they are interrelated parts of the larger pro­cess of urban expansion. Each approach has its merits, and potentially its prob­lems. Both have been taken by t­ hose who have written about cities in India. Having been carried to India by traders and administrators in the eigh­ teenth ­century, “suburb” has had plenty of time to put down local roots, but it has faced unusual challenges that also illuminate the larger issues at stake when considering how words travel. Social scientists have often argued that ­there are good reasons to pay attention to the unusual, as well as the typical: we see something at full stretch. It is very much in that vein that, writing about the ways in which cultures in general move and mix, Clifford has recommended that we consider each culture’s “furthest points of travel.”22 Given India’s size, cultural diversity, and physical remove from British home turf, it fits the bill. Along with many other words, the experience of “suburb” in India illustrates the point: its domestication has not been easy. The most obvious challenge it has faced has been that Indian cities, including their urban fringe areas, are so very dif­fer­ent from their En­glish counter­parts, and carry dif­fer­ent meanings. T ­ oday, the fringe may include poorly ser­viced informal settlements, sometimes referred to as “unauthorized colonies,” which are often occupied by rural mi­grants seeking urban opportunity. They are the very opposite of the ste­reo­t yped Anglo-­A merican suburb of middle-­class families seeking respite from the hustle and bustle of the city. In this regard, they are like informal settlements around cities in many parts of the developing world.23 Other fringe areas consist of “resettlement colonies,” which ­house slum dwellers who have been forcibly relocated from inner-­ city locations. In that ­these are state sponsored, they are comparable to public housing proj­ects. Even in ­England, ­people are often reluctant to speak of council estates as “suburban,” although many comprise low-­density semidetached homes near the urban periphery. The Indian resettlement colonies are far



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poorer, denser, and altogether dif­fer­ent. It is not at all obvious that “suburban” ­ iddle classes, ­there are new, somewould be appropriate. And then, for the m times gated proj­ects. Christiana Brosius has shown that some of ­these embody “the desire to distance oneself from the city, to be at ease, away from the chaos of the streets, markets, and shops.”24 ­Here, at last, we find ­something like the classic suburban impulse. But only the rich can afford villas. The g­ reat majority of the new proj­ects consist of medium-­or high-­rise structures for which, again, “suburban” might not seem to be the obvious term. The less vis­i­ble challenge, but perhaps no less impor­tant, is linguistic. “Suburb,” of course, is part of a larger linguistic and cultural package: what Barbara Cassin calls a “terminological network,” in which each word has meaning in relation to ­others, and what Karen Risager calls the larger “linguaculture,” in this case of British En­glish, where each word has unique referents.25 To be sure, India has long been one of the ­great English-­speaking nations of the world, ranked third in En­glish book publishing. Almost uniquely, it has a thriving, still-­growing English-­language daily press. It contains between one hundred million and two hundred million speakers of the language, more than Britain, and far more than Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand combined. Despite the historic re­sis­tance of leading nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the numbers and proportion are growing, as they are almost everywhere, and especially among the young. Students have long believed that knowing it improves their job prospects.26 Indians use En­glish out of necessity, as a mark of prestige, for con­ve­nience, and to provide “a win­dow on the world.” It was resisted as the language of a colonizing power but now, “shorn of its imperial associations,” it is largely welcomed.27 It is one of India’s official languages: along with Hindi, it is widely spoken everywhere. So ­there is ample opportunity for En­glish to have ­shaped the language of cities. Dominant in international business, the professions, and often politics and public administration, it is spoken disproportionately by urban elites, as well as by t­ hose who concern themselves in a general way with cities. Th ­ ese include indigenous engineers, architects, planners, and academics, as well as the staffs of nongovernmental organ­izations and a range of international agencies and their workers. It reigns supreme in the field of tertiary education.28 But outside the social, educational, and economic elites, most Indians do not know En­glish as their first, second, or even third language. Moreover, linguistically and culturally, India is a country of a bewildering complexity that is reflected in wide regional and local variations. Everywhere t­ here are three

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official languages, but the third is “the local language,” of which ­t here are many. Tom McArthur has suggested that “­there are few places in the world where the continuum of En­glish is so complex,” and local diversity is one dimension of this. Kuchru, for example, writes of the unique linguistic environment of the city of Nagpur, in Maharashtra Province. ­There, Marathi, the local language, has interacted in a par­tic­u­lar way with Hindi: Nagpuri Marathi (with some Hindi ele­ments) is used on the street, but Puneri Marathi or Hindi is preferred in more formal situations. En­g lish, then, has encountered a ­dif­fer­ent linguistic terrain in each place and social setting. Urban words are affected like all ­others. In their survey of urban words in northern India alone, Kundu and Basu note that word usages reflect a “complex pattern of interaction among ­peoples,” although neither they nor anyone ­else has made an attempt to sketch the patterns. India, then, underlines the fact that transnational movements do not happen between s­ imple, unitary cultures.29 The challenges do not end t­ here. As the example of Nagpur suggests, another part of India’s linguistic complexity arises from the varied ways in which words are borrowed and assimilated. Hybrid usages, of the sort that would stand out in everyday speech in Britain and North Amer­i­ca, are “entirely unremarkable” t­here. Code mixing is the norm, as “intercultural speakers”—­Claire Kramsch’s term—­subtly adjust the form and combination of languages to each social setting.30 Signaling the higher status of En­glish, ­there is a marked asymmetry. A study in Delhi found that recent Bengali and Punjabi mi­grants routinely acquired and used at least some En­glish words but that En­glish speakers rarely returned the ­favor.31 Shaheen Meraj reports intriguing examples drawn from Urdu magazine advertisements. In December 1984, ­houses in one suburban development, Muslim Villas, featured “do aur tiin kushaada bed room bamne tiled attached baths. Vasiih drawing aur dining. Car porch, kitchen . . . ​A merican kitchen me cabinet aur steel sink. Garm aur ThanDe paanii kii line.”32 Meraj speaks of borrowings—­apparent enough in this excerpt—­but also of “assimilation,” where the En­glish word is left ­behind but its meaning now suffuses a close indigenous equivalent. ­Apparently, such assimilations have drawn from “building,” “development,” “housing scheme,” and “planning.” ­These examples ­were taken from magazines published in Pakistan, but similar types of intermixture are routine throughout South Asia. It is not a question of w ­ hether code mixing occurs, but rather of how much, in what form, by whom, and in what context. The result would be confusing to an outsider: Kuchru suggests that Indians “instinctively” recognize up to ten va­ri­e­ties of En­glish, and the potential patterns of interaction



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with other languages are in effect limitless. Given that India is such a large country and that its cities are physically as well as linguistically diverse, it would be surprising if any single En­glish term such as “suburb” seemed to make sense, equally, everywhere.33 And yet t­ here is “colony,” a prime example of semantic shift. Apart from its best-­k nown use, in Britain this term is also occasionally employed to refer to an area, sometimes within a city, that has been settled by a par­tic­u­lar group (“nudists’ colony”; “artists’ colony”). Presumably that is how it was first used in colonial India. Ironically, however, since in­de­pen­dence, it has been widely ­adopted as the approximate equivalent of “neighborhood,” perhaps especially for planned “housing estates.” It is now used much more widely, and in a subtly dif­fer­ent way from in Britain.34 It has entered everyday speech, being a common toponym. Regardless of their fa­cil­i­ty with En­glish, locals must use the word whenever they need to speak of par­tic­u­lar places. H ­ ere, then, we have an example of an urban word that has made a new place for itself in a strange land. What, then, of “suburb”?

The Passage of “Suburb” to India The early prospects of “suburb” ­were very good, but in the long run the term has not caught on in the same way as “colony.” When the British brought the term to India in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, their inclination was to use it first and primarily to refer to places that they themselves occupied, and that corresponded in a general way with the emerging ste­reo­t ype. In India, this meant gracious bungalows with live-in servants and often set in extensive grounds. But the situation was never that s­ imple. In smaller and provincial urban centers, the British settled in separate areas that ­were commonly referred to as the civil lines; although appropriate, the term “suburb” was not generally used for ­these.35 In the major port cities of Bombay, Madras, and the capital Calcutta, it was not feasible to establish civil lines. The British lived, ­whether in town or in the suburbs, in areas that contained large numbers of Indians. Urban fringe areas ­were diverse: they included industrial towns, British estates with Indian servants, villages, and much e­ lse besides. In Calcutta administrators freely used phrases such as “the suburbs” or “the suburban municipalities” in a manner that sounds familiar to a modern North American reader. If anything, this practice was reinforced by serious outbreaks of plague in the 1890s. ­These encouraged not only a limited suburbanization of the British but

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also, more significantly, deliberate attempts to promote the decentralization of the general population to reduce urban overcrowding and congestion. In Bombay and Calcutta, discussions by local administrators, and by a small ­ ere just beginning to think of themselves as plangroup of professionals who w ners, emphasized the importance of promoting “suburbanization” and “suburban development.”36 Particularly in Bombay, expansion came to depend on a train ser­vice that itself was referred to as suburban—­echoing circumstances in London or Melbourne. And as settlement followed, a wave of apartment building created a distinctive landscape that supported new styles of living. Although ­these areas had no equivalent in Britain or North Amer­i­ca, they too ­were sometimes referred to locally as suburban.37 Reasonably enough, then, recognizing con­temporary usages, historians have spoken freely about “the suburbs” of colonial Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore.38 In ­doing so, most have simply assumed that the term is appropriate. In her recent study of Bombay, however, Preeti Chopra has suggested that we think about the issue more deliberately. Arguing that “the term ‘suburb,’ applied to colonial India, deserves closer scrutiny as a form and historical pro­ cess,” she notes that the British ­were often reluctant to use this word for what they regarded as “native towns,” regardless of their location at the edge of Bombay. Speaking, for example, of a large housing proj­ect for Parsis, she notes that the promoter, Khan Murzban, referred to it as a “suburb” but that local En­glish newspapers knew it as a “town.”39 This may suggest that, as in South Africa, the British felt possessive about the term, reserving it for situations they deemed appropriate, but what of local residents? How many would have followed Murzban’s lead and thought of it as a suburban neighborhood? Chopra does not tell us and, in truth, it is difficult to say, although the question might be pursued in the native press. In part for that reason, but also ­because historians have not thought to ask the question, the labelling and the meaning of the urban fringe to Indians in the colonial era remains obscure. If it is difficult to figure out usages a ­century ago, it is impossible to trace patterns of evolution over time. Part of the prob­lem is that very ­little has been written about Indian cities in the de­cades immediately before and ­after in­de­ pen­dence. ­Matters become a ­little clearer as we approach the pres­ent ­because the sources are more abundant and b­ ecause in princi­ple it is pos­si­ble simply to ask ­people how they think. Th ­ ere are, of course, many who barrel ahead with Western terminology and ignore local terms. Fulfilling a ste­reo­type, a fine example is a recently coauthored study for the World Bank, which speaks of metropolitan suburbs and peri-­urban areas but never of Indian usages such



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as “colony.”40 This sort of approach prob­ably dominates the work of, and reports written locally for, international agencies, but it can also be found in articles written for an educated domestic audience, as in the serious magazine Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly.41 But many writers are more cautious, even if only implicitly or indeed unconsciously. Usages that are unpremeditated are the most telling: they reveal what is simply taken for granted. Of course, it is usually impossible to know how carefully writers have chosen their words, but to probe the issue I contacted Andrew Harris, a geographer at University College London, who is the author of a recent study of Mumbai. Harris is explic­itly concerned with the ways in which Mumbai has been represented in the recent academic lit­er­a­ ture. He notes the inadequacy of “existing academic language, writing styles and conceptual categories,” and of the way researchers have given disproportionate attention to certain areas, for example Dharavi, while neglecting ­others, including the urban fringe. What struck me is that he never once mentions suburbs. When asked, he replied that this was not a conscious decision. Presumably, for someone who knows the city well and who is attuned to the significance of language, “suburb” did not pres­ent itself as a meaningful term in considering modern urbanization.42 ­Unless an author chooses to explain her language, it is usually impossible to know ­whether word choices reflect assumptions or strategic decisions. Even so, silences can be revealing. A good example is the Oxford Handbook of Urbanisation in India. Coauthored by scholars from the region, it makes very restrained reference to suburbs, or sprawl, and neither term is indexed. This would be inconceivable in a comparable work on North Amer­i­c a, say, or Britain. Opening up, more or at less at random, Canadian Cities in Transition, the most recent edition of a best-­selling textbook on Canadian cities, one finds a substantial, indexed reference to sprawl in the concluding chapter. ­There are numerous entries u ­ nder “suburbs,” pointing to serious commentary in six chapters, and references in many more. Th ­ ere are separate entries for “sub­ urbanization,” “suburban town centres,” and so forth. Any North American or British reader would expect this sort of coverage.43 My reading of recent works about Indian cities suggests that if writers avoid “suburb,” they do so ­because the term simply does not make a lot of sense, to them or to their readers. Indeed, another survey, this time encompassing Southeast Asia as well, implies a subtle appreciation for local differences in nomenclature. It makes some use of “suburbanisation” with re­spect to Bombay, but the term is employed only once, in passing, for Calcutta, where

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the peripheral districts are referred to as “outer municipalities,” while Chennai has “suburban trains” but no suburbs. The only index entry for the term pertains to Bombay.44 ­There could obviously be a danger in reading too much into such differences, ­unless shown to be part of a larger pattern, and this would require the use of more extensive documentation than was pos­si­ble ­here. But ­there are hints that subtleties of usage are apparent not only on the national scale but also on the local one. The usefulness of subjecting texts to close reading is confirmed by t­ hose instances where authors show discomfort with a term. Two de­cades ago, during a report on slums in Surat, Biswaroop Das referred awkwardly to the city’s “ ‘sub’-­urban growth.” Much more recently, speaking very deliberately of “Bombay” as opposed to “Mumbai” for po­liti­cal reasons, the journalist Naresh Fernandes notes that “the congested northern section of the metropolis” is “still known somewhat quixotically as ‘the suburbs.’ ” This gives and takes away, implying that the term may sometimes be used but that it is not r­ eally meaningful. This interpretation is confirmed by the responses of t­ hose urban and language experts whom I asked directly. Sanjeev Vidyarthi, the historian of the neighborhood idea in India, responded that “ ‘suburb’ is almost completely missing both from the official discourse (master plans ­etc.) and everyday parlance,” while anthropologist Shail Mayaram agreed: “Suburb is a category not much in use.”45 An obvious reason is that the urban fringe has no single or par­tic­u ­lar meaning in India. This is the view of Annapurna Shaw, an urban geographer in Kolkata. She observed that “living in the fringes ­doesn’t have any par­tic­u­lar connotations except for the greater travel time.” If that is so, then Indians would have no need for any generic term for the urban periphery, and in fact that may be the case. Bimal Patel, an architect and planner based in Ahmedabad, commented simply that “we do not seem to have a settled usage.” “Suburb” may have had a ­free passage to India, where it was used for de­cades by the British, but, despite the growing use and popularity of En­glish, it has since languished. Indians do not seem to need it.46

Discussion “Suburb” is a word with power­ful cultural meaning that should have traveled well to India, but fell on stony ground. Most Indians have neither a­ dopted nor domesticated the term. Is that b­ ecause it competes with domestic equivalents?



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­A fter all, t­ hese do exist. For Bangalore, Sahana Udupa, a media anthropologist, has suggested that the most generic term may be “outskirts,” or haravalaya in Kannada, the local language. According to Rafia Kazim, in northern India the Hindi word upnagar may come even closer: nagar has long meant “urban” as opposed to “rural,” while up translates as “subordinate,” so that the combination almost precisely captures the original meaning of “suburb.”47 I understand that purankar is a close equivalent in Tamil. An appropriate vocabulary exists, then, at least in some languages and regions. To the extent that such terms are not only available but in fact used, local residents may see l­ittle need for an En­glish replacement. But it is not clear ­whether ­these indigenous terms are in fact widely used. To find out, we need to know more about how Indians identify and speak about the varied types of places in their cities. Clearly, ­there has been no ­generic re­sis­tance to changes in urban vocabulary, including the adoption of En­glish terms. They have changed the way they use an indigenous word, nagar, to refer now to urban neighborhoods, this being a postwar development; on that basis, the word is commonly incorporated into proper names. It is also clear that Indians have been willing to adopt En­glish words other than “suburb” to describe their cities. “Colony” competes successfully with nagar; in some cities, “extension” or “layout” is used for North American–­style subdivisions, while “slum” has in many ways displaced indigenous terms such as bustee or jhuggi, although not to the same degree everywhere. To see ­whether ­there is a space for “suburb,” therefore, we need to take stock of the urban language for each metropolitan area. One way to tackle this is by searching online newspapers. A good example is the Hindu, a leading national daily with sixteen local editions. On July 9, 2014, the “most popu­lar” story of the Bangalore edition referred to new commuter trains from “suburban areas.” How typical is this “suburban” reference? A keyword search of the full text of the national paper for the first six months of 2014 revealed 120,259 references to “nagar,” 71,201 to “colony,” 20,812 to “neighbourhood,” 17,682 to “layout,” 11,391 to “suburb,” and 9,595 to “sprawl.” To interpret ­t hese numbers, it would be necessary to look more closely: is “nagar” much used in a generic sense? What proportion of the references to “colony” speak of a residential area, as opposed to a nation? And what are the connotations and contexts in which all of t­ hese words are used? Some of the native-­language newspapers would also support this type of analy­sis. For example, Jagran, a leading Hindi newspaper, permits searches in En­glish, as well as Hindi. Its engine unearthed 366 references to “nagar” on July 9, 2014, and

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89 to “colony,” but only 4 to “suburb” and none to “sprawl.” The broad ranking is similar to the Hindu, but the relative numbers differ. Such results suggest that newspapers could tell us a lot about the transnational circulation of words and meanings, but as yet they have not been tapped.48 Making sense of such evidence is a daunting task, but to illustrate the challenge and payoff, let us consider briefly the patterning of urban vocabulary in Bangalore. I have already suggested that t­here is a local word t­here for “outskirts.” Judging from a detailed survey of the city published in the 1950s, experts once spoke of “extensions,” ­these being subdivisions of varying size, some of which might include a “planned city-­sub-­c entre.” Sometimes the term was incorporated into a proper name, as with the Jayanagar Extension—­note the use of nagar. But “extension” seems to have fallen out of ­favor, except perhaps in the specialized sense of a relatively small addition to an existing subdivision.49 “Layout” is now preferred, t­here being several types. According to Solomon Benjamin, a leading expert on suburban land development in India, Revenue layouts are t­hose administered by the Revenue Department, Gramthana are situated on land controlled by village councils at the urban periphery, and Vattram layouts on private land are typically working class in character. Cutting across ­these categories, irregular layouts or settlements violate municipal regulations, many of which might also be designated, officially and unofficially, as “slums.” In time, all of t­ hese may be expected to evolve into “colonies,” just as North American suburban subdivisions mature into inner-­suburban and then city neighborhoods. This is an already complex pattern. But other common terms overlap with, or perhaps complement, the language of layout and colony. A number of writers have noted that the fringes of Bangalore now boast many “gated communities” or “complexes”—­the terms are interchangeable—­which often sport a globalized image, as well as “townships,” the sorts of public housing developments that might be called “estates” in Britain and “proj­ects” in North Amer­i­ca. Some, at least, of t­ hese terms may have resonance on the street, although ­others are prob­ably used largely by developers, planners, and urban experts. It would be helpful to know which are which, but no one has thought to ask.50 ­There is a logic to each of ­these names. ­A fter all, the metropolitan landscape of Bangalore displays striking physical contrasts, which reflect a very wide range of incomes and a g­ reat diversity in the agents of development, ­whether public, public-­private partnerships, or private, and among the last ­there are disputed distinctions between ­legal, quasi-­legal, and illegal. The forms



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of land regulation are complex, and so too are the forms of tenure: Benjamin counts ten. From the point of view of local residents, and perhaps planners too, the sponsorship, quality, owner­ship, and servicing of an area may ­matter far more than its location. And, to confuse ­matters further, the fast pace of growth makes it difficult to conceive of the overall pattern of urban space as being or­ga­nized in a stable, logically consistent fashion. Noting how Indian cities are a “mix of both old, traditional, unplanned areas and new, modern and planned areas,” Kazim has suggested that “­there is not any regular pattern of naming vari­ous sections of any city.” That may be overstating the point. In Bangalore as in most cities, for example, “slum” is used b­ ecause it denotes a type of area that differs in a recognizable way from all ­others, and ­because it is now embodied in legislation. But, along with many other words, “suburb” does not have an equivalent resonance.51 The very newest forms of growth around Bangalore and other Indian cities take forms that appear to have Western pre­ce­dents or global parallels. In addition to gated communities, they include malls and large, potentially self-­ contained proj­ects that lie at or beyond the urban fringe. In Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, such developments have caused growing numbers of researchers to follow Fishman’s example and to question ­whether the language of suburbia is still appropriate. In India, the larger ones are often referred to individually as “new towns,” “satellite towns,” “new cities,” or, occasionally, “townships,” while the collective noun “sprawl” is occasionally used.52 It may be that, just as landlines have been bypassed by mobile phone technology in many parts of the developing world, “new towns” and “sprawl” ­will leapfrog “suburb” in India. If so, it w ­ ill say something about how local residents understand and make sense of their urban environment, helping to explain why even the indigenous equivalents of “suburb,” such as haravalaya, are not widely used, at least by academics and planners. This impor­tant qualification points to the most significant deficiency of the pres­ent essay. In India, the language of experts is En­glish, while that of local residents is predominantly something ­else. It is very probable that t­ hose residents use “suburb” (or, for that ­matter, “layout” and “extension”) less ­frequently than the experts, but what do they say instead?53 We do not know. To find out, we need to ask them. We could also consult local media. News­ papers are still thriving in India; radio and tele­vi­sion are common too; while the sources that come closest to everyday speech are the vari­ous forms of social media. For researchers who speak in varied tongues, this is a ­viable proj­ect, but no one has yet thought to tackle it.

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Given the size of the Indian diaspora, we might also ask what words and meanings t­ hose mi­grants have taken to Eu­rope or North Amer­i­c a. ­There, many South Asian immigrants have settled in “the suburbs.” But in their homes, where many do not speak En­glish, do they think and speak of their neighborhoods as “suburban,” and, even if they do, what exactly might that mean? When asked, Emily Skop, the author of a recent study of South Asians in Phoenix, Arizona, confirmed that in transcripts of her interviews in this very suburban place, “the term ‘suburb’ ­doesn’t even come up.” What ­people cared and spoke about ­were specific types of accessibility—of jobs, schools, stores, and amenities. And where, as in large parts of suburban Toronto, Ontario, South Asians are overwhelmingly the largest ethnic group, we might well ask how their imported meanings shape the wider discourse.54 Again, no one seems to have asked, but from a transnational perspective the question seems obvious. ­A fter all, words, and meanings, travel in all directions. India, then, illustrates some points that have a very broad relevance. Its cities have of course been ­shaped by a variety of transnational ele­ments, from the laws, regulations, and governmental institutions established ­under colonial rule to the international models and practices of modern real estate development. Among the more significant of t­ hese imports have been the En­glish words by which cities have been described and conceived, through which meanings have been communicated and in varying degrees taken root. Attention should be paid to the manner in which t­ hose words have been received and adapted, above all in everyday speech. The evidence presented h ­ ere suggests that plausible, significant insights can be gleaned even from the published, readily available, English-­language material. The key qualification is that we must note the silences, as well as the slippery meanings of some of the words pres­ent. The most general insight is that, historically and on pres­ent evidence, the globalization of urban culture is not inevitable. Power­ful meanings may travel, but they meet re­sis­tance, and not just of the conscious sort. Some just do not make sense. And, in an era when the interplay between the global and the local occupies many minds, words can tell us a lot about this.

chapter 10

Suburbanization and Urban Practice in India N ikh i l Rao

In his contribution to this volume, Richard Harris suggests that studying the transnational movement of terms used for the urban environment offers an impor­tant perspective on how urban practices cross borders and are subsequently modified in their new context. He argues that in its passage to India, the term “suburb” “fell on stony ground,”1 and offers some reasons for this ill-­fated passage. Chief among them was the absence in Indian cities of any coherent, more or less uniform ordering of the urban periphery of the sort that was found in Anglo-­A merican cities. Absent such a recognizable urban form to signify, the signifier “suburb” failed to gain traction. Harris also notes that En­glish was a language of the elites in India, and that, moreover, India’s linguistic landscape was extraordinarily complex, with En­glish terms encountering dif­fer­ent linguistic topographies in dif­fer­ent regions. The movement of urban terms, he shows, does not happen “between s­ imple, unitary cultures.”2 As a result, terms like “suburb” might find only ­little resonance, and only in some parts of India, while other terms, including “colony,” might thrive with a variety of meanings in dif­fer­ent Indian contexts. Asking why the suburb as an urban form did not catch on in India is a good question ­because planned suburbanization briefly formed an impor­tant part of the British colonial state’s agenda a­ fter it began to undertake urban planning in Indian cities. If, as Harris demonstrates, words like “suburb,” “colony,” and “slum” encountered a complex linguistic terrain in India and

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s­ubsequently fragmented and ricocheted off on contingent trajectories, then might we not expect that the corresponding efforts to build suburbs also encountered complex social, po­liti­cal, and economic contexts? This essay offers the beginnings of an explanation for why planned suburbanization did not take hold in India despite being part of the colonial state’s agenda. It begins by examining changes in the po­liti­cal landscape in which suburbanization was introduced. It then looks more closely at what “suburbanization” consisted of at that time by disaggregating the term into specific practices and institutions. Suburbanization generally did not enjoy a successful transnational passage to India. Yet Indians embraced specific practices and institutions associated with suburbanization and helped them thrive, although often in unexpected ways. While this essay draws predominantly from my work on Bombay, the suburban mechanisms and institutions established first in that city subsequently flourished in other parts of the subcontinent.

Suburbanization and Po­liti­cal Power As Bombay industrialized and grew rapidly over the course of the late ­nineteenth ­century, it experienced congestion and outbreaks of disease. An especially severe plague outbreak at ­century’s end prompted efforts to “clean up” the inner city and, complementarily, to develop suburbs on the city’s edge in order to decongest the city center. British colonial officers in Bombay ­imagined that they could reproduce something along the lines of En­glish and German garden suburbs populated with villas, which would be sited on the lands lying to the north of the developed areas of the city.3 While initial efforts ­were energetic, the suburbanization proj­ect took an unexpected turn as planning efforts confronted the social, po­liti­cal, and economic context of Bombay. The envisioned villa suburbs eventually materialized as colonies of multistory apartment buildings, usually or­ga­nized along the lines of religious or caste communities. How did plans for garden-­villa suburbs result in colonies of apartment buildings? This outcome was determined by the par­tic­u­lar caste and economic considerations of the new upper-­c aste but lower-­middle-­class demographic group that ended up forming the constituency for housing in the suburban developments of Bombay. This group was unable to afford the planners’ envisioned villas but was also unwilling to live in the existing tenements that ­housed the working classes, who ­were usually of lower caste. The self-­contained



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apartment building suburbs of Bombay thus represented a compromise between the class and caste considerations of this new, fast-­growing urban demographic. More generally, suburbanization as a proj­ect of developing the urban periphery for residential use quickly lost steam even in Bombay, let alone in other cities where suburban planning did not have even the start that it had in the provincial capital. Part of the reason for this lay in the changing relationship between urban governance and state power over the course of the twentieth ­century. The colonial state’s suburban vision was ambitious and far reaching, with provincial government backing quite power­ful urban planning bodies such as the improvement trusts. But land acquisition proved to be a major challenge as authorities confronted speculators and landholders who proved resistant to acquisition. By the late 1910s, the difficulties in acquiring land had already come close to exhausting the resources allocated ­toward suburbanization. Moreover, from this time onward, the colonial state retreated from ­matters concerning urban development almost entirely, ceding ­these responsibilities to elected Indians while it fought an increasingly or­ga­nized nationalist movement. At the city level, therefore, the suburban agenda lacked strong support from regional and central governments. Or­ga­nized suburbanization as a proj­ect thus languished for the remainder of the colonial period ­after receiving its abortive start in Bombay and a few other cities. In newly in­de­pen­dent India, city planning was not a high priority to begin with and tended to be ad hoc in nature, with no consistent vision for the ­ ntil the 1970s, city governments continued to lack urban periphery. At least u support from state and central governments. As cities grew, municipal authorities proceeded to fill in lands within the city that had been acquired but not developed. The occupants of ­these lands ­were evicted to the urban edge. As cities grew still farther and municipalities sought to develop ­these peripheral ­ ere ­there ­were relocated once again. The urban lands, the settlements that w edge thus lacked a stable role in relation to city centers, its function being determined by the quality of land and the pressure of growth. Generally, nonelites ­were relocated from central areas to the peripheries ­until the saturation within cities led to the quest to develop the peripheries, which in turn led to another round of relocation. Although suburbanization as an or­ga­nized and consistent form of ordering the urban edge for residential use did not gain much traction, the vigor with which colonial authorities pursued this agenda in the early twentieth ­century meant that two key aspects of suburbanization did in fact catch on. The mechanism of land acquisition at the city’s edge, necessary for acquiring

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and converting agrarian areas into urban plots, took shape as part of the suburbanization imperative. Meanwhile, the cooperative housing society, which first gained institutional currency in conjunction with suburbanization, went on to become a ubiquitous form of occupancy in Indian cities.

Urban Expansion In the most basic material sense, urban growth entailed acquiring agrarian lands at the city’s edge and converting them into urban plots with the necessary infrastructure. Such conversion required legislation that would accommodate the vari­ous stakeholders in this pro­cess. In this section I argue that the imperative of land acquisition for suburbanization in Bombay established methods of land use conversion that have continued to shape urban expansion in India. When British officials first undertook suburban planning in early twentieth-­century Bombay, they did so by direct acquisition of lands from the peasants, cultivators, and, occasionally, speculators who occupied them. For this purpose, they used a power­ful new piece of legislation: the Indian imperial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, a form of eminent domain that descended from En­glish eminent domain legislation of the early nineteenth c­ entury.4 The Bombay Improvement Trust, the planning body set up in 1898 that first undertook suburbanization efforts, was one of the first Indian entities to use the new legislation. The trust established a range of protocols for land acquisition. Systems of land valuation ­were developed and refined, especially in the case of agrarian lands that had the potential for conversion to urban use; mechanisms for contesting valuation through a tribunal of appeal ­were also set up. ­These initial efforts resulted in the acquisition of large areas of land, but ­colonial planning authorities encountered fierce opposition from landholders who demanded higher compensation, as well as from the Indian-­controlled municipal corporation. (The Indians who dominated the corporation tended to own land in the older parts of the city, and thus fought efforts to extend the city since this would have lowered the value of their properties.) Eventually, the efforts and expenses required for land acquisition proved too much and, combined with the ebbing po­liti­cal ­will on the urban front of the colonial state itself, led by the 1920s to the withdrawal of the latter from suburbanization schemes and from urban interventions in general.



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Before the colonial state withdrew from urban intervention, however, it sought an alternative to the po­liti­cally and financially draining method of direct land acquisition as the mechanism for land use conversion. It found such an alternative in town planning legislation, a form of land use conversion that relied on holders of agrarian lands voluntarily surrendering their lands, which ­ ouse plots, street patterns, infrawould then be laid out for urban use with h structure, and so forth. The original landholders would receive plots in the new layout, and the costs for planning, streets, infrastructure, and so on would be offset by the increased value of the land as a result of its conversion to ­urban use. The Bombay Town Planning Act of 1915, which was used to extend suburbs north of the island of Bombay into what would become Greater Bombay, was directly influenced by the En­glish Town Planning Act of 1909. However, in an example of how urban ideas traveled during what Pierre-­Yves Saunier has called the “transnational municipal moment,”5 colonial planners in early twentieth-­c entury Bombay looked to German planning legislation, especially the methods used to convert agrarian lands into urban street layouts. B. W. Kissan, an En­glish civil servant based in Bombay, conducted a study tour of German cities in 1913 and recommended incorporating ele­ments of two German statutes in order to adapt the En­glish Town Planning Act to Bombay’s circumstances.6 Kissan especially endorsed the Lex Adickes, a 1902 law that offered a well-­developed mechanism for pooling lands and subsequently redistributing them once street layouts w ­ ere in place. Kissan noted that German landholdings that came on the market tended to be smaller in size, a feature shared by landholdings on Bombay’s edge—­and dif­fer­ent from landholding patterns in ­England, where larger estates could be acquired outright and converted into street layouts. The smaller landholdings in Bombay prompted Kissan to recommend incorporating the land-­reparcelling features of the Lex Adickes into the city’s town planning legislation rather than copying En­glish law outright. Furthermore, Kissan recommended another German law, the Prus­sian Fluchtliniengesetz of 1875, specifically a feature that accorded local authorities more power to execute town planning. This was dif­fer­ ent from the British law, where regional authorities and builders tended to have greater power over the execution of land use conversion through town planning. Indeed, when A. E. Mirams, a surveyor who had been active in town planning in Bombay in the 1910s, gave a lecture to the Town Planning Institute in London in 1919, he extolled the virtues of the Bombay Act over the

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En­glish Town Planning Act, recommending that the latter be amended to incorporate the land reparcelling feature from the former.7 Town planning as a form of land use conversion soon became an entrenched feature of Indian urban planning, as vari­ous provinces passed their own town planning laws that drew on and modified the Bombay Town Plan­ ese two features of town planning legislation—­land reparcelling ning Act. Th and the greater power accorded to local authorities—­would prove to play impor­tant roles in the ­future of urban expansion. For one ­thing, land reparcelling proved a time-­consuming and long, drawn-­out procedure that often led to the emergence of irregular housing—or slums—­because landholders whose lands ­were lying fallow during town planning arbitration would often “invite” squatters in. The increased power awarded to local authorities meant that ­these very nonelites, as they gradually mobilized in the po­liti­cal arena in the de­c ades ­a fter in­de­pen­dence, ­were sometimes able to use municipal power to stave off clearance efforts initiated by regional authorities or parastate agencies.8 Thus, two forms of land use conversion closely connected with the attempted suburbanization of Bombay—­ ­ d irect acquisition and town planning—­became a part of India’s planning repertoire. When po­liti­cal ­will has been strong, the state has tended to use direct acquisition, ­either through the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 or, most recently, through the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement Act of 2013, which fi­nally replaced the colonial-­era legislation. When state power has not been as strong, land use conversion has tended to take place through the compromise-­oriented mechanism of town planning.

Cooperative Housing The mechanisms of land use conversion used to effect suburban expansion had transnational origins and continued to play impor­tant roles in Indian urbanization long ­after state-­sponsored suburbanization had died. This was also the case with the institution that formed the desired housing type of Bombay’s suburbanization. The cooperative housing society was introduced to Indian cities in the context of Bombay’s suburbanization in the early twentieth ­century and went on to become a ubiquitous feature of Indian cities. Initially introduced as a way for the m ­ iddle classes to h ­ ouse themselves in the new areas developed by the Bombay Improvement Trust, the cooperative housing society



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was transformed in this setting to become a mechanism for exercising property rights. A global housing innovation of the nineteenth c­ entury, cooperative housing traveled to India, but its trajectory t­here took an unexpected course. A brief consideration of this trajectory thus offers a perspective on two distinct moments of transnational urban circulation: the first, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when cooperative housing made its way to India in the context of the suburbanization of Bombay; the second, from the mid-­t wentieth c­ entury, when cooperative housing became the context for exercising property rights and converged, in a surprising way, with U.S. efforts to export the virtues of homeownership. In par­tic­u­lar, this section emphasizes the contingencies at play in the trajectory of cooperative housing. In the United States, a system of incentives and subsidies that privileges homeownership over renting has been in place for many de­cades. Recent scholarship has shown how U.S. planners and administrators sought to export the ideology of homeownership to other parts of the world, claiming that this would uphold the princi­ples of democracy and capitalism.9 While this ideology was certainly propagated in Indian cities through World Bank housing aid, the way in which “owner­ship” functioned in the urban context of apartment buildings has been dif­fer­ent from the way it functions in the U.S. setting. As it happens, property rights in multistory apartment buildings have been very commonly exercised through the mechanism of the cooperative housing society. In industrializing cities like Bombay, familiar challenges such as congestion and overcrowding led to prob­lems ranging from rack-­renting landlords to outbreaks of disease. In response, housing reformers—­both British and Indian—­looked to the experiences of industrialized cities in Britain and Eu­ rope and seized on the institution of the cooperative housing society. While cooperative socie­ties had been established by colonial authorities at the turn of the nineteenth ­century, ­these had been oriented ­toward making credit available in the agrarian sector. The Indian legislation of 1904 was based on the En­glish Friendly Socie­ties law of 1896, but Indian credit socie­ties ­were also modeled ­after ­those that Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen founded in Germany to ­free peasants from dependence on rural moneylenders.10 In acknowl­edgment of the prob­lems confronting urbanizing cities, the colonial state passed a new law in 1912 that provided the framework for urban cooperative housing socie­ties. Started as a progressive movement in the Eu­ro­pean setting that sought to secure housing for the working classes, cooperative housing was transformed

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in Indian cities into a somewhat more conservative institution that sought to protect the ­middle classes from rent hikes. The utopian ele­ment of collectivism, meanwhile, was re­oriented to bring the cooperative collective into alignment with Indian notions of caste and community, and thereby to protect upper castes from ritual pollution in the face of urban diversity. S. S. Talmaki of Bombay was widely acknowledged as a pioneer of urban cooperative housing. ­A fter conducting a wide-­ranging study of cooperative housing experiments in ­England and Germany (and also in Italy and Denmark), he initiated the first such cooperative in India, the Saraswat Cooperative Housing Society, founded in Bombay in 1916.11 Participation was restricted to members of the Saraswat Brahmin community, a subcaste from the Konkan coast of southwestern India. In obtaining material from ­England and Eu­rope and in securing land in Bombay, Talmaki worked closely with J. P. Orr, an En­glish Indian Civil Ser­vice officer who served as chairman of the Bombay Improvement Trust in the 1910s. Indeed, the early cooperative housing socie­ties ­were inextricably linked to the suburban expansion schemes of the Bombay Improvement Trust and subsequent suburbanization efforts through town planning. Cooperative housing socie­ties ­were seen to offer a ­middle way between the market and socialism, much as they had in the early socie­ties of nineteenth-­century ­England and Germany. While they w ­ ere designed to protect members from the depredations of landlords in fast-­growing cities, they also distanced themselves from socialism and trade u ­ nionism, and thus converged with the self-­help agenda advanced by the colonial state in the early twentieth ­century.12 While Indian socie­ties such as that of the Saraswats ­were clearly modeled on British and Eu­ro­pean socie­ties, they also distinguished themselves from their pre­de­ces­sors. To begin with, they w ­ ere permitted by colonial law to discriminate on the basis of caste, religion, and other forms of community. Urban housing reformers such as Talmaki upheld this provision in the law, arguing that cooperative housing socie­ties could also help preserve traditional (usually upper-­caste) communities in the face of urban social mixing. Cooperative housing socie­ties in Bombay and other Indian cities such as Ahmedabad and Karachi w ­ ere or­ga­nized on the basis of par­tic­u­lar communities.13 In addition, while cooperative housing socie­ties in ­England and Germany ­were principally oriented ­toward the working classes, in Indian cities they tended to be dominated by the m ­ iddle class, since workers w ­ ere seen as too poor—­ and too unschooled in the virtues of practicing thrift—to save up for even the small amounts required to buy in.14 Even for the urban lower ­middle



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classes, the start-up contributions customary in E ­ ngland and Germany ­were recognized by Talmaki as being too high for Indian conditions, and he proposed instead an even lower initial contribution. From its beginnings in Bombay, the cooperative housing movement spread to other cities like Madras and Ahmedabad.15 While ­there ­were some variations, in general cooperative housing socie­ties in this early period ­were limited-­ equity enterprises. Members made initial contributions by purchasing shares in the society, while the cooperative as a collective entity secured financing for leasing land and erecting a structure. Members ­were assured fixed monthly expenditures, which went ­toward servicing the loan, as well as ­toward maintenance. In addition, ­those who had made a very small initial contribution ­ ntil their equity stake reached 20 ­percent. As also paid a monthly surcharge u this model indicates, the goals ­here ­were to keep monthly payments fixed and to create a community of stakeholders. (Although, of course, this community was to be built on a framework of caste or religious community.) ­A fter an initial flurry of excitement, cooperative housing socie­ties grew only very slowly in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, plagued by difficulties in securing credit and acquiring land. Beginning in the late 1940s, however, as large Indian cities experienced another surge of very rapid growth, cooperative housing socie­ties received renewed interest. For Bombay, two features of its growth contributed to this heightened interest. First, Bombay’s new housing stock increasingly took the form of apartment buildings, a pattern that had begun in the 1920s.16 Second, the form of occupancy gradually changed as ownership-­based occupancy began to appear more attractive to the ­middle and upper classes than renting. Given t­ hese two changes, cooperative housing socie­ties offered a mechanism to address the collective prob­lems posed by apartment living, such as the management of common spaces. More fundamentally, cooperative society legislation offered a ­legal framework to assert property rights within the context of multistory, multifamily apartment buildings.17 By the 1960s, cooperative housing socie­ties had changed quite dramatically in function. What began in the 1910s as a movement to protect the m ­ iddle classes from rent hikes had become a mechanism for facilitating ownership-­ based occupancy. By the 1970s, as the state began to move away from direct attempts to provide housing to the urban underclasses, city governments and large public-­sector companies had begun to encourage cooperative housing as a form of self-­help for the urban poor, as well as for employees of the state. While ­these programs ­were also initially based on the limited-­equity model,

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the state’s embrace of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s meant their gradual conversion into owner-­occupied units. When urban renewal programs ­were introduced in the 1990s, they ­were aimed at transforming slums and other forms of substandard housing into ownership-­based apartment buildings in which property rights w ­ ere exercised through the mechanism of the cooperative housing society. The role of cooperative housing socie­ties with re­spect to the property market in Indian cities is thus very dif­fer­ent from that in Eu­ro­pean and U.S. cities. In the latter, groups that have been adversely affected by gentrification, the proliferation of condominiums instead of rental housing, and ­accompanying rises in rents have turned to cooperative housing as a way to stake out a place in the city, one that seeks to bypass owner­ship.18 In the Indian case, on the other hand, through the contingencies of its history, cooperative housing is the very mechanism through which ownership-­based occupancy proliferates.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to offer a perspective on what happens to urban concepts and practices following their transnational passages—in par­tic­u­lar by establishing the connections between them and the agendas of which they ­were a part. Harris shows that the transnational movement of urban terms does not happen between “­simple, unitary cultures.” I have sought to show that terms such as “suburb” and the practices associated with them are also not unitary. In thinking about ­whether and how complex urban forms are embraced in foreign settings, it has been necessary to break down broad formations like suburbanization into the assemblage of practices of which they actually consist. The high degree of contingency displayed in the trajectories of land ­acquisition and cooperative housing suggests that while urban practices travel, they are seldom unaffected by the journey. While Anglo-­A merican-­ style suburbanization as a proj­ect failed to take hold in any systematic way in the Indian setting, some features of the colonial state’s suburban agenda gained power­ful traction. In par­tic­u­lar, regimes of land acquisition and land use conversion at the urban edge, and the institution of the cooperative housing society, played crucial roles in determining subsequent development in Bombay and elsewhere in urban India. As a result, Indian cities remain



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indelibly stamped by the legacies of the suburbanization agenda initiated by ­ ese practices have been delinked from that agenda the British colonial state. Th and are now available for adaptation into still other contexts. Speaking of transnationalism in the broadest terms, urban practices did not always move in the same direction: while ­there ­were clear influences that flowed from metropole to periphery, the opposite could also be true. In this chapter, this was most clearly suggested by the effort to modify En­glish town planning law based on features of the Indian law that ­were in turn influenced by German law. More generally, then, this essay suggests that urban practices ­ ere not unitary w ­ holes, and ­were themselves constituted in the metropole w through the transnational passages of urban concepts and practices.

chapter 11

­Will the Transnational City Be Digitized? The Dialectics of Diversified Spatial Media and Expanded Spatial Scopes Ca rl  H . N ig h t in g a l e

As urban historians map out a “transnational turn,” it is worth asking how it might be enhanced by the field’s also exciting “digital turn.” In the past few years, as the diverse and stimulating essays in this book attest, transnational urban history has moved from a theoretical call to a serious research field. Yet its innovations have largely been confined to traditional forms of scholarly expression—­print books and journal articles. Meanwhile, digital media have given urban historians the chance to expand our spatial imagination. Yet work in this field has largely focused on phenomena operating within the field’s traditional geographic scales: the metropolis, the municipality, the neighborhood, or the street. Since the transnational turn is designed to expand the range of geo­graph­i­cal scales in which urban historians do their work, it stands ­ atters of scale, to reason that digital methods, with their ability to illuminate m could both inspire and take inspiration from transnational urban research. Transnational urban history could lay out a widened geographic stage for ­digital historians to show off what they can do. And digital methods offer transnational urbanists exciting opportunities to ask, clarify, and answer new questions, possibly gaining new audiences in the pro­cess. In toasting the prospects for an imminent and mutually enriching marriage, I offer this observation: the dialectical interchanges between the two movements ­will bear the most fruit if scholars working within each recognize

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that the strength of their movement rests not solely on the innovations that they celebrate the most, but also on dialectical interactions they have brought about internally between innovation and modes of urban knowledge they think of as more “traditional” or as existing before the “turn.” Digital urban scholars enthusiastically celebrate the dazzling Internet-­based tools they have conceived in partnership with computer programmers and graphic designers. And for good reason: their work offers historians power­ful means to collect, archive, pro­cess, analyze, disseminate, and visually display new urban knowledge—­most spectacularly through digital maps, but also by means of online media themselves, which can not only can reach new audiences but also invite ­those audiences to participate in the pro­cess of knowledge creation. But we must remember that the very best digital proj­ects still rely heavi­ly on—­ and in the pro­cess extend the possibilities of—­traditional print-­based textual and authorial forms of expression. Similarly virtuous dialectics have strengthened the growing body of transnational urban research. On the one hand, transnational urban scholars seek to vastly extend the scope of urban historical inquiry, in the pro­cess opening huge new realms of analytical inquiry. But to understand urban phenomena on large continental, oceanic, hemispheric, and global scales, transnational historians must always depend on the more localized knowledge created by traditional urban historians. As I have argued elsewhere, large-­scale urban history must always interrogate the interactions of large and small phenomena and understand both similarities and differences, comparisons and contrasts, flows and diversification, and connections and contingencies. ­These questions are impossible to ask or answer without the vast library of knowledge that “traditional” urban historians have produced largely by focusing on local and smaller spaces.1 The short elaboration of ­these thoughts that follows reflects my own work as a transnational urban scholar who spent the formative years of the digital turn writing a traditional ink-­and-­paper, university-­press book about the world history of urban segregation, but whose historical consciousness represents an offshoot of an older childhood longing to grow up to be a cartographer. Having now arrived at the point of building on the book’s ideas, and ­eager to widen my audience, I have allowed myself to be mesmerized by digital scholarship on cities, most notably by the multifarious glories of digital maps. Happily for me, my subfield of residential segregation looms large as a theme in digital urban studies. This essay draws on examples from that subfield that explore local dynamics of segregation, as well as one of my own

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proj­ects aimed at expanding consciousness of its larger-­scale dynamics, to make two points about dialectical consciousness and spatial imagination. First, I ­will interrogate what I see as the truly exciting accomplishment of digital urban scholars—­namely, the varied ways they have married graphic and participatory expressions of knowledge to expanded possibilities for textual and authorial genres. Second, I argue that digital urban history’s primary spatial accomplishment to date—­its ability to drill deeply and thickly into the local and personal experiences of places—­gives it the perfect basis for embracing the equally complex, thick, and fundamentally dialectical nature of larger-­scale urban phenomena. In an exuberant book entitled HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (2014), Todd Presner and his UCLA-­based collaborators David Shepard and Yoh Kawano renew a call heard widely across the humanities for “a fundamental rethinking of the medium in which cultural criticism and historical investigations are undertaken.”2 While many of the innovations Presner outlines in his book have analog pre­ce­dents, the promise of their digitized versions is very real. Before digging into all the dialectics involved, it is worth laying out four ways in which transnational urban scholars could benefit from the most widely heralded promises of digital spatial studies. First, the “big data” point: if computer-­and Internet-­based tools enhance scholars’ ability to collect, pro­cess, display, and disseminate the large amounts of urban knowledge that are necessary to answer other­wise elusive questions about individual cities, then the same o­ ught to be true for scholars who want to amass similar or even larger amounts of data on multiple cities, synthesize existing research on cities in several parts of the world, compare cities, research connective flows and disruptions of flows between them, or bring historical insight to such pan-­urban concepts as “networked cities,” “urban pro­cesses,” and “global cities.” Second, the very epistemology of the digital turn promises to be deeply suited to transnational urban research. Read Presner’s book or the mission statements of the dozen or more proliferating university-­based centers for digitized spatial and urban studies, and you cannot miss the main theme: to acquire historical knowledge on ­things as complicated as cities, we need to visualize that knowledge better in space—in other words, we need to make ever more ingenious, information-­rich maps. Taken as a w ­ hole, digital offerings on cities run along a very wide spectrum, from online archives, to more customized downloadable collections of documents, to the electronic access to print articles that we all take for granted, to YouTube lectures on urban

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history, to massive waves of urban-­dedicated flotsam and jetsam in the blogosphere, in the Twitterverse, and, of course, on Wikipedia. But maps are clearly the stars of the urban digital turn in scholarship: “Thick maps” such as ­those Presner helped pioneer, made up of dozens of historic maps resized and reprojected, then piled up on each other to create historical “core samples” of urban places. Maps showing the changing extent of urban phenomena that can move forward and backward in time with a click. Maps that stack up dif­fer­ent types of social data, allowing users to vary correlations between variables in space. Animated maps that, for example, re-­create the movements of ­people walking through the city on a given day. Voiced-­over maps that help users orient themselves in unfamiliar terrain. Maps with pop-­ups that lead to commentary or illustrations or oral histories about depicted spaces. Crowdsourced maps that amass information from their users and viewers, creating kaleidoscopic urban knowledge that nicely approximates the ways cities look from the many-­eyed perspectives of their resident multitudes. Maps without fixed frames, that allow us to infinitely change our perspective (and with it  our maps’ under­lying agendas), that allow us to pan across the city, look at  it from dif­fer­ent ­angles, and zoom from larger to smaller spaces to trace connections between them. If such maps are useful to deepen our knowledge of spaces within individual cities, then, again, they should be all the more useful when the scale of space is even more varied, as it must be when we zoom out from the local and the metropolitan scales covered by most digital urban history to see how urban phenomena that operate in cities also work on national, imperial, continental, oceanic, hemispheric, and global scopes. While ­there are a few examples of digital transnational studies of urban-­related subjects, they have clearly only begun to tap the possibilities. Indeed, ­things that happen on t­ hese levels of space are no less complicated, dense, layered, and continuously changing than any teeming city street or any complex “metropo­liti­cal” dynamic. If anything, they may be even harder to visualize without maps, certainly from the perspective of the person on the street. Third, ­there is the aesthetic and even sensual dimension of digital urbanity. Color, so expensive in paper-­based media, is virtually f­ree of charge on the Internet, and online maps demonstrate vividly what our largely black-­and-­ white journals miss in terms of a capacity to convey both subtle gradations and vivid contrasts. More importantly, digital maps allow the visual style of scholarship on cities to keep pace with the urban-­information-­seeking habits of so many of us city dwellers—­who rely precisely on the borderless, layered, zoomable, data-­rich, animated, interactive, and brightly colored maps we carry

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inside an app inside a glowing rectangle inside our back pockets. Splay a thumb and forefinger to glass, then slide them together, and the location of the nearest post office, the layout of a city’s parks, or an approaching regional weather system resolves into views of continents and the globe itself. Indeed, the tactile aspect of our computer screens should be just as easy to harness to the cause of transnational urbanism as the visual; so, too, should the auditory, as experiments in voiced-­over maps amply suggest. Fourth, we would be remiss not to consider the sociology, the politics, and the culture of digital scholarship. Proj­ects of transnational scholarship do not need to be too large for one scholar to implement, but the collaborative spirit of digital urban and spatial research centers do offer inspiring ways for all of us to widen our scholarly ambitions. The priority most of ­these centers place on investing their media power and design talent in efforts to invite their wider audiences to participate in the creation of urban knowledge is another potential asset for all scholarship, not just that on transnational cities. And ­because ­these centers involve collaborative discussions between scholars, design mavens, and tech wizards, they encourage all of us as historians to expand our expressive languages and talents in ser­vice of urban knowledge. All of that being said—­and all of it said with high hopes—­for me the most compelling feature of the digitized expression of urban knowledge is its least heralded one: its ability to harness its visual, tactile, auditory, and participatory advantages to expanded opportunities for textual and authorial expression. Maps and media may help make sustained historical or spatial arguments, but they do not make them on their own. Nor do they, on their own, bring coordinated, systematic data-­gathering proj­ects into being. Some kind of textual explication is essential. Presner acknowledged this openly by publishing the ink-­and-­paper version of HyperCities (with Harvard University Press no less) to, as he put it, “choreograph” further participation and argumentation within the digital universe of the HyperCities proj­ect. If my own experience reading the book is any indication of its effect on his scholarly audience more broadly, t­ here is no question that the sustained argument he was able to make in book form rendered the digital proj­ect far more user friendly.3 ­There are many ways to use text and authorial intervention to choreograph or curate other­wise entirely mind-­arresting online visual proj­ects. ­These do not have to involve physical companion books: digital media themselves offer a range of genres of textual expression, from pop-up texts, to voice-­overs, to online lectures, to more conventional online scholarly article platforms, all of

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which allow authors to experiment with the extra, more often discussed advantages of embedded links and hypertext. In the field of urban segregation, ­these marriages of the visual and the textual follow a wide spectrum, from free-­form curation to very tightly coordinated pre­sen­ta­tions. The lessons for audience expansion remain ambiguous to me, but the advantages of entering into the dialectical relationship in some way seem indisputable—­and, indeed, essential to making any sort of transnational turn within digital urban history. Starting on the freest-­form end of the spectrum, consider Eric Fischer’s spectacularly designed racial “dot-­maps” of con­temporary American cities—­ the viral, breakout creation of the Google-­programmer-­turned-­digital-­artist. Inspired by the sociologist Bill Rankin (and through him by a much older tradition of dot-­mapping), Fischer contrived a program to plot racial data from the 2010 U.S. census onto maps of 108 metropolitan areas, using a differently ­ eople of each group, placed randomly colored digital dot for e­ very twenty p within the census tract in which enumerators gathered the data. The maps (though certainly not the urban realities they depict) are gorgeous, and they have clearly touched a collective nerve: in the summer of 2015, Fischer’s Flickr site alone had been visited over eight hundred thousand times (it also contains a wide range of possibly even more popu­lar urban maps that synthesize information from geo-­tagged and other large datasets).4 Fischer did not conceive of his dot map series as a formal digital humanities proj­ect. True to his open-­source ethos, the maps are downloadable f­ ree of charge with no restrictions on their use. More importantly, they come nearly entirely ­free of commentary, and Fischer has let the blogosphere and Twitterverse interpret the maps’ meanings, occasionally intervening himself with a very light hand. Summing up what he gathered from this collective response, Fischer told an interviewer that “when the maps succeed, I think it is when they can confirm something that the viewer already knows about their neighborhood or their city, and then broaden that knowledge a ­little by showing how some other places that the viewer ­doesn’t know so well are similar or dif­ fer­ent.” The online chat I have read is a bit more complex than that. Most of it has occurred on blogs devoted to the state of individual cities. As such, most involves even more localized observations. Some viewers puzzle over the apparently more “integrated” neighborhoods on the maps, but the most generalized point seems to be an awestruck realization of how segregated American cities continue to be. Th ­ ere are also common complaints about some of the bugs in the system, especially arising from the fact that Fischer’s random

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­ ot-­placement feature occasionally places ­people’s residences in the ­middle of d parks or bodies of ­water encompassed by census tracts.5 In 2013, the demographic researcher Dustin Cable at the University of ­Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Ser­vice took Fischer’s techniques a big step further, creating a zoomable racial dot map of the entire United States on which ­every one of the 308 million American citizens is represented by his or her own colored dot. Cable has intervened somewhat more in the smaller realm of online talk about his map, and it is clear that he has raised some further awareness about segregation, in addition to correcting ­t hose people-­living-­in-­t he-­park issues in a few cities. For example, viewers complained that ­there ­were big “puddles” of green and yellow (the colors Cable uses for African Americans and Hispanics) in the countryside near all-­white towns. It turns out that this was no ­mistake. ­Those puddles are state and federal prisons, swollen by four de­c ades of drug wars into an archipelago of disproportionately black-­a nd-­brown “carceral ghettos” spread across rural Amer­i­ca.6 No question: ­there could very well be value to analyzing this corpus of informally crowdsourced urban knowledge in its own right. Moreover, in an age when far more power­ful propaganda machines devoted to “color-­blind” politics have minimized or denied the importance of segregation in American cities, the fragile countertrend of awareness of segregation that Fischer’s and Cable’s maps have awakened is heartening.7 Still, t­ here is no mistaking a big vacuum. Why can such a big audience, I find myself asking, not be prompted even to ask why segregation persists, why it ­matters, why certain neighborhoods look mixed, or—­for me, a key point—­what practices are in play? Certainly, as digital humanities enthusiasts would be happy point out, the dot methodology could serve to raise spatially specific research questions that other tools—­such as sociologists’ wide array of “segregation indexes,” or the more traditional shaded maps that show the percentage of one group in any census tract—­cannot. Some of t­ hese questions might include the following: What is happening along color lines that look a bit fuzzier on the dot maps? Are we merely seeing another effect of random dot placement in borderline census tracts, or is ­there something much juicier ­going on in the way of spatial politics: gentrification, blockbusting, manic flipping, urban renewal, “invasion,” white flight, or something ­else we have yet to think about systematically, like Latino, Asian, or black flight? What about larger mixed districts and their many va­ri­e­ties of mixtures? Are they in the midst of longer transitions t­oward something more segregated or not? Could we not

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use ­these maps to identify neighborhoods that would be good candidates for deeper information gathering, say, through surveys of community organ­ izations or realtors? As this paragraph attests, and as no digital humanities scholar would ever deny, it does takes an ­actual paragraph to ask ­these questions. Professional digital historians of segregation are less willing to upload their material with so ­little text-­based curation, but even ­here the range is wide. For some, the main goal is to archive documentary evidence or provide scholars with “big” dishes of data. “Mapping In­equality: Redlining in New Deal Amer­i­ca,” a proj­ect coordinated by Robert K. Nelson, La Dale Winling, Richard Marciano, and Nathan Connolly, is designed to save historians the trip to Washington, D.C., to view the famous redlining maps created by the Home ­Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s of cities across the United States. Programmers have replotted t­hese maps onto a platform that allows viewers to click on any of the map’s checkerboard of assessed neighborhoods and view the original evaluation form, as filled out by federal valuators in connection with local realtors and lenders. The pop-up technique thus connects a map and a primary text document, but the interpretation is largely up to the scholar using the tool. Similarly, sociologist Robert Sampson’s “Chicago Mapping Proj­ect,” built on Harvard University’s Worldmap platform, offers a means of “discovery, analy­sis, visualization, and archiving of multi-­disciplinary, multi-­ source and multi-­format data on Chicago,” including historical maps. It is more text driven than “Mapping In­equality,” but Sampson makes it clear that “our proj­ects are distinct from traditional historical practice in that they are strengthened less by narratives and more by visualizations.” The goal is to offer users “the ability to add ‘layers’ of choice and make use of tiling and indexing approaches to facilitate rapid search and visualization of large volumes of disparate data.” It also allows scholars who have gathered other data sets the opportunity to add further layers to the maps. The ambition of the proj­ ect is to offer information in a way that inspires new interpretations, not to offer the interpretations themselves.8 If t­ hese archival proj­ects occupy a m ­ iddle point in our spectrum, a final group of mapping proj­ects—­which includes the work of the small handful of urban historians who have devoted much of their c­ areers to the digital turn—­ involve authorial interpretation as a central component. Not only did the creators of ­these proj­ects balance the graphical and the textual more equally, they also offer the most vivid display of the variety of textual expressions pos­ si­ble in online media. Colin Gordon’s exquisite “Mapping Decline: St. Louis

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and the American City,” produced in collaboration with the University of Iowa Libraries, uses dot-­mapping and shading techniques to chart precisely the kinds of segregationist practices that are missing in Fischer’s maps: white flight, restrictive covenants, zoning laws, redlining, and urban renewal. A chronological slide bar adds the ele­ment of time as well, stretching the story back to 1916. Overlays of text and graphical displays of the geo­graph­i­cal scope of ­these segregationist techniques give viewers of the proj­ect an enhanced sense of the repetitive hammer blows African American Saint Louis received from de­cades of local and federal urban policy, as well as the actions of the private real estate industry. In addition, of course, the proj­ect benefits from its direct connections to subjects in Gordon’s book, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (2008).9 Stephen Robertson’s award-­winning proj­ect “Digital Harlem” expands the authorial voice into still further digital genres. Robertson’s proj­ect uses a 1920s-­ era property map of Harlem overlain on a twenty-­first-­century offering from Google Maps. His achievement has been to plot “every­thing in the sources that contains an address” onto this thick map. Conscious that “the patterns evident on ­these maps reveal ‘where,’ in the pro­cess asking, but not explaining, ‘why ­there?,’ ” Robertson has settled on several dif­fer­ent textual media to offer ­t hose explanations. An extensive weblog offers a long series of eight-­ hundred-­to one-­thousand-­word explorations of dif­fer­ent data sets, guiding viewers as they zoom into the intimate spaces in which a multitude of urban microevents occurred. For historians of segregation, the most impor­tant finding has been to discover just how many cross-­racial encounters could occur in the microspaces of the “capital of Black Amer­i­ca,” not only in its dance halls and speakeasies, but also in traffic accidents, on rent day, in school and in hospitals, on public transport, and in ballparks. In turn, Robertson has also published ­these findings in numerous journal articles, all of which he has made available online.10 Rounding out what we might call the more emphatically “multimodal” end of the spectrum are two proj­ects concocted at Stanford University’s Spatial History Proj­ect. In “Trail of Blood: The Movement of San Francisco’s Butchertown and the Spatial Transformation of Meat Production, 1849–1901,” historian Andrew Robichaud collaborated with digital designer Erik Steiner to offer yet another combined graphic and textual genre that is impossible in ink-­and-­paper media: an online article on the zoning of butchering establishments in nineteenth-­century San Francisco that is embedded with interactive time-­series maps vividly displaying the diminishing space available to such

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activities. Steiner also collaborated with historian of the Holocaust Tim Cole and geographer Alberto Giordano on “Mapping Mobility in the Budapest Ghetto” to offer a superb animated and voiced-­over cartographic repre­sen­ta­ tion of a typical day in the Budapest ghetto in 1944. Though fascist authorities dispersed “yellow star” ­houses across the city, they limited Jews’ access to public spaces to a single period of time, ­every day between two ­o’clock and five ­o’clock in the after­noon. As the animation progresses, small dots representing ­house­holds move across the map at walking speed. The voice-­over explains how ­people living at differing distances from ­these halls faced dif­fer­ent experiences of the oppressive restrictions as they pursued their main priority during noncurfew hours: the acquisition of what­ever food was left over in the central city market halls once non-­Jews had finished their midday shopping. The proj­ect combines what Cole calls the “creation of a new kind of historical source” with ele­ments of a well-­produced, concise online lecture about the ­extent to which dispersal and concentration could vary over the course of a day, the interactions of Jews and bystanders, and the differential risks of harassment and mob vio­lence Jews faced depending on the location of their homes.11 How could t­ hese rich and dialectical expressions of urban knowledge inspire transnational histories of cities? It is true that, despite gestures to national and international phenomena, all of the proj­ects I have listed so far specialize in zooming inward ­toward ever-­smaller geo­graph­i­cal scopes, from the national (Gordon and “Mapping In­equality”) to the metropolitan (Fischer, Sampson, Gordon, and Robichaud) to the municipal (Cole et al.) to the neighborhood (Robertson and “Mapping In­equality” again) to the street and other microspaces (Robertson and Cole et al.). To some extent this means that a transnational history of segregation needs to turn to other proj­ects of digital scholarship that encompass multiple cities. The UCLA-­based HyperCities, for example, involves proj­ects in numerous cities across the world. Though t­hese proj­ects are largely self-­contained and based on diverse questions that do not lend themselves to comparative or transnational analy­sis, the large-­scale connections between scholars involved in the proj­ect do suggest pos­si­ble orga­nizational models for ­future transnational research proj­ects. The Lincoln Land Institute’s Atlas of Urban Expansion, available as an online reference as well as a print book, offers a stronger basis for comparison, through its maps and statistics on land cover from 120 cities across the world. While not strictly an urban proj­ect, Matthew Korman and Claudia Engels’s “Cigarette Citadels,” a crowdsourcing proj­ect that aims to map the location of ­every one of the world’s thousands of cigarette factories,

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suggests how big-­data sets on similarly widespread urban phenomena could be brought into being. And lastly, Laura Kurgan’s “­There + ­Here: Transnationalism and Migration,” a proj­ect at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab, demonstrates just how eloquently maps can represent another key ele­ment of transnational analy­sis, namely, long-­d istance connections between local places—in this case as part of an enticing promise to “look closely at local instantiations of global phenomena in New York City.”12 In the end, though, the scale of the proj­ect is not as impor­tant to imagining transnational digital histories as is the fact that digital media—­precisely by virtue of their potential to combine the graphic and the textual, and no ­matter what the size of their subject—­are so well suited to articulating a set of guiding ideas for larger-­scale studies of cities. ­These ideas take complex dialectical forms themselves, and, as the essays in this volume suggest, they need to find a place, as an interconnected set of thoughts, at the very beginning of our study of larger-­scale urban phenomena. The first of t­ hese is the dialectics of geo­graph­i­cal scale. Cities come into being b­ ecause of and are s­haped by historical forces of many sizes, from the most intimate to the global. The second is the dialectics of connection and contingency. As ­these many-­size historical forces transform cities, they do so by colliding with one another in patterns that are unique to each place. Thus, though larger-­scale phenomena may indeed create similarities between cities, their historically and spatially contingent intersection with other forces, which may take any size, creates ­diversity. Indeed, the spread of urban phenomena, such as urban segregation, always fundamentally entails their diversification. Studying such phenomena, in turn, suggests a third dialectical imperative, the mutually beneficial interaction between comparative and transnational methods. This dialectic is at once empirical and explanatory. Similarities between cities can offer empirical hints of the existence of connections; connections can explain similarities. Differences between cities that are other­w ise connected can empirically ­suggest the existence of contingencies, which in turn can help explain the differences. Fourth and fi­nally, we cannot write transnational history without the riches of the vast secondary archive produced by urban historians operating on smaller geo­graph­i­cal scopes.13 Yet another genre of multimodal expression—­t he public, digital-­slide-­ laden, academic presentation—­both helped me better articulate t­hese ideas about the large-­scale study of cities and began to suggest possibilities for a transnational digital proj­ect about the world history of urban segregation. Early on in an ongoing series of lectures on the book that I began in 2012,

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I abandoned Power­Point for Prezi, the 2001 brainchild of Hungarian computer scientists Peter Halacsy and Adam Somlai-­Fisher. While relatively limited for some of my more ambitious purposes, it possesses the key capacity to embeddable, virtually borderless, layered, rudimentarily anicreate web-­ mated, panable, rotatable, voiced-­ over, and zoomable images, including maps. And while ­there is a bit of a learning curve involved, Prezi allows a relatively painless foray into digital urban studies for t­ hose of us without in-­house tech and design staff. It enables one to at least sketch out reasonably compelling prototypes or even proposals for more solidly platformed proj­ects. But more importantly, it is pos­si­ble to think of the program as the basis for imagining what messages are pos­si­ble in richly mixed graphic and textual media.14 At the core of my own sketches is a world map covered with multicolored arrows indicating what I see as the five “surges” of racial segregationist practice and politics across the world from about 1700 to the pres­ent. A second, subsidiary hub concerns the history of segregation in the United States. A half dozen satellite maps surround t­ hese two, as well as several sequences of text-­ based introductory slides meant for vari­ous purposes. Hidden within t­hese larger maps are several hundred local, regional, national, hemispheric, oceanic, and imperial maps and images I collected as part of my research, all located at appropriate spots on the larger-­scale maps and reachable as full-­screen images through Prezi’s panning, rotating, reframing, and zooming features. Links enable me to connect up with other online images and proj­ects such as ­those of Fischer and Gordon. The program also allows me to change the route I take between t­ hese images depending on the themes I wish to emphasize in any given pre­sen­ta­tion. ­These can include segregation in colonial cities, comparisons and connections between French and British colonial cities, or between U.S.-­style urban segregation and South African apartheid, or much smaller pre­sen­ta­tions focused on the role played by any one city in the spread of segregationist practices.15 Where could all of this go? Add the inspiration from the proj­ects of the more established digital historians I have mentioned and new questions about the connection between expanded spatial media and expanded spatial scopes multiply. Why not an online atlas of urban spatial formation, one that offers its readers multiple interpretative pathways, ­either textual or voiced, through its multiscaled structure, zooming in and out to clarify the size of connections and contingent forces involved in the divisions of dif­fer­ent cities, comparing and contrasting historical phenomena operating on dif­fer­ent scales as it goes? Could ­these pathways serve as the basis for a series of online lectures

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of varying lengths, similar to Cole’s Budapest ghetto animation, for larger lay audiences, as clarification of print assignments in course syllabuses, or as the basis for flipped classroom discussions? Could viewers arrange their own pathways through the tool or search it for more specific information? Could such a reference and pedagogical resource also attract commentary from its audience, ­whether scholarly or other­wise? Could it crowdsource new relevant knowledge, becoming, say, a clearing­house for evidence of the spread of restrictive covenants, or a cata­logue of large-­scale urban residential clearances and forced removals, or even expanded treatments of segregationist practice in individual cities that emerge in further research? How about a site for collaborative interpretations, such as on the connections between urban residential color lines and immigration restriction mea­sures? In asking questions like ­these—­and no doubt many ­others—­I think we offer the most appropriate tribute to the promising marriage between the digital and transnational turns. Yes, to conclude: the two revolutions should be cross-­fertilized! The transnational should be digitized and the digital transnationalized! The main goal of transnational urban history is to expand the range ­ oing expand the range of of geographic scales on which we operate, and in so d interactions between forces of many sizes that create cities. That in turn helps us understand how cities vary and diversify, connect to each other or disconnect from one another, grow more similar or diversify, and in the pro­cess clarify the role of cities in creating larger-­scale, even global, history. ­Those questions are so vastly complex that we should embrace digital tools that have shown themselves so able to expand our comprehension of complexity. And, at the same time, remember the bottom line: the main advantage of both turns is that they provide us with a greater range of tools to raise and answer new questions, all of which possess their own strengths and promises but all of which depend on interactions with other tools. Visualizations of big data give us new vistas of what ­there is to analyze, but they do not tell us what we see within t­ hose vistas. The act of writing text helps us articulate more precisely what it is we discover. Digital texts, which tend to impose more need for conciseness than books or articles, offer other means of discovery, as any writer of a haiku or a sonnet knows well. But what­ever “turn” we allow our imaginations to take, never ­either arrest its curve or leave too much ­behind. As I hope my dialectical benediction for this marriage suggests, all new flights outward are enriched by full-­circle returns homeward, t­ here to combine riches before spiraling outward and back and upward again.

Notes

For eword 1. Organ­ization of American Historians, The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession (2000), http://­w ww​.­oah​.­org​/­about​/­reports​/­reports​-­statements​/­t he​-­lapietra​-­report​-­a​-­report​-­to​ -­t he​-­profession​/­. 2​.­Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Sean Wilentz, Chants Demo­cratic: New York City and Rise of the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Strug­gle for Postwar Oakland (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003); Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Matthew D. Lassiter, The ­Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2006). 4. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the ­Great West (New York: Norton, 1992); Ellen F. Stroud, Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the ­Making of the Modern Southwest (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2014); Andrew Needham and Allen Dieterich-­Ward, “Beyond the Metropolis: Metropolitan Growth and Regional Transformation in Postwar Amer­i­ca,” Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 943–69. 5. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), esp. ch. 8; Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 6. A. K. Sandoval-­Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban Amer­i­c a,” Journal of American History 101 (2014): 804–31; Nancy H. Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Introduction 1. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision and The 2014 Revision, Highlights

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(New York: United Nations, 2005 and 2014). The 2014 report uses the term “Northern Amer­i­c a” to group the United States and Canada together; Mexico is included with Latin Amer­i­c a. 2. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “Population Facts,” nos. 2013/2 (September 2013) and 2015/4 (December 2016). 3. Th ­ ere is no way to do justice to the enormous lit­er­a­tures related to such a large category as transnationalism. For an introduction, see, for example, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda ­ owards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Basch, and Christina Szanton-­Blanc, eds., T Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Acad­emy of Sciences, 1992); Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduard Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Peggy Levitt and Sanjeev Khagram, eds., The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Handel Kashope Wright and Meaghan Morris, eds., Cultural Studies of Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2013). 4. Manuel Castells, “Space and Society: Managing the New Historical Relationships,” in Cities in Transformation, ed. Michael Peter Smith (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1984), 235–60; David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 4th ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2011); Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, eds., Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000); Peter Marcuse, “The Layered City,” in The Urban Lifeworld: Formation ­Perception Repre­sen­ta­tion, ed. Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz (New York: Routledge, 2005), 94–114; Peter Marcuse, “ ‘Dual City’: A Muddy Meta­phor for a Quartered City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 13, no. 4 (1989): 697–708; Peter Jackson, Transnational Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004). Also see Yi-­Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); and Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). For a detailed survey and critique of this lit­er­a­ture, see Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 5. The historical lit­er­a­ture on transnationalism is vast. Some leading points of entry include C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (London: Blackwell, 2003); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2010); Emily S. Rosenberg et al., eds., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2012); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth ­Century (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ ton University Press, 2014); Akira Iriye et al., eds., Global Interdependence: The World ­After 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2014); and Wolfgang Reinhard et  al., eds., Empires and Encounters, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2015). For efforts to set the United States in a global history, see Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: Amer­i­ca’s Place in World History (New York: Macmillan, 2006); Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made Amer­i­ca (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective Since 1789 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014), ch. 1.



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6. On colonial urbanism, see Anthony  D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), and Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy (New York: Routledge, 1990); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers ­Under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2003); Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait, eds., Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Native Aspirations and ­Foreign Plans (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2002); Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Jyoti Hosgrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture, Urbanism, and Colonialism in Delhi (New York: Routledge, 2005). Note also that Janet Abu-­Lughod, while trained in sociology, clearly wrote pieces that could be thought of as early pre­ce­dents as well, such as “The Islamic City—­Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Con­temporary Relevance,” International Journal of ­Middle East Studies 19, no. 2 (May 1987): 155–76. On planning history, see Peter Hall, Cities ­ entury of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth C ­ ehind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Abidin Kusno, B and Po­liti­cal Cultures in Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2000); Lawrence A. Herzog, Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City Building in a Global Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Pierre-­Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, eds., Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Recent edited volumes include Jeffry Diefendorf and Janet Ward, eds., Transnationalism and the German City (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin, eds., Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History (Farnum, U.K.: Ashgate, 2015). 7. Impor­tant urban histories bounded by the nation-­state include Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Kenneth  T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the   United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1996); Becky  M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-­Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Strug­gle for Postwar Oakland (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003); Eric Avila, Popu­lar Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Alison Isenberg, Downtown Amer­i­ca: A History of the Place and the ­People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2005); and Matthew D. Lassiter, The ­Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2007). On the call to transnationalize U.S. history, see “Rethinking History and the Nation-­State,” special issue, Journal of American History 86 (1999), and Organ­ization of American Historians, The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession (2000), http://­w ww​.­oah​.­org​/­about​/­reports​/­reports​-­statements​/­t he​-­lapietra​-­report​-­a​ -­report​-­to​-­t he​-­profession​/­. Transnational urban histories include Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2001); Jesse Hoffnung-­Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo

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and New York A ­ fter 1950 (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2008); Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban ­Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Jerome  I. Hodos, Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and ­Philadelphia (Philadelphia: ­ Temple University Press, 2011); Nightingale, Segregation; Nancy  H. Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). There is, however, one British journal’s special transnational urban history issue, edited by Janice L. Reiff and Philip J. Ethington: Urban History 36, no. 2 (2009). 8. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922); Robert  E. Park, Ernest  W. Burgess, and Roderick  D. Mc­Ken­zie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Donna Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), and Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” Journal of American Ethnic History 29 (1992): 3–41; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 9. For more detail, see “Imperial Cityscapes: Urban History and Empire in the United States,” a roundtable with Maureen Mahoney, Brian Foster, Andrew Heath, Michael Adas, Thomas Bender, and A. K. Sandoval-­Strausz, in NeoAmericanist 5 (2010): 1–22. 10. See, for example, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt, “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 217–37; Smith, Transnational Urbanism; Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” Po­liti­cal Geography 20, no. 2 (2001): 139–74; Jim Glassman, “From Seattle (and Ubon) to Bangkok: The Scales of Re­sis­t ance to Corporate Globalization,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, no.  5 (2002): 513–33; and A. K. Sandoval-­Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban Amer­i­c a,” Journal of American History 101 (December 2014): 804–31; Sarah Lynn Lopez, The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 11. On the differences among t­hese approaches, see Thomas  D. Hall, ed., A World-­ Systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous ­Peoples, and Ecol­ogy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), ch. 1; Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye, eds., The Global History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), pt. 1; Patrick Finney, “Introduction: What Is International History?,” in Palgrave Advances in International History, ed. Patrick Finney (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 1–35; and Ian Tyrell, “What Is Transnational History?,” Ian Tyrell’s website, accessed December  23, 2016, http://­iantyrrell​.­wordpress​.­com​/­what​-­is​ -­transnational​-­history​/­. 12. ­­Atlantic world–­centered transnational histories include Daniel T. Rod­gers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made Amer­i­ca (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Thomas Adam, Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from



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New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011). Transnational studies with a broader ­geographic reach include Adam McKeown, Chinese Mi­grant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Bayly, Birth of the Modern World; Bender, Nation Among Nations; Osterhammel, Transformation of the World; and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014). More generally, see Françoise Lionnet and Shu-­mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, Imagining Our Amer­i­cas: ­Toward a Transnational Frame (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); and Klaus Segbers, ed., The Making of Global City Regions: Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu­rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), introduction. 14. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (London: Yves Saunier, “Sketches from the Urban Internationale, 1910–50: Blackwell, 1991); Pierre-­ ­Voluntary Associations, International Institutions, and U.S. Philanthropic Foundations,” International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 25, no.  2 (2001) 380–403; Pierre-­Yves Saunier, “La toile municipale aux XIXe et XXe siècles: Un pa­norama transnational vu d’Eu­rope,” Urban History Review/Revue d’Histoire Urbaine 34, no. 2 (2006): 163–76; Saunier and Ewen, Another Global City. 15. Smith, Transnational Urbanism. 16. Our thanks to Lynn Hollen Lees for her observation at the “Transnational Urban History” panel of the Urban History Association’s 2014 meeting, where she emphasized the idea of urbanization as the clearest catchall for much of what we are ­doing in this volume. Adding to this complexity, in the fields in which we work, ­people have increasingly moved ­toward metropolitan conceptualizations—­these recognize that cities and suburbs cannot be studied separately from one another, since their very definition is relational: see, for example, Andrew Needham and Allen Dieterich-­Ward, “Beyond the Metropolis: Metropolitan Growth and Regional Transformation in Postwar Amer­i­ca,” Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 943–69; and the Journal of Urban History special section, “The New Metropolitan History,” 40 (2014). 17. Pierre-­Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 64. 18. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1993); Robert Holton, Globalization and the Nation State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); David FitzGerald, A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Natasha Iskander, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). 19. Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011); Joel Kotkin, The ­Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us (Evanston, Ill.: Agate, 2016); Harvey, Urbanization of Capital and The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1991) and Cities in a World Economy (usefully critiqued in Smith,

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Transnational Urbanism, ch. 3; Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, eds., E Pluribus Unum? Con­temporary and Historical Perspective on Immigrant Po­liti­cal Incorporation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001). 20. Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, eds., Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the M ­ iddle East, Latin Amer­i­ca, and South Asia (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004).

Chapter 1 1. Ascendas, International Tech Park Bangalore, promotional brochure, 2014, in possession of the author. 2. Amy Waldman, “Indians Go Home, but D ­ on’t Leave  U.S. B ­ ehind,” New York Times, July 24, 2004, A1; Adarsh Developers website, accessed February 5, 2014, http://­w ww​ .­adarshdevelopers​.­com. 3. C. Ramachandraiah, A. C. M. van Western, and Sheela Prasad, “Introduction,” in High-­Tech Urban Spaces: Asian and Eu­ro­pean Perspectives, ed. C. Ramachandraiah (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008), 27. For further definition and discussion, see Doreen Massey, “Geography of High-­Tech Spaces: Some Reflections,” in Ramachandraiah, High-­Tech Urban Spaces, 53–67; Louise Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 195–224; and Margaret O’Mara, “The Environmental Contradictions of High-­Tech Urbanism,” in Now Urbanism: The ­Future City Is ­Here, ed. Jeffrey Hou, Ben Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocum (New York: Routledge, 2015), 26–42. Robert Fishman captured the confluence of technology and suburbanity at work in ­t hese geographies, calling them “technoburbs.” Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 4. This also comes through in the strong libertarian impulse that runs through the technology industry and, in its more effervescent moments, ­bubbles into pronouncements about the broader direction of policy. See, for example, Kevin Roose, “The Valley Politic,” New York Magazine, February 2014, http://­nymag​.­com​/­news​/­intelligencer​/­silicon​-­valley​-­politics​-­2014​-­2​/­. 5.­­A recent example of this argument is Trevor Hogan, Tim Bunnell, Choon-­Piew Pow, Eka Permanasari, and Sirat Morshidi, “Asian Urbanisms and the Privatization of Cities,” Cities 29 (2012): 59–63. The lit­er­a­ture builds on four de­cades of urban theory linking urbanization and capital flows and, more recently, foregrounding the critical role of information technologies in reformulating and accelerating pro­cesses of globalization and reproducing and extending elite authority. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge, 1994); and John Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69–83. The lit­er­a­ture on North American gentrification has further explored how postindustrial capital flows and reformulated class dynamics play out in ­battles over space and power. See, for example, Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996); and Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (1987): 129–47. 6. See, for example, Elisabeth Rosenthal, “North of Beijing, California Dreams Come True,” New York Times, February 3, 2003, A1. 7. John Stallmeyer, Building Bangalore: Architecture and Urban Transformation in India’s Silicon Valley (New York: Routledge, 2011); Michael Goldman, “Speculative Urbanism and



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the Making of the Next World City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 3 (May 2011): 555–81; Ananya Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization,” Planning Theory 8, no. 1 (2009): 81. Other impor­tant contributions in this vein include Fulong Wu and Klaire Webber, “The Rise of ‘Foreign Gated Communities’ in Beijing: Between Economic Globalization and Local Institutions,” Cities 21, no. 3 (2004): 203–13; Karen C. Seto and Robert K. Kaufmann, “Modeling the ­Drivers of Urban Land Use Change in the Pearl River Delta, China: Integrating Remote Sensing with Socioeconomic Data,” Land Economics 79 (2003): 106–21; Ivonne Audirac, “Information-­A ge Landscapes Outside the Developed World,” Journal of the American Planning Association 69, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 16–34; Kris Olds, Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-­Projects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Fulong Wu, “The Global and Local Dimensions of Place-­Making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City,” Urban Studies 37, no. 8 (2000): 1359–77; and Robin M. Leichenko and William D. Solecki, “Exporting the American Dream: The Globalization of Suburban Consumption Landscapes,” Regional Studies 39, no. 2 (2005): 241–53. 8. Margaret O’Mara, “The Uses of the Foreign Student,” Social Science History 36, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 583–615; Margaret O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2005). 9. A few of many impor­tant contributions in this vein are Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St.  Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Robert  O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Strug­gle for Postwar Oakland (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820– 2000 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003); Daniel Rod­gers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and In­equality in Postwar Detroit (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1996); and Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 10. For example, Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Jennifer Klein, For All Th ­ ese Rights: Business, ­Labor, and the Shaping of Amer­i­ca’s Public-­Private Welfare State (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003); and Michael B. Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). It is worth noting that, po­liti­cal rhe­toric to the contrary, some of the greatest champions of small government in the neoliberal era did not succeed in major welfare retrenchment, and government spending overall increased (particularly in the United States) due in good part to rising national security appropriations. See Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 11. Lawrence  E. Davies, “De Gaulle Hailed by San Francisco,” New York Times, April 28, 1960, A2. 12. O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, 97–141. 13. Office of the United States Commissioner General, Brussels World’s Fair, This Is Amer­i­ca (New York: Manhattan Publishing, 1958), 15. 14. Defense against nuclear attack was a ­factor in this decentralization. See Michael Quinn Dudley, “Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb,” Journal of Planning

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­ ducation and Research 21 (2001): 52–63; Margaret Pugh O’Mara, “Uncovering the City in the E Suburb,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 57–79. 15. On “atomic cities,” see Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); and John  M. Findlay and Bruce W. Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). ­These also ­were global phenomena; see Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the ­Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16. “De Gaulle in Suburbia,” New York Times, April 29, 1960, A10. Palo Alto residents related memories of the de Gaulle visit to the author in an audience discussion a­ fter a pre­sen­ ta­tion to the Stanford Historical Society, Stanford, Calif., February 10, 2004. 17. Scott G. Knowles and Stuart W. Leslie, “ ‘Industrial Versailles’: Eero Saarinen’s Corporate Campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T,” Isis 92, no. 1 (2001): 1–33. On industrial suburbs, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford, 1985); Becky  M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-­Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press, 2002). Also see O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge; Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism. 18. This is not to say that American leaders did not recognize the power of this military Keynesianism to buoy the domestic economy and prevent the much-­feared return of the ­Great Depression. The intense jockeying for military contracts among congressional del­e­ga­tions and local leaders attested to their economic power. For discussion of the regional effects of Cold War spending, see Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton ­Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). 19. Judith Stein, Pivotal De­cade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 8–13. 20. “France: First the Bomb, Then the ‘Plan Calcul,’ ” Science 156, no.  3776 (May  12, 1967): 767–70; “The Research Aspect of the Plan Calcul,” INRIA, accessed February 28, 2014, http://­w ww​.­inria​.­fr​/­en​/­institute​/­inria​-­in​-­brief​/­history​-­of​-­inria. On French nationalism and industrial policy prior to the de Gaulle era, see Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth ­Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For during and a­ fter, see Mairi Maclean, Economic Management and French Business: From de Gaulle to Chirac (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 21. Jean-­Jacques Servan-­Schreiber, Le défi Américain (Paris: Denoël, 1967); “Close-­Up: Paris Editor Servan-­Schreiber and the U.S. Challenge,” Life, May 17, 1968, 41; “Jean-­Jacques Servan-­Schreiber,” Telegraph​.­co​.­uk, November  9, 2006, http://­w ww​.­telegraph​.­co​.­u k​/­news​ /­obituaries​/­1533605​/­Jean​-­Jacques​-­Servan​-­Schreiber​.­html. 22.­­Quoted in Lloyd Garrison, “France Is Alarmed over the Inroads of U.S. Computers,” New York Times, March 30, 1967, 43, 53. 23. Henry  R. Lieberman, “U.S. Lead Is Putting Strains on Ties of Atlantic Alliance; Technology Gap Is Straining Ties,” New York Times, March 12, 1967, A1. Evidence of Eu­ro­pean anx­i­eties came through in the plethora of publications and conferences about science and policy emerging during ­these years from European-­led supranational organ­izations like the Organ­ization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); see, for example, Joseph Ben-­David, Fundamental Research and the Universities: Some Comments on International



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Differences (Paris: OECD, 1968); and Prob­lems of Science Policy: Seminar Held at Jouy-­en-­Josas (France) 19th–25th February 1967 (Paris: OECD, 1968). 24. U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, A Beacon of Hope—­Th e Exchange-­of-­Persons Program (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963), 9. 25. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2002); Liping Bu, Making the World like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American ­Century (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003); O’Mara, “The Uses of the Foreign Student.” 26. Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, “Lights Out, Seattle,” Seattle Times, November 3, 1996, M1. 27. Peter Hall, “The Geography of the Fifth Kondratieff,” in Silicon Landscapes, ed. Peter Hall and Ann Markusen (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 5. 28. Philip N. Cooke, “From Technopoles to Regional Innovation Systems: The Evolution of Localised Technology Development Policy,” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 24, no. 1 (2001): 21–40; Fumi Kitagawa, “Regionalization of Innovation Policies: The Case of Japan,” Eu­ro­pean Planning Studies 13, no. 4 (2005): 601–18. 29. On Brasilia, see James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). On Chandigarh, see Vikram Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Strug­gle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). Urban renewal was of course an essentially transnational phenomenon; this argument is eloquently outlined in Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 30. Ann Forsyth and Katherine Crewe, “Suburban Technopoles as Places: The International Campus-­Garden-­Suburb Style,” Urban Design International 15 (2010): 165–82. 31. Even ­behind the Iron Curtain, purpose-­built new cities dedicated to scientific research emerged that incorporated similar landscape and architectural cues, such as “the Siberian city of science,” Akademgorodok, established in 1958 (the same year as Japan’s Tsukuba). Soviet and Soviet-­bloc technological cities, however, had more in common with the World War II–­era atomic cities than with Silicon Valley or the East Asian technopoles, being dedicated to military defense (often highly classified) rather than building new industries. See Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1997). Also see Brown, Plutopia. 32. Neil Brenner, “Urban Governance and the Nationalization of State Space: Po­liti­cal Geographies of Spatial Keynesianism,” in New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 114–71. The approach also suffered from what I termed the “means not ends” prob­lem at work in earlier U.S.-­based efforts to duplicate California’s technology successes, in which high-­tech development was used as a means to address broader and more intractable urban prob­lems. O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, 225–34. 33. For further discussion of earlier international efforts, see Robert Kargon and ­A rthur P. Molella, In­ven­ted Edens: Techno-­Cities of the Twentieth ­Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). 34. Carola Hein, The Capital of Eu­rope: Architecture and Urban Planning for the Eu­ro­pean Union (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004), 87–88.

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35. Ludovic Halbert, “From Dirigiste to Interactive Innovation Systems: Three Paths to Technopolitan Development in France,” in Ramachandraiah, High-­Tech Urban Spaces, 115–46. 36. Pierre Laffitte, interview by Jean-­Pierre Largillet, “Pierre Laffitte: Sophia Antipolis, Land of Start-­Ups,” Sophianet, December  6, 1999, http://­w ww​.­webtimemedias​.­c om​ /­webtimemedia. 37.­­Michel Quere and Loïc Coutures, “The Evolution of the Sophia-­A ntipolis Park: ­Towards a Technopolis-­Type of Economic Development?” (paper presented in Jena, Germany, February  28–­March  2, 2002); Nathalie Lazaric, Christian Longhi, and Catherine Thomas, “Gatekeepers of Knowledge versus Platforms of Knowledge: From Potential to Realized Absorptive Capacity,” Regional Studies 42, no. 6 (July 2008): 837–52. 38. Cooke, “From Technopoles to Regional Innovation Systems.” 39. Christian Longhi, “Networks, Collective Learning and Technology Development in Innovative High Technology Regions: The Case of Sophia-­A ntipolis,” Regional Studies 33, no. 4 (1999): 333. 40. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (New York: Harper, 2000), 7. 41. Albert Winsemius, Oral History, Reel 4, National Archives of Singapore, 49. For background, see C. C. Chin, “The United Front Strategy of the Malayan Communist Party in Singapore, 1950s–1960s,” in Paths Not Taken: Po­liti­cal Pluralism in Post-­war Singapore, ed. Michael D. Barr and Carl A. Trocki (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 58–77. 42. Lee, From Third World to First, 60. 43. Ibid., 58–59. Also see Edgar Schein, Strategic Pragmatism: The Culture of Singapore’s Economic Development Board (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); and Lily Kong, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation” (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 44. Goh Keng Swee, “Speech on the Second Reading of the Jurong Town Corporation Bill at the Parliament,” May 21, 1968, Item Press R19680521c, NA 1249, Economic Development Board, National Archives of Singapore, Singapore. 45. William D. Hartley, “So Long, Taiwan: Electronics Firms Rush to Malaysia as ­Labor Gets Costly and Scarce Elsewhere in Asia,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 1973, 36. 46. Economic Development Board data cited by Jieming Zhu, “Industrial Globalisation and Its Impact on Singapore’s Industrial Landscape,” Habitat International 26, no. 2 (2002): 177–90. 47. Melody Zaccheus, “Lookout Towers Offered Views of Changing Singapore; They Served as Diplomatic Tools in Years ­A fter In­de­pen­dence,” Straits Times (Singapore), January 30, 2014. The EDB recruited its first U.S.-­based lobbyist, now known as Edelman Public Relations, in 1984 (Foreign Agents Registration Act Registration #3634, U.S. Department of Justice). As Chinese premier, Deng established a similar manufacturing zone in the southern Chinese town of Shenzhen in 1978, an experiment in “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” that triggered that nation’s extraordinary economic transformation and turned a small fishing village into a city of more than eight million. 48. Speech at the Twentieth Anniversary Dinner of the Economic Development Board, Mandarin ­Hotel, Singapore, August 1, 1981, Document Number HSS19810801, National Archives of Singapore.



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49. “EDB Reorganises for Intensive Promotion of High Technology Industries,” Press Release, November 23, 1978, Economic Development Board Rec­ords, Accession 78, No. 4, Rec­ord Locator 33, National Archives of Singapore. 50. Su-­A nn Mae Phillips and Henry Wai-­chung Yeung, “A Place for R&D? The Singapore Science Park,” Urban Studies 40, no. 4 (2003): 707–34. 51. W.  G. Huff, “The Developmental State, Government, and Singapore’s Economic ­Development Since 1960,” World Development 23, no.  8 (1995): 1421–38; J. F. Ermisch and W. G. Huff, “Hypergrowth in an East Asian NIC: Public Policy and Capital Accumulation in Singapore,” World Development 27, no. 1 (1999): 21–38; Henry Wai-­chung Yeung, “­Towards a Regional Strategy: The Role of Regional Headquarters of Foreign Firms in Singapore,” Urban Studies 38, no. 1 (2001): 157–83. 52. Quoted in Phillips and Yeung, “A Place for R&D?,” 718. Also see Kai Wen Wong and Tim Bunnell, “ ‘New Economy’ Discourse and Spaces in Singapore: A Case Study of One-­ North,” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 1 (2006): 69–83. 53. Phillips and Yeung, “A Place for R&D?,” 717. 54. Henry Kamm, “Lately Quiescent, Trieste Buds as a Science Center,” New York Times, July 1, 1984, W1. 55. Shiuh-­Shen Chien, “The Isomorphism of Local Development Policy: A Case Study of the Formation and Transformation of National Development Zones in Post-­Mao Jiangsu, China,” Urban Studies 45, no. 2 (2008): 273–94. For a good overview of Chinese economic liberalization and its urban impacts, see Thomas J. Campanella, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2008). 56. Tony Walker and Andrew Gowers, “Singapore Takes Modern Message to China,” Financial Times, May 14, 1994, 3. 57. Ibid. 58. ­These included environmental regulations, as the polluting side effects of computer hardware fabrication (especially semiconductors) brought fresh regulatory pressure, as well as unfavorable public relations to industries that long had portrayed themselves as “clean” and “smokeless.” See O’Mara, “The Environmental Contradictions of High-­Tech Urbanism,” 26–42. 59. Cornelia Tran, “JTC’s New Unit Aims to ­Triple Revenue,” Straits Times (Singapore), January 9, 2001, 14. 60. Quoted in Anne O. Krueger, “Policy Lessons from Development Experience Since the Second World War,” in Handbook of Development Economics 3B (1995): 2502. 61. For broader discussion of developmentalism and modernization policy, see David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, and Mark H. Haefele, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2003). 62. James Heitzman, Network City: Planning the Information Society in Bangalore (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth ­Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); Margaret O’Mara and Karen Seto, “The Influence of Foreign Direct Investment on Land Use Changes and Regional Planning in Developing-­World Megacities: A Bangalore Case Study,” in Megacities: Action Models and Strategic Solutions, ed. Frauke Kraas, Günter Dill, Günther Mertins, and Ulrich Nitschke (New York: Springer, 2014), 81–100. 63. “IBM Signals Its Departure from India,” Washington Post, September 21, 1977, E2.

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64. Stallmeyer, Building Bangalore; Meine Pieter Van Dijk, “Government Policies with Re­spect to an Information Technology Cluster in Bangalore, India,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of Development Research 15, no. 2 (2003): 93–108; M. R. Narayana, “Globalization and Urban Economic Growth: Evidence for Bangalore, India,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2011): 1284–301. See in par­tic­u ­lar ­table 5 in Narayana, which demonstrates the sharp upward trajectory of the globalization of capital in Bangalore. Style,” Journal of Commerce, 65. Sheila Tefft, “Welcome to Silicon Valley, India-­ May 18, 1987, A3; Sashi Kumar and Mohan Reddy, interview by the author, Bangalore, October 6, 2006. 66. “JTC Int’l Bangalore Park to Be Launched Soon,” Business Times, January 12, 2000; Vikram Khanna, “The Making of a Software Capital,” Business Times, July 10, 2000. 67. Amy Yee, “Strong Threads for a Durable Fabric: Singapore’s Investment and Experience Is Helping to Shore Up India’s Weak Spots,” Financial Times, October 3, 2007, 15. 68. E. Chacko and P. Varghese, “Identity and Repre­sen­ta­tions of Gated Communities in Bangalore, India,” Open House International 34 (2009): 57–64; M.-­A . Falzon, “Paragons of Lifestyle: Gated Communities and the Politics of Space in Bombay,” City and Society 16 (2004): 145–67; C. Webster et al., “The Global Spread of Gated Communities,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 29 (2002): 315–20. 69. Karun Varma, interview by the author, Bangalore, October 6, 2006. 70. Quoted in Waldman, “Indians Go Home.” 71. As Peter Hall and Ann Markusen observed three de­cades ago, Silicon Valley’s success “brought forth a new economic Holy Grail” (“Preface,” in Hall and Markusen, Silicon Landscapes, vii). Also see Philip N. Cooke, “Regional Innovation Systems: General Findings and Some New Evidence from Biotechnology Clusters,” Journal of Technology Transfer 27, no. 2 (2002): 133–45; Margaret O’Mara, “Silicon Valleys,” BOOM: A Journal of California 1, no. 2 (June 2011): 75–81. For discussion of place versus networks, see Lazaric et al., “Gatekeepers of Knowledge.”

Chapter 2 1. Thanks to Nancy Kwak, Andrew Sandoval-­Strausz, Leandro Benmerguí, Constanza Castro, Ann Farnsworth-­A lvear, Andrew Friedman, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Steve Hahn, Mark Healey, Paul Kramer, Kathy Peiss, and Barbara Weinstein for comments and suggestions, to residents of Ciudad Kennedy who provided oral history interviews, and to Lina Medina for transcribing the interviews. All translations are my own. 2. Instituto de Crédito Territorial (hereafter ICT), Informe al Señor Ministro de Fomento para su Memoria al Congreso Nacional (Bogotá: ICT, 1962), 39–45. 3. Momacu, “El barrio verde” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 2000), Colección General, Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu­rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2000); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: Amer­i­ca’s Cold War B ­ attle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); James Ferguson, The Anti-­Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life in the Zambian Copperbelt



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(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and In­equality in Twentieth-­Century Rio de Janeiro (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero, eds., Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin Amer­i­ca (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the ­Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); ­Janice  E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 5. ICT, Informe al Señor Ministro de Fomento; ICT, Informe Final, Plan BID-1 (BID-10 TF-­CO) (Bogotá: Oficina de Planeación y Estadística, ICT, 1967?); ICT, Programa de vivienda de interes social dentro de la Alianza para el progreso, Préstamo DLF No. 207, Informe Final (Bogotá: ICT, 1966). 6. Fabio Peñarete Villamil, “25 años del Instituto de Crédito Territorial,” Economía colombiana 20, no. 58 (1964): 72. 7. Alfonso Torres Carrillo, La ciudad en la sombra: Barrios y luchas populares en Bogotá, 1950–1977 (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popu­lar, 1993); Carlos Arango ­Zuluaga, La lucha por la vivienda en Colombia (Bogotá: Ecoe, 1981); “Adelina Suaza y Víctor Suaza, madre e hijo, Barrio Policarpa Salavarrieta,” interview, in Voces del común: Testimonios de líderes comunales de Bogotá, ed. Marta Lasprilla and Piet Spijkers (Bogotá: Departamento Administrativo de Acción Comunal, 1998), 33–60; Rakesh Mohan, Understanding the Developing Metropolis: Lessons from the City Study in Bogotá and Cali, Colombia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8. On La Violencia, the Rojas regime, and the National Front, see Albert Berry, Ronald  G. Hellman, and Mauricio Solaún, eds., Politics of Compromise: Co­a li­tion Government in Colombia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980); Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Vio­l ence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Jonathan Hartlyn, The Politics of Co­a li­tion Rule in Colombia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robert A. Karl, Forgotten Peace: Reform, ­ aking of Con­temporary Colombia (Berkeley: University of California Vio­lence, and the M Press, 2017); Daniel Pécaut, Crónica de cuatro décadas de política colombiana (Bogotá: Editorial Norma, 2006); Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Vio­lence: A History of Colombia, 1975–2002 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 135–93; Marco Palacios, Violencia pública en Colombia, 1958–2010 (Bogotá: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012); Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, Colombia años 50: Industriales, política y diplomacia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002); and Gonzalo Sánchez G. and Danny Meertens, Bandits, Peasants, and Politics: The Case of “La Violencia” in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 9. ICT, Una política de vivienda para Colombia: Primer seminario nacional de vivienda, 1955 (Bogotá: Imprenta del Estado Mayor General de las Fuerzas Armadas de Colombia, 1956), chs. 2, 4; ICT, “Mejoramiento de la vivienda campesina en Colombia,” Revista Nacional de Agricultura 35, nos. 430–31 (1940): 28–29; Peñarete Villamil, “25 años del Instituto de Crédito Territorial,” 71–74.

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10. Edwin G. Flittie to Irving G. McNayr, November 4, 1953, Folder 12, Box 30, Entry UD889, RG 469, National Archives College Park (hereafter NACP); ICT, Una política de vivienda para Colombia, 12–13, 16–21, 25; Wilson Longmore, memos dated July 3 and July 7, 1953, Folder “Longmore, T. Wilson—­Housing Economics, Correspondence,” Box 1, RG 469, Entry 1140, NACP; McMann to Foreign Operations Administration (hereafter FOA), Washington, D.C., February 1, 1954, Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. The ICT has been in liquidation since the 1990s, and its papers are not available to researchers. U.S. archives, while limited in perspective and scope, are impor­tant and understudied resources for understanding the history of the ICT. 11. Puerto Rico Planning Board, Faith in ­People: A Picture Story of Aided Self-­help ­Housing as a Part of Community Development in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (San Juan, P.R.: Puerto Rico Planning Board, 1954); Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts: ‘Aided Self-­ help Housing,’ 1939–1954,” Habitat International 22 (1998): 165–89; A. W. Maldonado, Teodoro Moscoso and Puerto Rico’s Operation Bootstrap (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997). 12. Harris, “Silence of the Experts”; Jorge Rivera, “El CINVA: Modelo de cooperación internacional” (master’s thesis, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002); Mark Healey, “Shelter in a Time of Vio­lence: Colombia as Unlikely Laboratory for Housing, 1951–1961” (unpublished manuscript, April 1, 2015); FOA, Washington, D.C., airgram, December 29, 1954, Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. 13. T. Wilson Longmore to Jean F. Rogier, July 3, 1953, Folder 12, Box 30, Entry UD889, RG 469, NACP. 14. Longmore arrived thanks to a recommendation from Crane’s colleague Donald R. Laidig. He belonged to a cohort of rural sociologists within the USDA during the New Deal whom Jess Gilbert and Daniel Immerwahr describe as low modernists or advocates of ­community development. Longmore had some experience in Latin Amer­i­ca, having spent six months in Peru during 1946 and 1947 planning the resettlement of Eu­ro­pean refugees as a member of the U.S.-­led Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Working for the ICT from 1953 to 1955, he trained his Colombian colleagues to produce the country’s first set of housing statistics. See the contents of Folder “Longmore, T. Wilson—­Housing Economics, Correspondence,” Box 1, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Folder 12, Box 30, Entry UD889, RG 469, NACP; Folder 2, Box 2, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; and Folder 18.10, Box 11, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. Also see T. Wilson Longmore, “A Matrix Approach to the Analy­sis of Rank and Status in a Community in Peru,” ­Sociometry 11 (August 1948): 192–206; T. Wilson Longmore, “Discussion of Neal Gross Paper,” Rural Sociology 13 (1948): 269–71; Jess Gilbert, “Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Dif­fer­ent Kind of State,” in Fighting for the Farm: Rural Amer­i­ca Transformed, ed. Jane ­Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 129–46; Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 46–53; Tommie Sjoberg, The Powers and the Persecuted: The Refugee Prob­lem and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1991). 15. Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Po­liti­cal Economy of Public Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16. Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento (hereafter CINVA), CINVA RAM: Máquina portatil para hacer bloques de tierra estabilizada (Bogotá: CINVA, 1957); Inter-­ American Housing and Planning Center, Annual Report, 1957 (Washington, D.C.: Pan-­



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American Union, 1957); El CINVA-­R AM: Máquina portatil para hacer bloques de tierra estabilizada (Bogotá: Inter-­A merican Housing Center, 1957); Casa campesina de suelo-­cemento: Juego de planos de construcción (Bogotá: CINVA, 1957); Rene Eyheralde  F., El concepto del desarrollo progresivo en el diseño de la vivienda (Bogotá: CINVA, 1953); Rudard A. Jones to Leonard Currie, May 8, 1956, Folder 8.1, Box 16, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. 17. On the creation of the mission and its work outside Colombia, see “The Schools and Architectural Research,” Journal of Architectural Education 1 (Spring 1947): 31; “Small House Costs Cut by Improved Building Methods,” Science News Letter 54, no. 8 (1948): 285; Rudard A. Jones, “Your Home—1902 to 1952,” Popu­l ar Mechanics, May  1952; Byron  E. Munson, “A Laboratory Method of Housing Research,” Marriage and ­Family Living 21, no. 2 (May 1959): ­ eports— 147–49; “FOA-­IIAA Program Summary for June 1954,” Folder “Program Summary R FY54,” Box 3, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; and documents in Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP: McCann to Washington, February 1, 1954; Rudard A. Jones to Walter Howe, May 17, 1955, “Biographical Statement of Edward G. Echeverria, Planner”; and “Biographical Data, Professor Rudard A. Jones.” On the mission’s work in Colombia, see Déficit y demanda de vivienda en Colombia (Bogotá: Corporación nacional de servicios públicos, 1956); Vivienda y planamiento, nos. 21–22 (Washington, D.C., 1956); Rudard A. Jones, “Final Report,” November 20, 1957, Folder “Reports FY 1957–1958” [Folder 2 of 5], Box 39, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Jones to Howe, October 26, 1955, Folder “Illinois University FY 1956–1958,” Box 1, Entry 1141, RG 469, NACP; and the following in Folder 8.1: “Housing & Community, General, FY56,” Box 16, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Rudard A. Jones, “Report of Activities, August 16–­September 15, 1955”; Rudard A. Jones, “Report of Activities, February 1956”; Jones to Jerome Meyer, May 18, 1956; Jones, Memo UI/ICA/6/4/56-1. 18. T. Wilson Longmore to Agustín Amaya Rojas, April 21, 1953, Folder “Longmore, T. Wilson—­Housing Economics, Correspondence,” Box 1, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. 19. Stassen, FOA, Washington, D.C., airgram, September 4, 1954, Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; ICA airgram, October 27, 1956, Folder 8.1, Box 23, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. 20. FOA, Washington, D.C., unsigned airgram, May 5, 1955, Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. 21. “Genuine Aid Program,” New York Daily News, March 3, 1957. 22. On the arguments of the Rojas years, see T. Wilson Longmore to George  L. Reed, June 14, 1954, Folder 8.1, Box 9, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Robert L. King to C. L. Williams, November 24, 1953, Folder 12, Box 30, Entry UD889, RG 469, NACP; Rudard A. Jones to Walter Howe, June 4, 1956, Folder 8.1, Box 16, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Rudard A. Jones, “Final Report,” November 20, 1957, Folder “Reports FY 1957–1958” [Folder 2 of 5], Box 39, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; and the contents of Folder 8.1, Box 23, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP. 23. Rudard A. Jones, “Final Report,” November 20, 1957, Folder “Reports FY 1957–1958” [Folder 2 of 5], Box 39, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; ICA Request and Authorization of ­Official Travel, September 30, 1957, Folder “Illinois University,” Box 41, Entry 1149, RG 469, NACP; William N. Womelsdorf to John Johnston, February 17, 1958, Folder “Reports FY 1957–1958” [Folder 2 of 5], Box 39, Entry 1140, RG 469, NACP; Inter-­A merican Housing and Planning Center, Annual Report, 1957; CINVA, Informe del CINVA, 1958 (Bogotá: CINVA, 1958); CINVA, Bello Horizonte: Proyecto de rehabilitación urbana (Bogotá: CINVA, 1958); CINVA, Siloé: El proceso de desarrollo comunal aplicado a un proyecto de rehabilitación urbana (Bogotá: CINVA, 1958).

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24. CINVA, Mesas redondas sobre el aporte de la comunidad en vivienda: Ayuda mutua y esfuerzo propio (autconstrucción): Informe (Bogotá: CINVA, 1959); Karl, “State Formation, Vio­lence, and Cold War in Colombia”; Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Vio­lence, 185; ­C aroline F. Ware, “Observaciones sobre acción comunal urbana en el Distrito Especial de Bogotá,” July 1959, in Jorge Enrique Rivera Farfán, “Informe de la misión de asistencia técnica directa de la OEA a la Oficina de Planificación del Distrito Especial de Bogotá, Colombia,” August 1959, Colección General, Archivo de Bogotá; Elisabeth Shirley Enochs to Wyman  R. Stone, August  6, 1953, Folder 12, Box 29, Entry UD889, RG 469, Entry UD889, NACP. 25. Raúl Cristancho et al., Ciudad Kennedy: Memoria y realidad (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2003), 6–7; John F. Kennedy, speech at Techo, December  12, 1961, Folder “Remarks upon Arrival at El Dorado Airport, Bogotá 12/17/61,” Box 36a, President’s Office Files, JFK Library; Inter-­A merican Development Bank, “Colombia: Loan to the Instituto de Credito Territorial,” November 24, 1964, Folder “Colombia—1964, 3 of 3,” Box 21, Entry 699, RG 56, NACP; ICT, “Vivienda urbana: Requerimientos financieros para la solución del problema en diez años: Alternativa máxima,” 1961, Carpeta “Institutos,” Caja 13, Secretaria Económica, Transferencia 7, Fondo Presidencia, 1960–1970, Bogotá, Colombia, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN). 26. On the ICT’s place among Colombian mortgage lending programs, see Miguel Urrutia and Olga Marcela Namen, “Historia del crédito hipotecario en Colombia,” Ensayos sobre política económica 30, no. 67 (2012): 280–306. ICT housing has commonly been called public housing by English-­language researchers; see, for instance, Mohan, Understanding the Developing Metropolis, 148. As Sean Purdy and Nancy H. Kwak have argued, “Public housing itself often eludes s­ imple definition, as the nature of public subsidy, intervention, and management can often be mea­sured by widely dif­fer­ent variables in degree and kind. . . . ​In his study of public housing in the United States, historian Lawrence Vale explains, ‘The term public has retained a central ambiguity, referring at once to the sponsor of an act or place (a public authority) and to the intended beneficiaries (the public). In a democracy, this ambiguity is resolved by a presumed common interest between sponsor and beneficiary in promoting the “public good.” ’ Public housing policy can consequently be defined not so much by a static set of terms but by the pro­cess of negotiation between sponsor and beneficiary, between obligation and right.” Sean Purdy and Nancy H. Kwak, “Introduction: New Perspectives on Public Housing Histories in the Amer­i­cas,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 3 (March 2007): 360–61. 27. Momacu, “El Barrio Verde,” 18; Cristancho et al., Ciudad Kennedy; ICT, Informe al Señor Ministro de Fomento; ICT, Informe Final, Plan BID-1 (BID-10 TF-­CO); ICT, Programa de vivienda de interes social. 28. White House Press Release, March  14, 1961, Folder “Latin Amer­i­ca, General, 3/8/61–3/14/61,” Box 215, National Security Files, JFK Library; Amy C. Offner, “Anti-­poverty Programs, Social Conflict, and Economic Thought in the United States and Colombia, 1948– 1980” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2012), 282–88; Helen Elizabeth Gyger, “The Informal as a Proj­ect: Self-­Help Housing in Peru, 1954–1986” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2013); Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of Sociology 46, no. 2 (August 2005): 297–320. 29. Roger J. Sandilands, The Life and Po­liti­cal Economy of Lauchlin Currie: New Dealer, Presidential Adviser, and Development Economist (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990); Wallace  F. Smith, “The Economic Viability of Self-­Help Housing,” in Report on the



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First National Conference on Self-­Help Housing: Airlie House, Warrenton, ­Virginia, December 6–9, 1965 (Philadelphia: American Friends Ser­vice Committee, 1965). 30. Inter-­A merican Housing and Planning Center, Annual Report, 1957. 31. Robert C. Hickok to Mr. Boerner, December 27, 1956, Folder “­People’s Capitalism May–­Dec 1956 (2),” Box 19, Abbott Washburn Papers (hereafter AWP), Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas; “Annex A: ­People’s Capitalism Exhibit,” Folder “­People’s Capitalism May–­Dec 1956 (3),” Box 19, AWP; and the contents of the following folders: Folder “­People’s Capitalism May–­Dec 1956 (1),” Box 19, AWP; Folder “­People’s Capitalism May–­Dec 1956 (2),” Box 19, AWP; Folder “­People’s Capitalism May–­Dec 1956 (3),” Box 19, AWP; Folder “­People’s Capitalism Jan–­Apr 1956 (4),” Box 19, AWP; Folder “­People’s Capitalism 1955 (3),” Box 19, AWP; Folder “­People’s Capitalism 1958–1960,” Box 20, AWP; and Folder “­People’s Capitalism Test Preview Feb 1956 (2),” Box 22, AWP. 32. George A. McBride, “A Description of Proyecto Ciudad Techo and an Analy­sis of Some of Its Economic Aspects” (unpublished report, June–­September 1962), 20, 41–42, Fondo CINVA, División de Archivos Correspondencia, Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia (hereafter Fondo CINVA). 33. McBride, “Description of Proyecto Ciudad Techo” 20, 41–42, Fondo CINVA; Graciela García de Avendaño, interview by the author, Bogotá, Colombia, February 11, 2011; Ana Teresa Huertas de Díaz, interview by the author, Bogotá, Colombia, February 10, 2011. 34. As Mark Healey notes, CINVA began to embrace more capital-­intensive materials, designs, and construction methods a­ fter the rise of the National Front. Ironically, the po­liti­cal transition that elevated CINVA in policy making also facilitated the departure of rural sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, a critic of modernist design who left to establish the sociology faculty at the Universidad Nacional. For prac­ti­tion­ers at the time, ­these dif­fer­ent versions of aided self-­help came to seem utterly antagonistic, and proj­ects like Ciudad Kennedy became objects of rebuke by John F. C. Turner and o­ thers who saw existing settlements and socioeconomic practices as systems to adapt rather than supplant. As the history of Ciudad Kennedy shows, debates over va­ri­e­ties of self-­help obscured the fact that all auto-­construction proj­ects pushed tremendous costs and responsibilities onto residents and by the same token proved susceptible to popu­lar visions of order. Healey, “Shelter in a Time of Vio­lence”; John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter, eds., Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Pro­cess (New York: MacMillan, 1972); John F. C. Turner, Housing by ­People: ­Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976); Gyger, “The Informal as a Proj­ect.” 35. McBride, “Description of Proyecto Ciudad Techo,” 9. 36. Ibid., 20–21; Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda and Carmen de Patiño, interview by the author, Bogotá, Colombia, February 21, 2011; interview with Ana Teresa Huertas de Díaz; María Ester Ramírez, interview by the author, Bogotá, Colombia, February 3, 2011. 37. The statistics come from surveys conducted by John I. Laun, who notes that they are prob­ably conservative, since residents likely underreported violations of ICT regulations. John I. Laun, “El Estado y la vivienda en Colombia: Análisis de urbanizaciones del ICT,” in Urbanismo y vida urbana, ed. Carlos Castillo (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiana de Cultura, 1977), 309, 316; interviews with Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda and Carmen de Patiño, Graciela García de Avendaño, María Ester Ramírez, and Ana Teresa Huertas de Díaz. 38. Elsa Gómez Gómez, “Evaluación socio-­económica del proyecto de ayuda mutua de la Supermanzana 8-­A, Ciudad Kennedy, Bogotá: Estudio de caso de 28 viviendas,” November 1966, unpublished report, ch. 2, Fondo CINVA.

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39. Alcira Peñuela de Guerrero and Aura Morena de Fajardo, interview by the author, Bogotá, Colombia, January 31, 2011; and interview with María Ester Ramírez. 40. An exception is Alan Gilbert, who studied renters and ­owners in Mexico City, Caracas, and Santiago de­cades ­later and found that most preferred home owner­ship to renting ­because public policies had deliberately made owner­ship a form of economic security and social stability. Alan Gilbert, In Search of a Home (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993). 41. In 1977, Laun published the results of a survey of residents of twenty-­one ICT proj­ ects in Bogotá, including Ciudad Kennedy. Only 64 ­percent of the Ciudad Kennedy residents indicated where they had lived before moving to the neighborhood, but 55.75 ­percent had lived in Bogotá. Laun, “El Estado y la vivienda en Colombia,” 324. On rural mobilization for land before the 1960s, see Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in ­Colombia, 1850–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); Marco Palacios, ¿De quien es la tierra? Propiedad, politicización y protesta campesina en la década de 1930 (Bogotá: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011); Nola Reinhardt, Our Daily Bread: The Peasant Question and ­Family Farming in the Colombian Andes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 42. For researchers from CINVA, residents’ uses of property inspired endless worry. Throughout the 1960s, the center sent staff into Ciudad Kennedy to determine ­whether housing recipients ­were using each room as intended, ­whether they had saved money to improve the structures, and ­whether they cooperated with each other and ICT staff. See, for instance, McBride, “Description of Proyecto Ciudad Techo.” For parallel conflicts in Argentina and Brazil, see Leandro Benmergui, “The Alliance for Pro­gress and Housing Policy in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the 1960s,” Urban History 36 (2009): 303–26. 43. Interviews with Aura Morena de Fajardo, January 28 and 31, 2011, Bogotá, Colombia; Alcira Peñuela de Guerrero; Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda and Carmen de Patiño; and Elizabeth Torres, February 3, 2011, Bogotá, Colombia. 44. Interviews with María Ester Ramírez, Alcira Peñuela de Guerrero, Aura Morena de Fajardo (January 31, 2011), and Ana María Huertas de Díaz. 45. Jorge Nariño and residents of Supermanzana 9B to Guillermo Leon Valencia, January 28, 1964, Carpeta “Departamentos Territoriales,” Caja 153, Despacho Sr. Presidente, Transferencia 7, Fondo Presidencia, 1960–1970, AGN. 46. Laun, “El Estado y la vivienda en Colombia,” 313–14; interviews with Ana Teresa Huertas de Díaz and Aura Morena de Fajardo (January 28, 2011); and similar comments in the interviews cited previously. 47. Interview with Clímaco Patiño Sepulveda and Carmen de Patiño; Judith Cabrera Cabrera, “Cuatro Puntas: Un sector residencial en vía de extinción,” in Bogotá, historia común (Bogotá: Departamento Administrativo de Acción Comunal, 1998), 47–81; “José Elías Calderón Cabrera: Barrio Las Américas,” in Lasprilla and Spijkers, Voces del común, 163; “José de la Cruz Acevedo Hurtado, Barrio Pío XII,” in Lasprilla and Spijkers, eds., Voces del común, 152–53. ­These mobilizations raise the possibility that linked policies of private homeownership in the United States and Colombia encouraged related pro­cesses of racial and class formation that turned working-­class homeowners against the poor in general and Afro-­descendant ­people in par­tic­u ­lar. See David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter, The ­Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O. Self, American



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Babylon: Race and the Strug­gle for Postwar Oakland (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and In­equality in Postwar Detroit (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1996). 48. “Adelina Suaza y Víctor Suaza,” 33–60; Arango Zuluaga, La lucha por la vivienda en Colombia, 63–72; Martín Reig, La vivienda popu­lar oficial y el desarrollo urbano (Bogotá: ­Sociedad Colombiana de Planificación, 1972), mimeograph, Colección General, Archivo de ­ areer of Lauchlin Currie, 199; Alan Gilbert and Peter M. Bogotá; Sandilands, The Life and C Ward, Housing, the State, and the Poor: Policy and Practice in Three Latin American Cities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 129. 49. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to John F. Kennedy, March 10, 1961, Folder “Latin Amer­i­ca, General, 3/8/61–3/14/61,” Box 215, National Security Files, JFK Library. On the formation of self-­identifying ­middle classes in Bogotá and beyond, and the unanticipated po­liti­c al consequences of that pro­c ess, see Abel Ricardo López-­Pedreros, “A Beautiful Class, an Irresistible Democracy: The Historical Formation of the ­Middle Class in Bogotá, 1955–1965” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mary­land, College Park, 2008), and A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein, eds., The Making of the ­Middle Class: ­Toward a Transnational History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 50. Interview with Aura Morena de Fajardo (January 31, 2011). 51. Ciudad Kennedy presented specific manifestations of general phenomena that feminist historians and economists have long analyzed: the per­sis­tent production of economic value within the home, and the integration within ­house­holds of multiple systems of production and exploitation, formality and informality, and licit and illicit activity. Lourdes Benería and Martha Roldán, The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and House­hold Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: House­work, Wages, and the Ideology of ­Labor in the Early Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Carmen Diana Deere, House­hold and Class Relations: Peasants and Landlords in Northern Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); ­ omen: Land and Property Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León de Leal, Empowering W Rights in Latin Amer­i­ca (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Nancy Folbre, “Cleaning House: New Perspectives on House­holds and Economic Development,” Journal of Development Economics 22 (1986): 5–40; Florencia E. Mallon, “Gender and Class in the Transition to Capitalism: House­hold and Mode of Production in Central Peru,” Latin American Perspectives 13, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 147–74; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman House­holds, Gender Relations, and the Po­liti­cal Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and ­Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 52. More than Brasilia, Ciudad Kennedy recalls Stephen Kotkin’s analy­sis of interdependent licit and illicit activity in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the H ­ uman Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). 53. Cullather, The Hungry World, ch. 3; Gilbert, “Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal”; Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American ­Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Immerwahr, Thinking Small; Latham, Modernization as Ideology, chs. 4–5.

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54. For such an analy­sis of socialist rather than mixed economies, see Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-­Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011).

Chapter 3 I would like to thank Nancy Kwak, Andrew Sandoval-­Strausz, all the participants at the conference “Transnational Cities: Past into Pres­ent,” and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions. Research for this chapter was made pos­si­ble thanks to a grant from the Social Science Research Council. I want also to thank Paula Halperin, Mark Healey, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Barbara Weinstein, Daryle Williams, and James Woodard for feedback on previous versions of this chapter. I am solely responsible for any shortcomings. 1. Teodoro Moscoso (1910–92) was both the U.S. coordinator of the Alliance for Pro­gress and the assistant administrator for Latin Amer­i­ca of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) between 1962 and 1964. He had been the executive director of the Puerto Rican Housing Authority in the early 1940s and president of the Puerto Rican Industrial Development Com­pany from 1942 to 1950. 2. The government renamed Vila Progresso as Vila Kennedy ­a fter the assassination of the president of the United States, a gesture that USAID officials received with joy. 3. Juan de Onís, “Brazilians Wary on Aid Benefits,” New York Times, August 19, 1962, 31. 4. Ibid. 5. Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts: Aided Self-­Help Housing, 1939–1954,” Habitat International 22, no. 2 (June 1998): 165–89; Godwin Arku and Richard Harris, “Housing as a Tool of Economic Development Since 1929,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no.  4 (December  2005): 895–915; Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 6. See Alex  W. Maldonado, Teodoro Moscoso and Puerto Rico’s Operation Bootstrap (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). 7. Among ­others, see Anthony Leeds and Elizabeth Leeds, A sociologia do Brasil urbano (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1978); Victor Vincent Valla, Educação e favela: Políticas para as favelas do Rio de Janeiro, 1940–1985 (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1986). 8. Onís, “Brazilians Wary on Aid Benefits,” 31. 9. Adrián Gorelik, “A produção da ‘cidade Latino-­americana,’ ” Tempo 17, no.  1 (2005): 112–33. 10. Among ­others, see Kwak, World of Homeowners; M. Iqlal Muzaffar, “The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World” (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 2007); Adrián Gorelik, “La aldea en la ciudad: Ecos urbanos de un debate antropológico,” Revista del Museo de Antropología 1, no. 1 (2008): 73–96; Mark Healey, The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan ­after the 1944 Earthquake (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Leandro Benmergui, “The Alliance for Pro­gress and Housing Policy in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the 1960s,” Urban History 36, no. 2 (2009): 303–26; Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Proj­ects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Patricio del Real and Helen Gyger, eds., Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (London: Routledge, 2012); Helen Gyger, “The Informal as a Proj­ect: Self-­Help Housing in Peru, 1954–1986” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2013).



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11. Some scholars and sectors of the media have recently revised accounts of Lacerda’s administration to celebrate his achievements in terms of the significant infrastructural developments of the city. In that line, see Maurício Dominguez Perez, Lacerda na Guanabara: A reconstrução do Rio de Janeiro nos anos 1960 (Rio de Janeiro: Odisséia, 2007). 12. The term “contact zone” was first coined by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); see also Gilbert Joseph, Catherine Legrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounter of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US–­Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 5; and Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, In from the Cold: Latin Amer­i­ca’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 13. Lucien Parisse, Favelas do Rio de Janeiro: Evolução, sentido (Rio de Janeiro: Pontificia Universidade Católica-­RJ, Centro Nacional de Pesquisas Habitacionais, 1969), 97–112. 14. São Paulo, a metropolitan center like Rio and itself an industrial juggernaut, received more mi­grants than Rio. By 1950, São Paulo’s population began to exceed that of Rio and it almost doubled in 1970. Mauro Osorio, Rio nacional, Rio local: Mitos e visões da crise carioca e fluminense (Rio de Janeiro: SENAC Rio, 2005), 132. 15. For a comprehensive study of Rio’s ­labor and social transformations, see Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and In­equality in Twentieth-­Century Rio de Janeiro (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). See also Licia do Prado Valladares, A invenção da favela: Do mito de origem a favela​.­com (Rio de Janeiro: FGV Editora, 2005). 16. The Tijuca Massif divides the city in two, north and south. To the south, the hills run parallel to the sea, creating a relatively thin fringe (or strip) of limited land. 17. Mauricio de Almeida Abreu, Evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: IPLANRIO and Zahar, 1987); Mark Kehren, “Tunnel Vision: Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro, 1960–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mary­land, 2006). 18. Between 1940 and 1950, the population of four municipalities in Rio’s suburbs grew significantly, including Nova Iguaçu (189.4  ­percent), Nilópolis (107.9  ­percent), São João de Meriti (93.4 ­percent), and Duque de Caxias (22.6 ­percent). Parisse, Favelas do Rio de Janeiro, 48. 19. On the relationship between legality (or the lack thereof) in favelas and citizenship, see Fischer, Poverty of Rights; Rafael Soares Gonçalves, Favelas do Rio de Janeiro: Historia e direto (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas and Pontificia Universidade Católica-­RJ, 2013). 20. This par­tic­u ­lar status changed again in 1975 when the Guanabara and Rio de Janeiro states ­were fused into the state of Rio de Janeiro. 21. On the debates about the status of Rio, see Marly Silva da Motta’s “ ‘Que será de Rio?’ Refletindo sobre a identidade politica da cidade do Rio de Janeiro,” Tempo 2, no. 4 (1997): 146–74; Marly Silva da Motta, Rio de Janeiro: De cidade-­capital a Estado da Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro: Assembléia Legislativa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2001); Angela Moulin S. Penalva Santos, Economia, espaço e sociedade no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: FGV Editora, 2003). 22. On Lacerda, see Bryan McCann, “Carlos Lacerda: The Rise and Fall of a Middle-­ Class Populist in 1950s Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 4 (2003): 661–696; John  W. F. Dulles, Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Marina Gusmão de Mendonça, O demolidor de presidentes: A trajetória política de Carlos Lacerda, 1930–1968 (São Paulo: Códex, 2002); Perez, Lacerda na Guanabara. 23. Brodwyn Fischer, “The Red Menace Reconsidered: A Forgotten History of Communist Mobilization in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas, 1945–1964,” Hispanic American Historical Review

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94, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–33; Nísia Verônica Trindade de Lima, “O movimento de favelados do Rio de Janeiro” (master’s thesis, Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, 1989); Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva, “A política na favela,” Cadernos Brasileiros 9, no. 41 (1967): 35–47; Carlos Nelson Ferreira dos Santos, Movimentos urbanos no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1981). 24. Secretaria Geral de Agricultura, Indústria e Comércio, Plano para construção de 5 mercados, mimeo, March  1962, Folder 15, “512-11-150-130 Guanabara Markets,” Box 42, RG 286, National Archives at College Park, Md. (hereafter NACP). 25. Lincoln Gordon, Rio de Janeiro, to Thomas Mann, tele­gram 1773, February 24, 1964, Central Files 1964–66, POL 15 BRAZ, RG 59, NACP; Ruth Leacock, Requiem for Revolution (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), 31. 26. Created in 1959, the IDB was part of the multinational institutional development in the region to finance Latin American infrastructural growth and social programs. 27. Carlos Lacerda to John  F. Kennedy, Washington, D.C., March  26, 1962, cited in Dulles, Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader, 88–89. 28. U.S. organ­izations like the Ford Foundation or the Social Science Research Council, as well as international organ­izations like the Organ­ization of American States and the United ­ ere key in supporting research Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organ­ization, w as well as in promoting collaborations on a hemispheric scale. 29. Maria Cristina de Silva Leme, “The Économie et Humanisme Movement: The Politicization of Urban Planning in Brazil ­A fter the Second World War” (paper presented at the ­Fourteenth International Planning History Society Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, July 12–14, 2010); Licia do Prado Valladares, A Escola de Chicago: Impacto de uma tradição no Brasil e na França (Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ, 2005); Valladares, A invenção da favela; Celso M. Lamparelli, “Louis Joseph Lebret e a pesquisa urbano-­regional no Brasil: Crônicas tardias ou história prematura,” Revista Espaço e Debate 37 (1994): 90–99. 30. Marco Antonio da Silva Mello et al., eds., Favelas cariocas: Ontem e hoje (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond Universitária, 2012). 31. Brodwyn Fischer, “A ­Century in the Pres­ent Tense: Crisis, Politics, and the Intellectual History of Brazil’s Informal Cities,” in Cities From Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin Amer­i­ca, ed. Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 9–67; Gorelik, “La aldea en la ciudad”; Leandro Benmergui, “The Transnationalization of the ‘Housing Prob­lem’: Social Sciences and Developmentalism in Postwar Argentina,” in The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City, ed. Edward Murphy and Najib B. Hourani (London: Ashgate, 2013), 35–55. 32. On the ideals of homeownership and the politics of housing aid abroad among U.S. experts, see Kwak, World of Homeowners; for the Argentine case, see also Benmergui, “The Alliance for Pro­gress and Housing Policy.” 33. “US Spurs Latin Americans to Mobilize Savings to Finance Homes,” New York Times, July 28, 1963, 87; Lacerda to Felipe Herrera, IDB president, n.d. (ca. July 1962), and Lacerda to Leonard Saccio, IDB minister-­deputy, July 12, 1962, both in Estado de Guanabara, Plano de recuperação de favelas e de habitação de interesse social (Guanabara, Brazil: COHAB, July 1962), Entry 400, Brazil subj/proj 56–73, Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 34. In the Peruvian case, PL 480 funds for housing construction w ­ ere a way to deter the alleged communist threat in the years prior to the formation of the Alliance for Pro­gress. See Sean Elliott, Financing Latin American Housing: Domestic Savings Mobilization and US Assistance



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Policy (New York: Praeger, 1968); Thomas Zoumaras, “Containing Castro: Promoting Homeownership in Peru, 1956–61,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 161–81; Kwak, World of Homeowners, 127–65; Gyger, “The Informal as a Proj­ect.” 35. Rafael de Almeida Magalhães, O problema das favelas cariocas e sua solução (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade do Estado da Guanabara, 1964), 13; Guanabara, Plano de recuperação de favelas. 36. Carlos Lacerda, O poder das ideias (Rio de Janeiro: Distribuidora Rec­ord Editôra, 1962), 251, my translation. 37. Almeida Magalhães pointed out the difficulty of and bureaucracy involved in obtaining funds from the national government, which, in addition, had to satisfy the demands of the reminding states. Alemeida Magalhães, O problema das favelas cariocas e sua solução, 23–27. 38. Ibid. 39. “USAID—­Assisted Guanabara Housing Program,” report prepared by Bill J. Williams, USAID housing advisor, December 5, 1966, Folder 2, Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 40. “Audit Report in the Utilization of Public Law 480, June 12, 1962 through February 29, 1964,” 4, Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 41. COHAB, Relatório Geral, 1963–1965, Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 42. Almeida Magalhães, O problema das favelas cariocas e sua solução, 12. 43. The plan also included partial urbanization of a favela in a working-­class neighborhood (Vila de Penha) and the construction of a hospital in Madureira, an area underserved in terms of health ser­vices. 44. Guanabara, Plano de recuperação de favelas. 45. COPEG had bought the area that belonged to Cristo Redentor’s Shelter, where COHAB built Vila Kennedy. Lacerda or­ga­nized COPEG following the example of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Com­pany, created during Operation Bootstrap ­under Moscoso’s direction. Centro de Pesquisa e Documentacão de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Clemente Mariani’s Collection, CMa ae COPEG 1960.12.29. 46. Stuart  H. Van Dyke, director of USAID/Brazil, to Roberto de Oliveira Campos, minister of planning and economic coordination, April 30, 1965, Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 47. “Flagelados saem para novas casas,” Correio da Manhá, May 5, 1967; see also Folder “Disaster Relief Program,” Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 48. Documentation on the eradication of Esqueleto is in the Arquivo Carlos Lacerda (hereafter ACL) at Universidade de Brasilia. 49. Paradoxically, the building of the university carries the name of Negrão de Lima, Lacerda’s successor and po­liti­cal adversary. 50. On the role of social workers and the shifting paradigm in the field at that time, see Cezar Honorato, “O Assistente Social e as favelas (1945/64),” and Maria de Fatima Cabral Marques Gomes and Bruno Alves de França, “SAGMACS, Serviço Social e favelas cariocas, referência e/ ou produto de um contexto histórico,” both in Favelas Cariocas: Ontem e hoje, ed. Marco A. da Silva Mello, Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva, et al. (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2012). 51. The destination of the inhabitants of Esqueleto subsection G helps to illustrate this point. Out of a total of 419 relocated families, 312 went to Vila Kennedy, 53 went to temporary settlements, and 19 owned property on the outskirts. PO.03, Dossié Secretaria de Obras Públicas, Remoção da Favela do Esqueleto, Projetos, Planilhas de Remoções, 1964, ACL; “Os moradores da Favela do Esqueleto irão para Vila Kennedy em Abril,” O’Globo, October 30, 1964, 6.

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52. Luiz Carlos de Moraes Vital’s answers and some of Lacerda’s memorandums are located in PO.03, Dossié Secretaria de Serviços Socias, Companhia de Habitação Popu­lar, Programa de Remoção de Favelas, Correspondencias, 1963–65, ACL. 53. For Brazil, see Brodwyn Fischer, Poverty of Rights and “The Red Menace Reconsidered.” Edward Murphy’s For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960–2010 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) analyzes the Chilean case to show how owner­ship dreams led to insurgent popu­lar mobilizations. 54. “Vila Kennedy fracassa como experiência para acabar com as favelas,” Jornal do Brasil, July 7, 1968, 19; Mário Trindade, Habitação e desenvolvimento (Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 1971), 176. 55. Bernard Wagner, David McVoy, and Gordon Edwards, Programa para o desenvolvimento urbano e habitacional da Guanabara: Relatório e recomendações da equipe de Habitação e Desenvolvimento Urbano da A.I.D., 1º de julho de 1966 (mimeographed, 1966); Lawrence  F. Salmen, “A Perspective on the Resettlement of Squatters in Brazil,” América Latina 12, no. 1 (January–­March  1969): 73–95, and personal interview with Lawrence Salmen conducted February 13, 2011. 56. Cited in Berenice Guimarães Vasconcelos de Souza, “O BNH e a política do governo” (master’s thesis, Departamento de Ciência Política, Universidade de Minas Gerais, 1974), 157–59. 57. Trindade, Habitação E Desenvolvimento, 176. 58. Licia do Prado Valladares, Passa-se uma casa: Análise do programa de remoção de favelas do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1978). 59. Janice Perlman, Favela: Four De­cades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 60. Salmen, “Resettlement of Squatters in Brazil,” 88–89. Personal interviews with original residents at Vila Kennedy also reflect this ambivalence. 61. Iná Elias de Castro, “Conjunto habitacional: Ampliando a controvérsia sobre a remoção de favelas,” Dados—­Revista de Ciências Sociais 26, no. 3 (1983): 213–31. 62. Alba Zaluar, A máquina e a revolta: As organizações populares e o significado da pobreza (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985). 63. “Foreign Aid Flop: ‘Showcase’ Community in Brazil Deteriorates Due to Poor Planning,” Wall Street Journal, March 20, 1967, 1. 64. Bill  J. Williams, Housing and Urban Development Office, to Ambassador John Tuthill, responding to ambassador’s request for information on Vila Kennedy, May 3, 1967, Box 25, RG 286, NACP. 65. “700 famílias da Vila Kennedy têm ameaça de despejo,” O Dia, May 6, 1968; “Vila Kennedy fracassa como experiência para acabar com as favelas,” Jornal do Brasil, July 7, 1968, 19; “Cidade de Deus quase é favela,” Correio da Manhá, July 7, 1968, 16; “Lacerda afirmou que Estado abandonou a Vila Kennedy,” Jornal do Brasil, July 9, 1968, 7. 66. William Mangin, “Latin Amer­i­ca Squatter Settlements: A Prob­lem and a Solution,” Latin American Research Review 2, no. 3 (Summer 1967): 65–98. U.S. anthropologist Anthony Leeds, who had vast experience in Rio’s favelas and whose work was formative for many social scientists, including Carlos Nelson, had firsthand knowledge of John Turner’s experience in the barriadas of Lima, Peru. 67. Juan de Onís, “US Team Urges Rebuilding, Not De­mo­li­tion, of Brazil Slums,” New York Times, August 12, 1966, 12.



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68. Mario Brum, Cidade Alta: História, memórias e estigma de favela num conjunto habitacional do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Ponteio, 2012). 69. Williams Ellis, director of USAID/Brazil Housing and Urban Development Office, to Governor Francisco Negrão de Lima, June 2, 1969, Box 25, RG 286, NACP.

Chapter 4 1. Brenda Yeoh discusses the importance of overcrowded, low-­quality housing to the thriving economy, noting that such living conditions “became the mechanism by which the urban economy sustained a market for menial and more or less casual l­abour. Subdivided tenements, makeshift cubicles, and back-­to-­back ­houses ­were a crucial part of the urban infrastructure by which the coolie population could be absorbed.” While I agree with this statement, I would add that po­liti­cal leaders and government officials tolerated such “infrastructure” as temporary expedients to be cleared eventually as cities fully modernized. Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 137. 2. Paulo Alcazaren, Luis Ferrer, Benvenuto Icamina, and Neal Oshima (photographer), Lungsod Iskwater: The Evolution of Informality as a Dominant Pattern in Philippine Cities (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 2010), 61. 3. Such statistics should be viewed with a fair amount of skepticism given the state of government rec­ords of informal dwellers at this time. Social Welfare Administration Annual Report, 1957–58, as cited in Romeo B. Ocampo, Historical Development of Philippine Housing Policy, pt. 2, Postwar Housing Policy and Administration, 1945–1959, Occasional Paper No. 7 (Manila: Research and Publications Program, College of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, January 1977), 13. 4. N. J. Demerath and Richard N. Kuhlman, ­Toward a Housing Programme for the Philippines (Washington, D.C.: National Housing Agency, 1945); Jacob Crane, “Notes on Advisory Housing Mission to the Philippines,” December 1945, Folder 1945–48, Box 12, Accession 71A3534, RG 207, United States National Archives and Rec­ords Administration (hereafter NARA). 5. Romeo B. Ocampo, Historical Development of Philippine Housing Policy, pt. 1, Prewar Housing Policy, Occasional Paper No. 6 (Manila: Research and Publications Program, College of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, November 1976), 21. 6. In 1958, the Rehabilitation Finance Corporation would be replaced by the Development Bank of the Philippines, an agency that fi­nally addressed the needs of lower-­income clients by issuing loans with ten-­to fifteen-­year amortization periods at 8 ­percent interest starting in 1960. Report and Recommendations of the Joint Philippine-­American Finance Commission (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), 60–61. 7. The Home Financing Commission did not actually begin insuring mortgages ­until 1957. Ocampo, Historical Development of Philippine Housing Policy, pt. 2, 2; minutes of the inaugural meeting of the National Housing Council, Manila, October 18, 1956, p. 1, Folder 1946–54, Box 11, Accession 71A3534, NARA; Republic Act No. 580, Second Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, Second Session, September 15, 1950, National Library of the Philippines. 8. Richard P. Poethig, “An Urban Squatter Policy for Metropolitan Manila,” Solidarity 4, no. 11 (November 1969): 22, as cited in Ocampo, Historical Development of Philippine Housing Policy, pt. 2, 11.

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9. Zone One Tondo Organ­i zation response to the questions posed by the World Bank, October 31, 1973, Loan 1272 (1972–75), World Bank Archives. 10. Ibid. 11. ­These agencies ­were listed in the National Housing Authority Primer (Quezon City, Philippines: NHA Information Division, December  2010), 15, Rec­ords of the National Housing Authority. ous, in Folder “Manila Urban Development Proj­ e ct—­ 12. Internal memos, vari­ Philippines—­P004445—­L oan 1272—­L oan 1282-­C orrespondence, Vol. 8,” World Bank Archives. 13. Letter to Mr. Eberhard Kurth, German representative, n.d. (most likely 1977), Folder “LOAN-1272-1976-77,” World Bank Archives. 14. See Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), for a detailed description of this transition in World Bank policy. 15. Gregory Votaw to World Bank, tele­gram, May 27, 1977, Folder “Manila Urban Development Proj­ect—­Philippines—­PO4445-­Loan 1272, Loan 1282-­Correspondence, Vol. 9,” World Bank Archives. 16. A. Pellegrini, “Draft of Suggested Terms of Reference for Consulting Ser­vices to Be ­ nder Auspices of METROFINDS Proj­ect of Department of Public Furnished to NHA, U Works, Transportation, and Communications, for Assisting in Development of a Metropolitan Area Wide Slum Improvement Program,” March 29, 1977, Folder “Manila Urban Development Proj­ect—­Philippines—­P004445—­L oan 1272—­L oan 1282-­Correspondence, Vol. 8,” World Bank Archives. 17. “Tita Baby” (preferred not to give her name), Marive Fernandez, Herman and Jeanne (both preferred to withhold surname), Delia Mejia, Arnold Balaod, Lorna Sabado, Rosalinda Dado, and ­Mother Leadro Chia, interviews by author, Philippines, January 8, 2013. I owe a tremendous debt to Eleiza Recaro, who provided all introductions, translations, and detailed explanations during t­ hese interviews. 18. Anonymous NHA worker (name withheld by request), interview by author, Quezon City, Philippines, January 7–8, 2013. 19. Anonymous national government housing official (name withheld by request), interview by author, Philippines, February 2013. 20. ­Cromwell Teves and Ana Mirador, Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, interview by author, Makati City, Philippines, February 20, 2013. 21. The Lopez Group includes holdings in major media and telecommunications, converged mobile telecom ser­vices, remittance and cargo ser­vices, power and energy, property and land, infrastructure, and manufacturing. 22. Frank Quilas, interview by author, BayaniJuan/Southville 7, Philippines, June  11, 2013. 23. Bebot Corpuz, interview by author, Manila, Philippines, June 13, 2013. 24. Anonymous resident at Estero de Paco (name withheld by request), interview by author, Manila, Philippines, June 11, 2013. Many thanks to Bebot Corpuz, head of Kapit Bisig para sa Ilog Pasig’s relocation unit; Arlene Yumol, community or­ga­nizer staff; and Rosemarie Sanchez for the detailed tour of the rehabilitation proj­ect. 25. “Citi and Habitat for Humanity Roll Out Home Improvement Microsavings Program in the Philippines,” Habitat for Humanity International News, August  3, 2012,



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http://­w ww​.­habitat​.­org ​/­a siapacific​/­news​/­2012​/­08​_­03​_ ­2012 ​_­Citi ​_ ­Habitat ​_ ­Roll ​_­Out ​_ ­Home​ _­Improvement​_­In​_­Philippines​.­a spx.

Chapter 5 1​.­­Stefan Kraetke, Kathrin Wildner, and Stephan Lanz, eds., Transnationalism and Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2014). 2. On the concept of imposition and borrowing, see Stephen V. Ward, “Re-­examining the International Diffusion of Planning,” in Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth ­Century Experience, ed. Robert Freestone (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 2000), 40–60; Stephen  V. Ward, “The International Diffusion of Planning: A Review and a Canadian Case Study,” International Planning Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 53–77. For further discussion of border crossings in planning history, see Carola Hein, ed., “Transnational Urbanism,” special issue, Planning Perspectives 2, no 29 (2014). 3. The term has drawn attention since the early 2000s. See Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). 4. Jon Binnie, “Review: Locating Transnationalism: Agency and Method: Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? by Peter Marcuse, Ronald Van Kempen; The Transnational Cap­i­ tal­ist Class by Leslie Sklair; Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization by Michael Peter Smith,” Sociology 37 (2003): 599–604; Bruce Stanley, “Review: Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization by Michael Peter Smith,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 77, no. 2 (2001): 429–30. 5. Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” in “Transnational Communities in ­Eu­ro­pean History,” theme issue, Con­temporary Eu­ro­pean History 14, no. 4 (2005): 421–39. 6. Ibid., 438. 7. Smith, Transnational Urbanism. 8. Lars Amenda, “China-­Towns and Container Terminals: Shipping Networks and ­Urban Patterns in Port Cities in Global and Local Perspective, 1880–1980,” in Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks, ed. Carola Hein (London: Routledge, 2011), 43–53; Flemming Christiansen, Chinatown Eu­rope: Identity of the Eu­ro­pean Chinese ­Towards the Beginning of the Twenty-­First C ­ entury (London: Routledge, 2003); Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer, eds., Chinatowns in a Transnational World: Myths and Realities of an Urban Phenomenon (New York: Routledge, 2011). 9. For example, Transcultural Cities Symposium, Seattle, February  11–13, 2011 (http://­ faculty​.­washington​.­edu ​/­jhou​/­transcultural​/ ­). This symposium included the “Now Urbanism: City-­Making in the 21st  ­Century and Beyond” 2010–2011 John  E. Sawyer Seminar in the Study of Comparative Cultures at the University of Washington, “Transcultural Urbanism: Immigrants in the City,” February  11, 2011, with pre­sen­ta­tions by Anastasia Loukaitou-­ Sideris (urban planning, School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles), Michael Rios (environmental design, University of California, Davis), and Arijit Sen (architecture, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) (http://­w ww​.­nowurbanism​.­org ​/­download​ /­nowurbanism​_ ­february​.­pdf). The conference was ­later developed into a book: Jeffrey Hou, ed., Transcultural Cities: Border-­Crossing and Place-­Making (New York: Routledge, 2013). 10. Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism”; Akira Iriye and Pierre-­Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan,

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2009); Pierre-­Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 11. Anthony  D. King, “Writing Transnational Planning Histories,” in Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans, ed. Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, 2003), 1–14; Anthony D. King, “Exporting Planning: The Colonial and Neo-­Colonial Experience,” Urbanism Past and Pres­ent 5 (1977): 12–22; Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). 12. Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850–2000 (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1998); Stephen V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth-­Century City: The Advanced Cap­i­tal­ist World (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 2002); Ward, “Re-­examining the International Diffusion of Planning”; Ward, “The International Diffusion of Planning.” 13. Andrew Harris and Susan Moore, “Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 5 (2013): 1499–1509; Patsy Healey and Robert Upton, eds., Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices (London: Routledge, 2010); Andrew Sandoval-­Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban Amer­i­ca,” Journal of American History 101 (2014), 804–31. 14. Arturo Almandoz, ed., Planning Latin Amer­i­ca’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 15. Anthony Sutcliffe, ­Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States and France, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); Iriye and Saunier, Palgrave Dictionary of Yves Saunier and Shane Transnational History; Saunier, Transnational History; Pierre-­ Ewen, eds., Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait, eds., Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Foreign Plans and Native Aspirations (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, 2003). 16. Dirk Schubert, “Transatlantic Crossings of Planning Ideas: The Neighborhood Unit in the USA, UK and Germany,” in Transnationalism and the German City, ed. Jeffry Diefendorf and Janet Ward (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 141–58. 17. Michel Agier, “Between War and City: T ­ owards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps,” trans. Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant, Ethnography 3, no. 3 (2002): 317–34; Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge, 2002); Sarah Lopez, The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 18. On the limits of professional planning, see Alexander Garvin, The Planning Game: Lessons from ­Great Cities (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 19. For border crossings of subnational entities, see Saskia Sassen, “Locating Cities on Global Cir­cuits,” in Sassen, Global Networks, Linked Cities. For the impact of border crossings on architecture, see, for example, Marc Schoonderbeek, ed., Border Conditions (Rotterdam: Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, 2010); and Jean Louis Cohen and Harmut Frank, eds., Interferenzen: Interférences (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2013). 20. See Hein, “Transnational Urbanism.” 21. On Otto Koenigsberger, see Rachel Lee, “Negotiating Modernities: Otto Koenigsberger’s Works and Networks in Exile (1933–1951)” (Ph.D. diss., Technical University of



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Berlin, 2014); and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, “In­-­de­pen­dence: Otto Koenigsberger and Modernist Urban Resettlement in India,” Planning Perspectives 2 (2006): 157–78. 22. Amenda, “China-­Towns and Container Terminals.” 23. Dana Buntrock, Japa­nese Architecture as a Collaborative Pro­cess: Opportunities in a Flexible Construction Culture (Abingdon, U.K.: Taylor and Francis, 2002). 24. On Dyer, see Nobuhiro Miyoshi, Henry Dyer: Pioneer of Education in Japan (Folkestone, U.K.: Global Oriental, 2004). 25. See Don Choi, “On Origins of Modern Architecture in Japan: The Imperial College of Engineering” (paper presented at Symposium on the History of Modern Japa­nese Architecture in World Perspective, June 25–27, 1999). 26. Carola Hein, “City Nord—­Die Geschäftsstadt Im Grünen,” in Das Ungebaute ­Hamburg, ed. Ulrich Höhns (Hamburg: Junius, 1991), 200–209; Carola Hein, The Capital of Eu­rope: Architecture and Urban Planning for the Eu­ro­pean Union (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood/ Praeger, 2004). 27. On global landscapes of oil, see Carola Hein, “Global Landscapes of Oil,” New Geographies 2 (2009): 33–42; Carola Hein, “Between Oil and ­Water: The Logistical Petroleumscape,” in The Petropolis of Tomorrow, ed. Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper (New York: Actar and Architecture at Rice, 2013), 437–47; Carola Hein, “Exploring Architectural History Through the Petroleumscapes of the Randstad to Imagine New Fossil-­Free ­Futures,” Bulletin Kunsthistorici 3 (2015): 27–31. 28. Arturo Almandoz, ed., Planning Latin Amer­i­ca’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2002); Carola Hein, “Maurice Rotival: French Planning on a World-­Scale” (parts 1 and 2), Planning Perspectives 17, no.  3 and no.  4 (2002): 247–65, 325–44; Jean-­François Lejeune, ed., Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin Amer­i­ca (New York: Prince­ ton Architectural Press, 2005); Pan American Union, Maracaibo, Venezuela’s ­G reat Oil ­Metropolis, The American City 21-­B (Washington, D.C.: Sun Print, 1936); Marta Vallmitjana et al., eds., El Plan Rotival: El Caracas que no fue. 1939/1989 un plano urbano por Caracas (Caracas: Ediciones Instituto de Urbanismo/Faculdad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo/Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1991); Francis Violich, Urban Planning for Latin Amer­i­ca: The Challenge for Metropolitan Growth (Boston: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain with Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1987). 29. Robert Home, “Knowledge Networks and Postcolonial Careering: David Oakley (1927–2003),” Architecture Beyond Eu­rope 4 (2013): 1–15. 30. Johan Lagae, “Unlocking the Archive of a Transnational Expert: Traces of Henri-­Jean Calsat’s Activities as a WHO-­Consultant,” Architecture Beyond Eu­rope 4 (2013): 1–13. 31. Carola Hein, “Bruxelles et les villes sièges de l’Union Européenne,” in Change: Brussels, Capital of Eu­rope, ed. Joël Claisse and Liliane Knopes (Brussels: Prisme Éditions, 2004), 118–22; Carola Hein, “Brussels, the Unofficial ‘Capital’ of Eu­rope: A Motor for Eu­ro­pean Unification,” in Brussels: Perspectives on a Eu­ro­pean Capital, ed. Pierre Laconte and Carola Hein (Brussels: Foundation for the Urban Environment, 2007), n.p.; Carola Hein, “Brussels: The Making of a Eu­ro­p ean Union Capital,” in Laconte and Hein, Brussels; Carola Hein, ­“Eu­ro­pean Spatial Development, the Polycentric EU Capital, and Eastern Enlargement,” Comparative Eu­r o­p ean Politics 4, no.  2/3 (2006): 253–71; Carola Hein, ed., Bruxelles, l’Européenne: Capitale de qui? Ville de qui? [Eu­ro­pean Brussels: Whose Capital? Whose City?] (Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2006). 32. Siim Kallas, “Foreword,” in Laconte and Hein, Brussels, 4–5.

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33. Clément Orillard, “The Transnational Building of Urban Design: Interplay Between Genres of Discourse in the Anglophone World,” Planning Perspectives 29, no. 2 (2014): 209–29. 34. For leading theories on garden cities, see Ebenezer Howard et al., To-­Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898; London: Routledge, 2003); and Ebenezer Howard and Frederic James Osborn, Garden Cities of To-­Morrow (1902; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). On a Japa­nese garden city, see also Shun’ichi Watanabe, “Garden City Japa­nese Style: The Case of Den-­En Toshi Com­pany Ltd., 1918–28,” in Shaping an Urban World: Planning in the 20th ­Century, ed. Gordon E. Cherry (London: Mansell, 1980), 129–43. On the concept of the small town in Japan, see Carola Hein, “Machi: Neighborhood and Small Town—­t he Foundation for Urban Transformation in Japan,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 1 (2008): 75–107. 35. On the deconcentration of Tokyo, see also Itsuki Nakabayashi, “Concentration and Deconcentration in the Context of the Tokyo Capital Region Plan and Recent Cross-­Border Networking Concepts,” in Cities, Autonomy and Decentralization in Japan, ed. Carola Hein and Philippe Pelletier (London: Routledge, 2006), 55–80; and Yorifusa Ishida, Nihon Kindai Toshi Keikaku No Hyakunen [A hundred years of Japa­nese urban planning] (Tokyo: Jichitai-­ kenkyûsha, 1987). 36. On Ishikawa, see Sumie Shoji, “The Life of Hideaki Ishikawa,” special issue, Toshikeikaku/City Planning Review, no. 182 (1993): 25–30. 37. Feder had been an early member of the Nazi Party. He was the Reich’s commissioner of settlement before being pushed out in 1934 and appointed at the Technical University of Berlin to a chair in urban and regional planning. See also Tilman A. Schenk and Ray Bromley, “Mass-­Producing Traditional Small Cities: Gottfried Feder’s Vision for a Greater Nazi Germany,” Journal of Planning History 2, no. 2 (2003): 107–39. 38. Nishiyama Uzō, “Dai 1 sho Seikatsu kiji no kozo” [Chapter 1: The structure of life units and the base of life], in Chiiki kûkan ron [Reflections on urban, regional and national space] (Tokyo: Keiso shobo, 1968), 19–56. Also see Carola Hein, Nishiyama Uzo: Leading Japa­ nese Planner and Theorist (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 39. Jonathan  V. Beaverstock, Richard  G. Smith, and Peter  J. Taylor, “World City Network: A New Metageography?,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 123–34; Carola Hein, ed., Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (London: Routledge, 2011); Adrian Jarvis and W. Robert Lee, eds., Trade, Migration and Urban Networks in Port Cities, c. 1640–1940 (St.  John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2008); Anthony D. King, “Bound­a ries, Networks, and Cities: Playing and Replaying Diasporas and Histories,” in Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, ed. Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 1–14; Helga Leitner, Claire Pavlik, and Eric Sheppard, “Networks, Governance, and the Politics of Scale: Inter-­urban Networks and the Eu­ro­pean Union,” in Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, ed. Andrew Herod and Melissa W. Wright (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 274–303; Sassen, Global Networks, Linked Cities; G.  H. Boyce, “Network Structures, Pro­cesses and Dynamics: Inter-­firm Cooperative Frameworks in the Shipping Industry,” in International Merchant Shipping in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Comparative Dimension, Research in Maritime History 37, ed. L. R. Fischer and E. Lange (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2008), 165–78. 40. Exemplary work on early twentieth-­c entury exchanges across the Atlantic includes Daniel T. Rod­gers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998). This book notably spurred further publications and study including research



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at the German Historical Institute in 2012. The institute itself has produced a very helpful website on Eu­ro­pean mi­g rants in the twentieth c­ entury and their impact on transatlantic exchange. “Transatlantic ­C areers: Mi­g rant Biographies Between Eu­rope and the United States,” German Historical Institute website, accessed December  28, 2016, http://­w ww​ .­transatlanticperspectives​.­org. 41​.­­For a comprehensive attempt at positioning planning history as an interdisciplinary field taking into account new global planning histories, see Carola Hein, ed., Routledge Planning History Handbook (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

Chapter 6 1. Letter to the editor, “Bell Clarifies Position,” Markham (Ontario) Economist and Sun, August 16, 1995, 4. 2. Heightened concerns about Vancouver’s density during unpre­ce­dented immigration from Hong Kong in the 1980s led the city to enact several zoning and design guideline restrictions to preserve the residential density of the 1940s. See John Punter, The Vancouver Achievement: Urban Planning and Design (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004); Peter Krivel, “­Will Bylaws or Market Determine Growth of Chinese Theme Malls?,” Toronto Star, November 9, 1995, North York/York Region NY1. 3. “Signs of Racism Hit a Suburb,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), November 20, 1995, http://­w ww​.­scmp​.­com​/­a rticle​/­139671​/­signs​-­racism​-­hit​-­suburb. Thomas Fung, a Hong Kong Chinese educated in Vancouver who returned to Hong Kong in 1984, established Fairchild Media and built the Aberdeen Centre in Richmond, British Columbia, among the first Asian-­themed malls in Canada. R. Eng, “Total Anonymity Not Pos­si­ble for Multimillionaire Developer Thomas Fung,” Chinatown News (Vancouver), August 18, 1994, 4, reprinted from Business in Vancouver and cited in David Ley, Millionaire Mi­grants: Trans-­Pacific Life Lines (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010), 131. Malaysian sugar tycoon and developer Robert Kuok, whose Kuok Group developed several multimillion-­dollar proj­ects in British Columbia, controls the South China Morning Post and holds a stake in the TVB tele­vi­sion station. Robert Williamson, “Billionaire Leaves Mark on Vancouver—­a nd Vice Versa,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 11, 1994, B1. 4. Maureen Murray, “Chinese Media Targets Markham: Mall Furor Dominates the Headlines,” Toronto Star, September 21, 1995, Metro News A1. 5. The term “ethnoburb” is defined in Wei Li, “Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles,” Urban Studies 35 (1998): 479–502. 6. Ley, Millionaire Mi­grants, 126. 7. Ibid., 20; Harris Hudema Consulting, “Condominium Retail Experience in Richmond B.C.” (unpublished report, 1994), 5. The Canada Immigrant Investor Program (CANIIP) and Entrepreneur Program w ­ ere terminated on February 11, 2014. Quebec’s Investor and Entrepreneur Programs are still in effect. Iain Marlow, “Investor Road to Canada Hits a Dead End with Immigrant Program’s Closing,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), February  11, 2014, http://­w ww​.­t heglobeandmail​.­c om ​/­news​/­p olitics​/­i nvestor​-­road​-­to ​-­c anada​-­h its​-­a​-­dead​-­end​ -­with​-­immigrant​-­programs​-­closure​/­a rticle16821623​/­. 8​.­­Existing studies of owner­ship and the replication of shop types do not distinguish between simply more than one owner and the condominium or strata-­title model. See

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Douglas  S. West, “The Effects of Shopping Center Owner­ship on Center Composition in Planned and Unplanned Shopping Center Hierarchies,” Papers in Regional Science 72, no.  1 (1993): 25–43. 9. Although t­ here is an extensive lit­er­a­ture on ethnic economies, including David Kaplan and Wei Li, eds., Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), and Ivan Light and Steven  J. Gold, Ethnic Economies (San Diego: Academic Press, 2000), I have found few mentions of group-­ownership or condominium models of nonresidential development in ­either mainstream or ethnic or transnational economies. One notable exception is David Lai, A Study of Asian-­Themed Malls in the Aberdeen District of the City of Richmond, B.C. (Vancouver: Centre for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, University of British Columbia, 2000). See also Shuguang Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity in the Toronto CMA: New Development Patterns and Impacts,” Canadian Geographer 43 (1999): 19–35; and Lucia Lo, “Con­temporary Chinese Landscapes in Toronto,” in From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian Communities in Pacific Rim Countries, ed. Wei Li (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 134–54. 10. See Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia Loukaitou-­Sideris, eds., The Informal American ­ abor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014); Judith K. De City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day L Jong, New SubUrbanisms (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Roger Keil, ed., Suburban Constellations: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st ­Century (Berlin: Jovis, 2013). 11. H. Lee Murphy, “What’s the Downside to Retail Condominiums?,” National Real Estate Investor, November 2007, 63. 12. Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001); Tsung-­Yi Michelle Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 2–8. See also Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 13. Wang’s 1995–99 study of retail condos in the GTA was the first published analy­sis of this development type, drawing on two unpublished reports: John Winter Associates Limited, “Condominium Retailing in Markham: A Consulting Report Prepared for the Planning Department, Town of Markham” (1994), and Mohammed Qadeer with A. Leung, “The Planning System and the Development of Chinese Shopping Malls in Suburban Scarborough, Ontario” (1994), which was ­later reworked as Mohammed Qadeer, “Ethnic Malls and Plazas: Chinese Commercial Developments in Scarborough, Ontario” (CERIS Working Paper Series, Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, Toronto, 1998). 14. Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity,” 29–30; Lucia Lo and Valerie Preston, “Asian Theme Malls in Suburban Toronto: Land Use Conflict in Richmond Hill,” Canadian Geographer 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 182–90; Lai, A Study of Asian Themed Malls. 15. William N. Kinnard Jr. and Stephen D. Messner, “Obtaining Competitive Locations for Small Retailers in Shopping Centers,” Journal of Small Business Management 10 (January 1972): 21–26. 16. One of the earliest examples involves a Mas­sa­chu­setts developer and investor who began constructing office condominiums in 1981, taking advantage of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 that cut depreciation to fifteen years. Bill Dorman, “Office Condos Offer Benefits,” Boston Globe, November  22, 1981, Real Estate section, ProQuest document ID 294179492. Business analysts also forecast the proliferation of nonresidential condominiums. See Jerry C. Davis, “Next Phase of Condo Craze to Embrace Shopping Centers,” Chicago Sun-­ Times, January 3, 1982, Real Estate section.



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17. Matthew Gordon Lasner, “­Behind This Façade: The Generic Condo as a Space of Autonomy,” Insidious Urbanism, Spring 2011, 49. 18. Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity,” 30; Lo, “Con­temporary Chinese Landscapes,” 149. 19. Ley, Millionaire Mi­grants, 144. 20. Ibid., 127–28. 21. West, “Effects of Shopping Center Owner­ship,” 25–27. 22. Sarah Ratchford, “Debunking Assumptions,” Novae Res Urbis 17, no. 1 (February 12, 2014): 1, 5. See John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and Susan Fainstein, Restructuring the City: The Po­liti­cal Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York: Longman, 1983). 23. Arent Greve and Janet  W. Salaff, “Social Network Approach to Understand the Ethnic Economy: A Theoretical Discourse,” GeoJournal 64 (2005): 7–16. 24. Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity,” 20. 25. Marcia Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity: The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Urban and Suburban Greater Toronto” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Planning, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1999), 141, citing Harris Hudema Consulting, “Condominium Retail Experience,” 5. 26. Qadeer, “Ethnic Malls and Plazas,” n.p. 27. Karlene Nation, “Chinatown Receivership Puts Unit ­O wners at Risk,” Toronto Star, July 18, 1992, Business ­Today C1. 28. Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity,” 149. 29. Maureen Murray, “Hong Kong Exodus Transforms Markham,” Toronto Star, February 5, 1995, News A14. 30. Lo and Preston, “Asian Theme Malls,” 182–90. 31. Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity,” 31. 32. See Chicago-­trained sociologist Rose Hum Lee’s study The Chinese in the United States of Amer­i­ca (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960). 33. See Timothy Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, ­ emple University Press, 1994); Huping Ling, Chinese St. Louis: California (Philadelphia: T From Ethnic Enclave to Cultural Community (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2004); and Shenglin Chang, The Global Silicon Valley Home: Lives and Landscapes Within Taiwanese American Trans-­Pacific Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). 34. This history is a summary of David Chuenyan Lai and Jack Leong, Toronto Chinatowns, 1878–2012, Canada Chinatown Series (Vancouver: Chinese Canadian Heritage Fund, 2012), 1–8. 35. Lo, “Con­temporary Chinese Landscapes,” 149–50. 36. Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity,” 32. 37. Ibid., 28. 38. A detailed history of the Bayview Landmark controversy (1994–95) can be found in Lucia Lo and Valerie Preston, “Asian Theme Malls in Suburban Toronto: Land Use Conflict in Richmond Hill,” Canadian Geographer 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 182–90. 39. Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity,” 138. 40. Lo and Preston, “Asian Theme Malls,” 189–90.

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41. Peter Krivel, “Racism Blocks Chinese Malls, Developer Says,” Toronto Star, September 22, 1995, North York/York Region NY1. 42. Ibid. 43. Lo and Preston, “Asian Theme Malls,” 186. 44. Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity,” 166–68. 45. Krivel, “Racism Blocks Chinese Malls,” NY1. 46. Ibid. 47. Krivel, “­Will Bylaws or Market Determine Growth?,” NY1. 48. Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1991); John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 49. Cecilia Chen, “Ethnoburbs and Pacific Mall,” Public 43 (Spring 2011). 50. Chen, 132. ­ ill Be Too Small, 51. John Spears, “Mall in Markham Taste of Hong Kong, Shops W Crowded, Critics Complain,” Toronto Star, June 1, 1995, Business C1. 52. John Winter Associates, “Condominium Retailing in Markham.” 53. Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity,” 164. 54. Zhixi Cecilia Zhuang, “Ethnic Retailing and the Role of Municipal Planning: Four Case Studies in the Greater Toronto Area” (Ph.D. diss., University of Waterloo, Ontario, 2008), 145. 55. Ho Hon Leung and Raymond Lau, “Multiculturalism at Work: Pacific Mall in Toronto as a Case Study,” in Investigating Diversity: Race, Ethnicity, and Beyond, ed. Ho Hon Leung, Raymond Lau, and Sharon Shaw-­McEwen (Yarnton, Oxon, U.K.: Linton Atlantic Books, 2008), 111–20. 56. Spears, “Mall in Markham,” Business C1. 57. Lo, “Con­temporary Chinese Landscapes,” 151. 58. Mr. X (pseudonym of Remington Group realtor), interview by author, June 27, 2014, Markham, Ontario. 59. Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity,” 171. 60. Ibid., 139–40. 61. Ley, Millionaire Mi­grants; Sucheng Chan, The Global Silicon Valley Home: Lives and Landscapes Within Taiwanese American Trans-­Pacific Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). 62. Krivel, “­Will Bylaws or Market Determine Growth?,” NY1. 63. Ibid. 64. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996), 147–59. 65. Zhuang, “Ethnic Retailing,” 165; Wallace, “Planning Amidst Diversity,” 165. 66. Hamida Ghafour, “Scenes from an Ethnic Mall: Ethnic Malls Bring World to Suburbs,” Toronto Star, July 22, 2001, News A1. 67. Wang, “Chinese Commercial Activity,” 30. 68. Ibid. 30–31. 69. This shift in attention was pres­ent in academic, professional, and popu­lar circles. It can also be seen in the shift from urban-­centric texts like Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of ­Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961) to studies of shopping centers, the first suburbs, and exurban developments influenced by the rise of New Urbanism during the early 1990s.



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70. Ratchford, “Debunking Assumptions,” 1. 71. Zhuang, “Ethnic Retailing,” 147. 72. Howard Gillette  Jr., “Assessing James Rouse’s Role in American City Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 65, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 150–67. 73. Zhuang, “Ethnic Retailing,” ­table  7-7, based on CSCA (Center for the Study of Commercial Activity, Ryerson University, Toronto) data. 74. See David Smiley, Pedestrian Modern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and Richard Longstreth, From City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 75. Morris Ketchum Jr., “Shops and the Market Place,” in Stores and Shopping Centers, an Architectural Rec­ord Book, ed. James S. Hornbeck (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1962), 11–23, 18. 76. Vanessa Parlette and Deborah Cowen, “Dead Malls: Suburban Activism, Local Spaces, Global Logistics,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no.  4 (July 2011): 794–811, 796. 77. Ibid., 802. 78. Candace Rice, “Carts, Kiosks, and Compromises,” Shopping Center World 31, no. 2 (February 2002): 56. 79. Ibid. 80. Magdalena Barros Nock, “ Swap Meets and Socioeconomic Alternatives for Mexican Immigrants: The Case of the San Joaquin Valley,” ­Human Organ­ization 68, no.  3 (October 2009): 307–17. ­ aters,” Las Vegas Business Press 10, 81. Gloria Savko, “Swap Meets: A Chance to Test the W no. 23 (July 26, 1993): 7. 82. Based on a conversation with Matthew G. Lasner, who noted the development of office building cooperative plans in Washington, D.C. Phone interview with author, January 23, 2014. 83. Kinnard and Messner wrote explic­itly about the difficulty of ethnic minority retailers obtaining leases in mainstream shopping centers. Kinnard and Messner, “Obtaining Competitive Locations,” 26. 84. Light and Gold, Ethnic Economies, 28–39. 85. Ley, Millionaire Mi­grants, 129–30, citing P. Mendez, D. Hiebert, and E. Wyly, “Landing at Home: Insights on Immigration and Metropolitan Housing Markets from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15, no. 2 (2006): 82–105. 86. Paul Davis, “ ‘Retail Condominium’ Latest ­Thing from Bristol,” Providence Journal (R.I.), January 11, 1988, B13. 87. Dorman, “Office Condos Offer Benefits,” n.p. 88. Gary Washburn, “Retailers, Wanting to Own the Store, Take Malls Condo,” Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1982, B1. 89. Davis, “Next Phase of Condo Craze,” discusses the benefits of the shopping center condo version, and John Holusha, “The Lure of Converting Retail Space to Condos: ­Doing So Is a Way of Raising Cash When It’s Harder to Get a Loan,” New York Times, December 6, 1998, 512, focuses on apartment co-­ops seeking nonconventional means of refinancing. 90. A ware­house and retail condo, Cherry Lane Business Park, developed in Laurel, ­Virginia, by J. Webb in 1990 (“In the Business,” Washington Post, January 27, 1990, F5), and a home design center, Design Mart, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, developed by the Rifkin Group in

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2001 (Roger  A. Gribble, “Retail Condo Concept Nears Real­ity,” Wisconsin State Journal, February 22, 2001, F1), are just two of many examples found in business reporting in this period. 91. Washburn, “Retailers,” B1. 92. Dan Sorenson, “East Broadway Strip Mall Seeks Identity, Prosperity,” Arizona Daily Star, August  26, 2009, http://­tucson​.­com​/­business​/­east​-­broadway​-­strip​-­mall​-­seeks​-­identity​ -­prosperity​/­a rticle​_­6fbc91cc​-­e4b8​-­5ae8​-­a 4d2​-­0b71faebc6db​.­html. 93​.­­“W&M Properties Eyes More Retail Condos,” Real Estate and Investment 3, no.  28 (July 21, 1997): 5. 94. See Longstreth, From City Center to Regional Mall; and David Smiley, Pedestrian Modern. On the history and legacy of pedestrian malls as urban panacea, see Michael Cheyne, “No Better Way? The Kalamazoo Mall and the Legacy of Pedestrian Malls,” Michigan Historical Review 36, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 103–28. 95. Holusha, “Converting Retail Space,” 512. 96. On foreign investment in postindustrial American downtowns, see Julian Brash, “Downtown as Land: Urban Elites and Neoliberal Development in Con­temporary New York City,” in Global Downtowns, ed. Gary McDonogh and Marina Peterson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 253–72. 97. David W. Dunlap, “Retail Condominiums: For the Premier Locations, the Price Is Commensurate,” New York Times, July 7, 1991, A9. 98. Erica Stephens, “Retail Condos Snapped Up in International Village,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, September 7, 1998, Focus 17. 99. Ibid. 100. Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villa­gers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Sarah Lopez, The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 101. Angela Kryhul, “Retail Condos Snapped Up in Shopping Malls,” Globe and Mail, September 30, 2013, Special Report on Business, http://­w ww​.­theglobeandmail​.­com​/­report​-­on​ -­b usiness​ /­i ndustry​ -­n ews​ /­property​ -­r eport ​ /­r etail​ -­c ondos​ -­s napped​ -­u p​ -­i n​ -­s hopping​ -­m alls​ /­a rticle14607866​/­. 102​.­­Mark D. Uehling, “An Asian Mall in the G ­ reat Midwest: Arlington Heights, Illinois; Yaohan Plaza,” American Demographics, May 1, 1994, 36. 103. Kryhul, “Retail Condos Snapped Up.” 104. Lease rates in comparable Mississauga shopping centers are based on the real estate site Loopnet, accessed February  28, 2014, http://­w ww​.­loopnet​.­c om​/­Intl​/­C anada ​/­Ontario​ /­Mississauga​_­Retail​-­Space​/­. 105​.­­Kryhul, “Retail Condos Snapped Up.” 106. David Fleming, “Commercial/Retail Condo Space,” Toronto Realty Blog, October 25, 2011, Business, http://­torontorealtyblog​.­com​/­a rchives​/­5839. 107​.­­Chen, “Ethnoburbs and Pacific Mall,” 130. 108. Mr. Y, interview by author, June 27, 2014, Toronto, Ontario. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Amanda Persico, “Planned Asian Mall Opens Pre­sen­ta­tion Centre,” Markham Economist and Sun, March  28, 2013, http://­w ww​.­yorkregion​.­c om​/­news​-­story​/­2516372​-­planned​ -­a sian​-­mall​-­opens​-­presentation​-­centre​/­.



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112​.­­Remington Centre website, accessed September 27, 2013, http://­w ww​.­remington​cen​ tre​.­ca. 113​.­­Orly Linovski, “Beyond Aesthetics: Assessing the Value of Strip Mall Retail in Toronto,” Journal of Urban Design 17, no. 1 (February 2012): 81–99, 83. 114. Ibid., 91. 115. Longstreth, From City Center to Regional Mall, 336–40. 116. Eric Muhlebach and Richard Muhlebach, “The ‘Malling’ of American Retail,” Journal of Property Management 78, no. 3 (May/June 2013): 22–25. 117. Greve and Salaff, “Social Network Approach,” 7–16. 118. Leung and Lau, “Multiculturalism at Work,” 117. 119. Gary McDonogh and Cindy Wong, “Beside Downtown: Global Chinatowns,” in McDonogh and Peterson, Global Downtowns, 294. 120. McDonogh and Wong focus on entanglements between urban Chinatowns and central districts in ibid., 294. 121. Interview with Mr. Y, June 27, 2014. 122. Mr. Z (pseudonym of a Chinese businessman who operates primarily in Lima, Peru, but has purchased retail condos in Markham’s King Square), interview by author, June 10, 2014, Toronto, Ontario. 123. Krivel, “­Will Bylaws or Market Determine Growth?,” NY1. 124. Vanessa Lu, “Hong Kong, Canada,” Toronto Star, November 10, 1996, Context B1. 125. Tony Wong, “Democracy ­Will Come, Hong Kong Leader Says,” Toronto Star, April 28, 1996, News A14. 126. Lu, “Hong Kong, Canada,” B1. 127. Doug Ward, “The New Chinatown: Mall Style,” Vancouver (B.C.) Sun, February 26, 2000, F1. 128. In 2013 Richmond resident Kerry Starchuck proposed a bylaw amendment requiring En­glish on all business signs in a city over 50 ­percent ethnic Chinese. The city voted against the proposal in 2015 ­because ­legal advisers argued the bylaw would violate Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Vincent Matak, “Richmond, B.C., Seeking Language Enforcer to Remedy Chinese-­Only Signs,” Globe and Mail, December 14, 2015, http://­w ww​.­theglobeandmail​ .­com​/­news​/­british​-­columbia​/­richmond​-­bc​-­seeking​-­language​-­enforcer​-­to​-­remedy​-­chinese​-­only​ -­signs​/­article27754314​/­.

Chapter 7 1​.­­ Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-­Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 5. 2. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 150. 3. Villa, Barrio-­Logos. See also Michelle Habell-­Pallán, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popu­lar Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 4. Victor M. Valle and Rudolfo D. Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22. 5. The terms “compadres” describes relationships among Mexicans and Mexican Americans that may or may not be familial, and, in the case of immigrants, are not. They are

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often a product of confianza, or social “trust” networks, that are a result of the common experiences of immigrants and the need to look a­ fter one another in a hostile land. They are, in many ways, “fictive” kinships that nevertheless provide the comfort and protection of an extended f­ amily. For more, see Robert Alvarez’s classic study, Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1880–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 58. 6. Eric Avila, Popu­lar Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 13; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White ­People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1998). For a brilliant example of how suburbanization influenced racial politics in the Bay Area, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Strug­gle for Postwar Oakland (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003). ­ aces, Changing Places: Mapping South7. James P. Allen and Eugene Turner, Changing F ern Californians (Northridge, Calif.: Center for Geo­graph­i­cal Studies, 2002), 48–49, 55. 8. The Claremont University Consortium that manages shared resources among the seven colleges was born in 1925, based on the Oxford-­Cambridge model, whereby a group of small, distinctive colleges would share a library and other utilities that would equal the facilities of one g­ reat university. The colleges initially planned to add at least one campus per de­cade to Pomona College, which was founded in 1887. They began with two in the 1920s—­ the Claremont Gradu­ate School in 1925, and Scripps, an all-­women’s college, in 1926—­but ran into financial challenges in the 1930s with the ­Great Depression. They resumed their expansion plans in 1946 with Claremont Men’s College (­later renamed Claremont McKenna College), followed by Harvey Mudd College in 1955, and Pitzer College in 1963. Due to financial and spatial limitations, the colleges added only one more campus, Keck Gradu­ate Institute, in 1997. “History of the Claremont Colleges,” Claremont University Consortium, last updated April 1, 2016, http://­w ww​.­cuc​.­claremont​.­edu ​/­aboutcuc​/­history​.­a sp. 9​.­­“History of Oldenborg Center,” Pomona College, accessed January  24, 2015, https://­ www​.­pomona​.­edu​/­administration​/­oldenborg​-­center​/­about​/­history. 10​.­­“Enrollment Statistics,” Claremont McKenna College, accessed January  24, 2015, http://­w ww​.­cmc​.­edu​/­ir​/­enrollment​/­. 11​.­­ Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988). Kincaid’s discussion of British and American colonization in Antigua articulates conditions that are familiar to barrio residents in Southern California. 12. Valle and Torres, Latino Metropolis, 23. Valle and Torres write, “A key f­actor in this pro­cess of economic gerrymandering was each municipality’s ability to create and protect its strategic economic assets.” For Claremont, their primary economic asset for the last fifty years has been higher education. 13. A. K. Sandoval-­Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban Amer­i­ca,” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (2014): 804–31. 14. Johnny Dominguez, interviewed by the author, Claremont, California, July 6, 2004. 15. Ibid. 16. Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, ­Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1; Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 84–112. 17. Bob Herman, interview by the author, Claremont, California, July 14, 2004. 18. David Garcia, interview by the author, Upland, California, July 6, 2004.



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19. Interview with Herman. ­ reat American Cities (1961; New York: Vintage 20. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of G Books, 1992), 257. 21. Ibid., 259. 22. Ibid., 267. 23. Ibid., 263. 24. Bob Herman, Memo to Mr. Richard Malcolm, City Man­ag­er, Claremont, “Regarding: The East Barrio of Claremont,” February 17, 1964, 5, author’s private collection. 25. Interview with Herman. 26. Ibid. 27. “Our Parish History,” Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Community, accessed February 22, 2014, http://­w ww​.­olaclaremont​.­org​/­cgi​-­bin​/­complex2​/­showPage​.­plx​?­pid​=­64. 28​.­­Bob Herman, Memo to Mr. Richard Malcolm, 5. 29. Jacobs, ­Great American Cities, 259. 30. Marciano Martínez, interview by the author, July 13, 2004, La Brea, California. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Interview with Dominguez. 36. Michael Rothman, assistant trea­surer of Claremont Men’s College, to Jennifer Jaffe, August 23, 1977, author’s private collection. 37. Jennifer Jaffe, interview by the author, June 19, 2004, Claremont, California. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Jack Stark, interview by the author, January 11, 2005, Claremont, California. ­ attles College’s Expan41. Jim Woller, quoted in Sam Hall Kaplan, “A Neighborhood B sion Plans,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1982. 42. Judy Wright, Claremont: A Pictorial History (Claremont, Calif.: Claremont Historical Resources, 1999), 359. 43. Collette Weinberg, “Arbol Verde: The Evolution of One of Claremont’s Founding Neighborhoods,” Claremont Courier Almanac, 2015–2016, 23–27. 44. Interview with Stark. 45. Ibid. 46. Marcia Goldstein, community liaison officer, City of Claremont, to Jennifer Jaffe, May 1982, author’s private collection. 47. Kaplan, “A Neighborhood ­Battles College’s Expansion Plans.” 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Interview with Dominguez. 52. Interview with Herman. 53. Marilyn B. Noble, letter to the editor, Claremont Courier, April 17, 1982. 54. Interview with Dominguez. 55. Interview with Stark. 56. Ibid.

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57. Interview with Dominguez. 58. Interview with Jaffe. 59. ­Human Ser­vices Department, City of Claremont, “History of El Barrio Park,” private collection. 60. “Barrio Park: What’s in a Name?,” Claremont Courier, October 20, 1991. 61. Final Environmental Impact Report, Arbol Verde Specific Plan (Long Beach, California: BCL Associates, January 1987). 62. Sam Hall Kaplan, “Requiem for a Claremont Neighborhood,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1990. 63. Interview with Dominguez. 64. Teresa Watanabe and Carla Rivera, “Amid Racial Bias Protests, Claremont McKenna Dean Resigns,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2015, http://­w ww​.­latimes​.­com​/­local​/­lanow​/­la​ -­me​-­ln​-­claremont​-­marches​-­20151112​-­story​.­html. 65​.­­Teresa Watanabe and Larry Godon, “Claremont MeKenna College Students Embrace a Lesson in Activism,” Los Angeles Times, November  13, 2015; Tyler Kingkade, “Claremont McKenna Students Say Protests Against Racism Have Gotten out of Hand,” Huffington Post, November 17, 2015; Sarah Brown and Katherine Mangan, “Torn over Tactics: Activists Refine Their Demands as Protests over Racism Spread,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 24, 2015. A ju­nior and son of Chinese and Filipino parents, Nathaniel Tsai, led a countermovement to question the tactics pursued by some of his fellow students. Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2015.

Chapter 8 This research was funded by the Research Grant Initiative at the University of Wisconsin–­ Milwaukee. I thank the research fellows and Director Richard A. Grusin at the Center for 21st ­Century Studies, University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee, for their support, suggestions, and comments on this chapter. My sincere gratitude goes to Andrew K. Sandoval-­Strausz and Nancy Kwak for their editorial support and thoughtful comments and to the participants at the “Transnational Cities: Past into Pres­ent” symposium at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, March 28–29, 2014. 1. The Konkani Bible is the translation of the New Testament into the Konkani language. “First Konkani Version of Bible in Roman Script Released,” One India News, June 5, 2006, http://­news​.­oneindia​.­in​/­2 006​/­06​/­05​/­fi rst​-­konkani​-­version​-­of​-­bible​-­in​-­roman​-­script​-­released​ -­1149491699​.­html. 2​.­­I have used the terms “South Asian” and “Indian” to talk about the immigrant ­community in this narrative. “South Asian” is more of an umbrella term used to refer to im­ ecause of this region’s colonial migrants originating from the South Asian subcontinent. B past, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India ­were part of a unified British India before 1947. Many within the historic South Asian diaspora trace their origins back to British India. However, I use the term “Indian” to refer to immigrants from the con­temporary nation-­state of India. 3. On transnationalism, see Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-­ Szanton, eds., ­Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Acad­emy of Sciences, 1992); Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural



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Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 6–23; Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration to the United States: ­Family Relations in the Development of a Transnational Mi­grant Cir­cuit” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1989). 4. Annis  W. Sengupta, “Politics on Parade: Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Chicago, Illinois” (Ph.D. diss., Urban and Regional Studies, Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, 2012), 17. 5. Ibid., 304. 6. Ibid., 269. 7. Ibid., 275. 8. Ibid., 289. 9. David Harvey explains the new informational and ser­vice economy, where money, goods, and information travel large distances with ease and speed. Global money transfer companies such as Moneydart and Western Union target immigrants as their perfect customers. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York: Wiley-­Blackwell, 1991). 10. Research on ethnic marketplaces is categorized as scholarship of ethnic enterprise. See, for example, Ivan H. Light, Ethnic Enterprise in Amer­i­ca: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japa­nese, and Blacks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Ivan H. Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Roger Waldinger, Howard Aldrich, and Robin Ward, Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Business in Industrial Society (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990). 11. Irv Loundy, interview by author, Chicago, June 2013; Trudy Turner, interview by author, Skokie, Illinois, March 2010. In author’s possession. 12. Arijit Sen, “Transcultural Place-­Making: Intertwined Spaces of Sacred and Secular on Devon Ave­nue, Chicago,” in Transcultural Cities: Border Crossing and Placemaking, ed. Jeff Hou (New York: Routledge, 2012), 19–33. 13. ­These conversations and interviews ­were part of a neighborhood workshop titled “The Devon Ave­nue Needs Assessment: A Smart Growth Strategy,” or­ga­nized by West Rogers Park Community Organ­ization and South Asian American Policy and Research Institute, at the Indo American Community Center, Chicago, June  19, 2008; Amie Zander, West Ridge Chamber of Commerce, interview by author, Chicago, May 2013; Ann Lata Kalayil, Padma Rangaswamy, and K. Sujata, Developing Devon: Creating a Strategic Plan for Economic Growth Through Community Consensus (Chicago: South Asian American Policy and Research Institute, 2008). 14. Adam Langer’s novel describes growing up on California Ave­nue in 1979 and discusses the geo­graph­i­cal divide between the upper-­middle-­class and lower-­middle-­class Jewish families living in Rogers Park. Adam Langer, Crossing California (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004). 15. Mafat Patel, Susan Patel, and Jayant Sukhadia, interviews by author, Chicago, May 2013. In author’s possession. 16. J. B. Jackson, “The Accessible Landscape,” in Landscape in Sight, ed. Helen L. Horo­witz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 68–77; J. B. Jackson, “Roads Belong in the Landscape,” in Horo­witz, Landscape in Sight, 249–254; John A. Jakle, “Landscapes Redesigned for the Automobile,” in The Making of the American Landscape, ed. Michael P. Conzen (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 293–310. 17. Wei Li, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban Amer­i­ca (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

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18. Many new South Asian Muslim residents work low-­paid, unstable jobs, but not all. For instance, I interviewed skilled plumbers who cannot find better-­paid work due to their limited En­glish and unstable immigration status. The exact numbers of Muslim immigrants is not easy to find except in the membership rolls of local cultural and religious bodies that in the recent po­liti­cal climate are difficult to obtain. GB/5/09; AZ/2/09, MH/2/09 [names ­suppressed due to Institutional Review Board requirements] interviews by author, Chicago, October, 2009; Syed Mohammed Jalaluddin Murtaza interview by Salman Hussain, Chicago, January 2016. In author’s possession. 19. Urban designers call this the urban grain. See Anne Vernez Moudon, Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); Anne Vernez Moudon, “Getting to Know the Built Landscape: Typomorphology,” in Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design, ed. Karen A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994), 289–314. 20. S. M. Krishna, “India Calls for Security Council Expansion,” India Review 8, no. 10 (October 1, 2012): 3–7. 21. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Sarah Lynn Lopez, “The Remittance House: Architecture of Migration in Rural Mexico,” Buildings and Landscapes 17 (Fall 2010): 33–52; Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (New York: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2000); Françoise Lionnet and Shu-­mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Rafael Perez-­Torres, “Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje,” in Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 317–38. 22. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Part 1: The Body,” in Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1995), 207–42. 23. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Par­tic­u­lar History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992). 24. Michelle Puetz, “Keywords Glossary,” Theories of Media, University of Chicago, Winter 2002, http://­c smt​.­uchicago​.­edu​/­glossary2004​/­mimesis​.­htm#​_ ­f tn17. 25​.­­See also V. S Naipaul, The Mimic Men (New York: Vintage, 2001); and Homi  K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 126. 26. My use of the term “mimicry” in this context may hark back to the concept of double-­consciousness, an internal conflict experienced by the Indian immigrant whose sense of self-­identify is framed within the context of a British colonial past as well as his current subordinate position within the United States. W. E. B. Du Bois defined double-­consciousness for African Americans in the following way: “One ever feels his two-­ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 3. A complicated sense of self allows Indian immigrants to move, often unselfconsciously, between multiple identities and subject positions as per the demands of the immediate situation. 27. Tanya  L. Chartrand and John  A. Bargh, “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-­ Behavior Link and Social Interaction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy­chol­ogy 76, no. 6 (1999): 893. 28. Nigel Rapport, “Mi­grant Selves and Ste­reo­t ypes: Personal Context in a Postmodern World,” in Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 1995), 279.



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29. Samuel Kinser and Norman Magden, Carnival, American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Kathleen O’Reilly and ­ abor Day Parades,” Michael E. Crutcher, “Parallel Politics: The Spatial Power of New Orleans’ L Social and Cultural Geography 7, no. 2 (April 2006): 245–65. 30. Paul Connerton, “Bodily Practices,” in How Socie­ties Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 88. Although Connerton does not say so explic­itly, his work can be related to theoretical work by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre-­Félix Guattari, Baruch Spinoza, and Henri Bergson. See Patricia Ticineto Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–2. 31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 165. 32. Mike Sula, “Paleteria Jalisco,” Chicago Reader, 2014, http://­w ww​.­chicagoreader​.­com​ /­chicago​/­paleteriajalisco​/­L ocation​?­oid​=­1025437. 33​.­­ Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). 34. Miles Richardson, “Being-­in-­t he-­Market Versus Being-­in-­t he-­Plaza: Material Culture and the Construction of Social Real­ity in Spanish Amer­i­ca,” in The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, ed. Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-­Zuniga (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 74–91. 35. Norah Zuniga Shaw, “Introduction: The Dance,” Synchronous Objects: For One Flat ­Thing, Reproduced, by William Forsythe, March  2009, http://­synchronousobjects​.­osu​.­edu​ /­blog​/­introductory​-­essays​-­for​-­synchronous​-­objects​/­. 36​.­­Victor Turner, “Frame, Floe and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality,” Japa­nese Journal of Religious Studies 6, no. 4 (December 1979): 465–99. 37. Kathleen Bubinas, “Gandhi Marg: The Social Construction and Production of an Ethnic Economy in Chicago,” City and Society 17 (December 2005): 161–79; Padma Rangaswamy, Namaste Amer­i­ca: Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). For a discussion of activities in the Indo American Center, see Sharmila Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 38. By its stark juxtaposition, this event gave us a glimpse of a community of low-­income South Asian Muslims who live in this neighborhood. For a description of new spaces that deal with the unique needs of the Muslim residents in this neighborhood, see my work on base­ ese spaces are generally invisible to t­ hose who are not part ment mosques and prayer spaces. Th of the in-­group. See Sen, “Transcultural Place-­Making”; and Arijit Sen, “Evaluating Lived Landscapes and Quotidian Architecture of Muslim Devon,” in Homogenization of Repre­sen­ta­ tions: The Aga Khan Award for Architecture Knowledge Construction Workshop II, ed. Modjtaba Sadria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 175–95. 39. Especially influential was Herbert Gans, The Urban Villa­gers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-­Americans (New York: ­Free Press, 1962). 40. See, for example, social media accounts of “­Little India” on websites such as Trip Advisor, Chicagomag​.­com, timeout​.­com, and travel blog sites: “Chicago’s ­Little India and Pakistan: Review of Devon Ave­nue,” TripAdvisor, accessed January  21, 2017, https://­w ww​ .­t ripadvisor​.­c om​/­A ttraction ​_ ­R eview​-­g 35805​-­d 1217399​-­R eviews​-­D evon ​_ ­Avenue​- ­C hicago​ _­Illinois​.­html#REVIEWS; Victoria Lautman, “A Guide to Devon Ave­nue,” Chicago, January  5, 2011, http://­w ww​.­chicagomag​.­com​/­Chicago​-­Magazine​/­January​-­2011​/­Guide​-­to​-­Devon​ -­Avenue​-­in​-­Chicago​/­; “­Little India/Devon Ave­nue,” Big Shoulders Atlas (blog), February 11, 2013, http://­bigshouldersatlas​.­blogspot​.­c om​/­2 013​/­0 2​/­l ittle​-­i ndiadevon​-­avenue​.­html; Lisa

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Ghisolf, “Tour Devon Ave­nue and L ­ ittle India in an After­noon,” Time Out Blog, May 5, 2015, http://­w w w​.­t imeout​.­c om​/­c hicago​/­b log ​/­t our​-­d evon​-­a venue​-­a nd​-­l ittle​-­i ndia​-­i n​-­a n​ -­a fternoon. The term “geographies of exclusion” is used by David Sibley to look at social construction of difference in space. However, in the case of Devon Ave­nue (and I ­will argue this is true in any enclave), ­t here exists internal in-­group diversity. In addition, residents who come from other cultural backgrounds may be a minority but they play an impor­tant role within the life of ­these neighborhoods. Melvin  M. Webber’s term “community without propinquity” adds a reference to the existence of social networks and dispersed locales within the cultural landscape of immigrants that exists beyond the bound­a ries of the ethnic enclave. See David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Melvin M. Webber, “Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity,” in Cities and Space, ed. Lowdon Wingo Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 23–56. 41. Padma Rangaswamy, “Devon Ave­nue: A World Market,” in The New Chicago: A ­Social and Cultural Analy­sis, ed. John P. Koval, Larry Bennett, Michael I. J. Bennett, Fassil ­ emple University Press, Demissie, Roberta Garner, and Kiljoong Kim (Philadelphia: T 2006), 222. 42. J. Mark Schuster, “Ephemera, Temporary Urbanism, and Imaging,” Cultural Policy Center, University of Chicago, accessed January 3, 2016, https://­culturalpolicy​.­uchicago​ .­edu​/­sites​/­culturalpolicy​.­uchicago​.­edu​/­fi les​/­schuster​-­ephemera​.­pdf. 43​.­­ Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “trans-­, prefix,” accessed January  21, 2017, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com​/­view​/­Entry​/­204575​?­rskey​=­f MkqUl&result​=­3. 44​.­­Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture.’ ” 45. See also Ulf Hannerz, “Notes on the Global Ecumene,” Public Culture 1, no.  2 (Spring 1989): 66–75; and Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7, no. 2 (June 1990): 295–310. 46. The “transnational turn” generated certain epistemological innovations that influenced historians who study immigrant landscapes. See Wilbur Zelinsky and Brett  A. Lee, “Heterolocalism: An Alternative Model of the Sociospatial Behaviour of Immigrant Ethnic Communities,” International Journal of Popu­lar Geography 4 (December 1998): 1; and Wei Li, “Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles,” Urban Studies 35 (1998): 470–501. 47. Lopez, “The Remittance House”; Smith, Transnational Urbanism. 48. For more on this emerging ethnic geography, see Valerie Preston and Lucia Lo, “Ethnic Enclaves in Multicultural Cities: New Retailing Patterns and New Planning Dilemmas,” Plan Canada 49 (2009): 72–74. 49. As scholars focused on interconnected geographies that straddled national borders, some advocated multisited analy­sis. See Arif Dirlik, What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); and Ong, Flexible Citizenship.

Chapter 9 I would like to thank Nancy Kwak and Andrew Sandoval-­Strausz for encouraging me to think deliberately about the issue of transnational urbanism. Christian Topalov and Charlotte Vorms have deepened my appreciation for words. Nancy and Andrew, together with Andrew Harris,



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Pierre-­Yves Saunier, Emily Skop, and Charlotte Vorms, commented on an earlier draft. I also owe a thank-­you to several scholars for their assistance in confirming or clarifying word usages in Britain (Richard Dennis), Cairo (Salwa Ismael and Karl Schmidt), and India (Solly Benjamin, Narayani Gupta, Shubhra Gururani, Andrew Harris, Mathew Idiculla, Rafia ­K azim, Tony King, Shail Mayaram, Janaki Nair, Bimal Patel, Ananya Roy, Annapurna Shaw, Sahana Udupa, and Sanjeev Vidyarthi). The financial support of the Global Suburbanism proj­ ect, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is gratefully acknowledged. 1. Rafael Pizarro, Liang Wei, and Tridib Banerjee, “Agencies of Globalisation and Third World Urban Form,” Journal of Planning Lit­er­a­ture 18, no. 2 (2003): 111–30; Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organ­ization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Robert Redfield and M. S. Singer, “The Cultural Role of Cities,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 3 (1954): 53–73; Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 174–83. 2. The pres­ent study is most directly inspired by a proj­ect, directed by Christian Topalov, that resulted in a unique thesaurus, published in French, that surveys the common words in seven languages that are used to describe the parts of cities. Christian Topalov, Laurent Coudroy de Lille, Jean-­Charles Depaule, and Brigitte Marin, eds., L’aventure des mots de la ville: À travers le temps, les langues, les sociétés (Paris: Laffont, 2010). Some background studies that ­were not included in the final publication are available on the web. ­These include surveys of words used in northern India. See Denis Vidal and Narayani Gupta, “Urban Vocabulary in Northern India”; Amitabh Kundu and Somnath Basu, “Words and Concepts in Urban Development and Planning in India”; and Amitabh Kundu, “Stigmatization and Urban Pro­ cesses in India: An Analy­sis of Terminology with Special Reference to Slum Situations,” in Les mots de la ville, cahier 4, Inde du Nord/Northern India (Aix-­en-­Provence, France: Maison Méditerranéenne de Sciences de l’Homme, December 1999), 7–22, 23–32, and 33–40, http://­ unesdoc​.­unesco​.­org​/­images​/­0011​/­001191​/­119144mo​.­pdf (accessed March 10, 2014). For a brief summary see Yves Grafmeyer, “City Words: An Invitation to Travel,” Metropolitics 13 July 2011, http://­w ww​.­metropolitiques​.­eu​/­City​-­Words​-­A n​-­Invitation​-­to​-­Travel​.­html. See also Christian Topalov, ed., Les Divisions de la Ville (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002); Anthony D. King, The Bungalow. The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Raymond Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976). With Charlotte Vorms, I am currently editing a collection of essays that explore the manner in which residents in cities around the world refer to the urban fringe. 3. Pierre-­Yves Saunier, “Learning by ­Doing: Notes About the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History,” Journal of Modern Eu­ro­pean History 6, no. 2 (2008): 171, 173; Akira Iriye and Pierre-­Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Rafia Kazim, “Subverting the Rules of Grammar: Is Kolaveri di the Subalterns’ En­glish?,” En­glish ­Today 114, vol. 29, no. 2 (2013): 27–32; Sahana Udupa, “Desire and Demo­cratic Visibility: News Media’s Twin Avatar in Urban India,” Media Culture Society 34 (2012): 880–97. 4. In an influential statement, for example, Manuel Castells once claimed that what he calls the “space of flows” destroys social meaning, leaving open the question w ­ hether anything is left. Manuel Castells, The Informational City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 349. More typically, as several writers have noted, scholars have simply overlooked this dimension. See David Ley,

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“Transnational Spaces and Everyday Lives,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29 (2004): 151–64; J. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstruction (London: Sage, 2001); and Richard Harris, “Development and Hybridity Made Concrete in the Colonies,” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 15–36. 5. Peggy Levitt and Sanjeev Khagram, eds., The Transnationalism Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (New York: Routledge, 2008), 12; Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Levitt and Khagram, Transnationalism Reader, 53; Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City: Inquiries ­Toward an Urban Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 283; Hannerz, Cultural Complexity; Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections (London: Routledge, 1996), 22–23; Pieterse, Development Theory, 71; J. Nederveen Pieterse, Globalisation and Culture: Global Melange (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 54; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth ­Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 24; Harris, “Development and Hybridity.” Pierre-­Yves Saunier mentions the circulation of words in passing in his Transnational History (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 63. A proj­ect that (coincidentally?) riffs on Appadurai’s epigram is reported in Carol Gluck and Anna L. Tsing, eds., Words in Motion: ­Towards a Global Lexicon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). Unfortunately, the editors do not take the opportunity to link their approach to the lit­er­a­tures on transnationalism or globalization. 6. Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes”; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “A Small History of Subaltern Studies,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 467–85; Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007); Hannerz, Transnational Connections; Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1475–90; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-­colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 3 (1996): 349; Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xviii; Ashis Nandy, The Intimate ­Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self ­Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 63; Bernard  S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1996), 16. 7. Urban social scientists, especially, have shown a strong interest in economic forces, coupled with theory. See, for example, Neil Brenner and Roger Keil, The Global Cities Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006); Castells, Informational City; Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (New York: Routledge, 2006); Ananya Roy, “The 21st ­Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory,” Regional Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 819– 30; and Smith, Transnational Urbanism. 8. For a dated but still useful survey, see Alan Smart and Josephine Smart, “Urbanisation and the Global Perspective,” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 263–85; Gordon Mathews, Gustavo L. Ribeiro, and Carlos A. Vega, Globalisation from Below: The World’s Other Economy (London: Routledge, 2012); and Shail Mayaram, ed., The Other Global City (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2009). For perceptive discussions, see Ley, “Transnational Spaces”; and Alan Mabin, “Grounding Southern City Theory in Time and Place,” in Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield (London: Routledge, 2014), 21–36. 9. This truism is easily illustrated. I am most familiar with discussions within the discipline of geography and the related subfield of urban morphology. See, for example, Maria-­Dolors



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Garcia-­R amon, “Globalisation and International Geography: The Question of Languages and Scholarly Traditions,” Pro­gress in ­Human Geography 27, no. 1 (2003): 1–5; Rob Kitchin, “Disrupting and Destabilizing Anglo-­A merican and English-­L anguage Hegemony in Geography,” Social and Cultural Geography 6, no. 1 (2005): 1–15; John Short, Armando Boniche, Yeong Kim, and Patrick Li Li, “Cultural Globalisation, Global En­glish and Geography Journals,” Professional Geographer 53, no. 1 (2001): 1–11; and J. W. R. Whitehand, “Issues in Urban Morphology,” Urban Morphology 16, no. 1 (2012): 55–65. 10. Alan Mayne, “A Just War: The Language of Slum Repre­sen­ta­tion in Twentieth-­ Century Australia,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 1 (1995): 75–107; Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language ­Matter?,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–713. 11. Kundu, “Stigmatization,” 39; Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Environment and Urbanisation 13, no. 2 (2002): 23–43; Pushpa Arabindoo, “Rhe­toric of the ‘Slum’: Rethinking Urban Poverty,” City 15, no. 6 (2011): ­ egal Discourse B ­ ehind Delhi’s Slum De­mo­li­ 636–46; D. Asher Ghertner, “Analy­sis of New L tions,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 43, no. 20 (2008): 57–66; D. Asher Ghertner, “Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle-­Class Discourses of Slum-­Free Delhi,” Antipode 44, no. 4 (2012): 1161–87; Barbara Harriss-­W hite, Wendy Olsen, Penny Vera-­Sanso, and V. Suresh, “Multiple Shocks and Slum House­hold Economies in South India,” Economy and Society 42, no. 3 (2013): 398–429; Vyjayanthi Rao, “Slum as Theory: The South/Asian City and Globalization,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 1 (2006): 225–32; Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Ur­ ere are some parallels with colonias, as ban and Regional Research 35, no. 2 (2011): 223–38. Th used in the United States. Vinit Mukhija and Paavo Monkkonen, “What’s in a Name? A Critique of ‘Colonias’ in the United States,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 2 (2007): 475–88. 12. Robert McCrum, Globish: How En­glish Became the World’s Language (Toronto: Anchor, 2010); David Crystal, En­glish as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alistair Pennycook, En­glish and the Discourse of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1998). 13. “The En­glish Empire,” Schumpeter, Economist, February 15, 2014. ­ ings with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer14. John L. Austin, How to Do Th sity Press, 1962); Williams, Keywords. 15. Anthony King, “Postcolonialism and Planning: Where Has It Been? Where Is It ­Going?,” in Learning Civil Socie­ties: Shifting Contexts for Demo­cratic Planning and Governance, ed. Penny Gurstein and Leonora Angeles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 51. 16. Christian Topalov, “City Words: An Experiment and a Thesaurus” (paper presented at Columbia University, New York, November 5, 2009), 7. To my knowledge, this paper is unavailable online, but I have a personal copy. See also Christian Topalov, “Plaza,” in Topalov et al., L’aventure, 939–46. 17. Braj  B. Kuchru, “En­glish in South Asia,” in The Cambridge History of the En­glish Language, vol. 1, En­glish in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development, ed. Robert Burchfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 532; Kundu and Basu, “Words and Concepts,” 25; Cohn, Colonialism, 16–56; Ivor Lewis, Sahibs, Nawabs and Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of the Words of Anglo India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30–32. 18. R. E. Hawkins, Common Indian Words in En­glish (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); Kundu, “Stigmatization”; Kundu and Basu, “Words and Concepts,” 27, 30; Lewis, Sahibs;

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George Clifford Whitworth, An Anglo-­Indian Dictionary (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1885); Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-­Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-­Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geo­graph­i­cal and Discursive (1886; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968). Vidal and Gupta suggest that basti should be translated as quar­tier or “neighborhood,” but this is incorrect, or at the very least imprecise. Although invaluable and groundbreaking, this trilingual glossary offers only approximate equivalents. Vidal and Gupta, “Urban Vocabulary.” 19. Rose Nash, “Aspects of Spanish-­English Bilingualism and Language Mixture in Puerto Rico,” in Linguistics at the Crossroads, ed. A. Makkai, V. B. Makkai and L. Heilman (Lake Bluff, Ill.: Jupiter, 1977), 214; Tej K. Bhatia, “En­glish in Advertising: Multiple Mixing and Media,” World En­glishes 6, no. 1 (1987): 33–48. 20. Richard Harris, “Meaningful Types in a World of Suburbs,” in Suburbanization in Global Society: Research in Urban Sociology, vol. 10, ed. Mark Clapson and Ray Hutchison (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald, 2010), 15–47; James Moore, “Making Cairo Modern? Innovation, Urban Form and the Development of Suburbia, c. 1880–1922,” Urban History 41, no. 1 (2014): 81–104; Mona Harb and Jean-­Charles Depaule, “Dâhiya,” in Topalov et al., L’aventure, 412–16; Salwa Ismael, personal email communication, June 21, 2013; Karl Schmid, personal email communication, April 12, 2011. Ismael suggests that dâhiya implies “suburb,” but that its use has declined in recent de­cades. See also Salwa Ismael, Po­liti­cal Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 21. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987); John Archer, “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700–1850, and the Spaces of Modernity,” in Visions of Suburbia, ed. Roger Silverstone (New York: Routledge, 1997), 26–54. 22. Clifford, Routes, 25. 23. See, for example, Véronique Dupont, “Residential Practices, Creation and Use of Urban Space: Unauthorised Colonies in Delhi,” in Urbanisation and Governance in India, ed. ­ uman Sciences, and South Evelin Hust and Michael Mann (Delhi: Manohar, Center for H Asia Institute, 2005), 311–41; cf. Harris, “Meaningful Types.” ­ iddle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption 24. Christiana Brosius, India’s M and Prosperity (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 94. 25. Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philiosophical Lexicon, ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2014); Karen Risager, “­Towards a Transnational Paradigm in Language and Culture Pedagogy” (paper presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, March 2008, Washington, D.C.), https://­w ww​.­academia​.­edu​/­200448​/­Towards​_­a ​_­transnational​_­paradigm​ _­in​_­language​_­and​_­culture​_­pedagogy. 26​.­­Kuchru, “En­glish in South Asia,” 528; Tom McArthur, The Oxford Guide to World En­ glish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 312; Kamal  K. Sridhar, “En­glish in a South Indian Urban Context,” in The Other Tongue: En­glish Across Cultures, ed. Braj B. Kuchru (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 145. 27. McArthur, Oxford Guide, 313; Kuchru, “En­glish in South Asia,” 538; Joshua Fishman, “Conclusion,” in Post-­imperial En­glish: Status Change in British and American Colonies, 1940– 1990, ed. Joshua Fishman, A. W. Conrad, and A Rubal-­L opez (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 634–39. 28. Fishman, “Conclusion,” 625; Kuchru, “En­g lish in South Asia,” 537; Sridhar, ­“En­glish.”



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29. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 78–88, 100–135; McArthur, Oxford Guide, 313; Braj B. Kuchru, The Alchemy of En­glish: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-­native En­glishes (London: Prentice-­Hall, 1986), 73; Kundu and Basu, “Words and Concepts,” 24. 30. McArthur, Oxford Guide, 317; cf. Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2004), 157; Claire Kramsch, “The Privilege of the Intercultural Speaker,” in Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective: Approaches Through Drama and Ethnography, ed. Michael Byram and Michael Fleming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 16–31. 31. Aditi Mukherjee, Language Maintenance and Language Shift: Punjabis and Bengalis in ­ ere is a further asymmetry: Punjabis w ­ ere more willDelhi (New Delhi: Bahri, 1996), 170. Th ing to pick up words and mix codes than Bengalis. 32. “Two and three bedrooms with tiled attached bath. Large drawing and dining rooms. ­ ater Car porch, kitchen . . . ​A merican kitchen with cabinets and steel sink. Hot and cold w lines.” Shaheen Meraj, “The Use of En­glish in Urdu Advertising in Pakistan,” in The En­glish Language in Pakistan, ed. Robert Baumgardner (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1993), 231. 33. Ibid.; S. N. Sridhar, “On the Function of Code-­Mixing in Kannada,” in Aspects of Sociolinguistics in South Asia, ed. Braj  B. Kuchru and S.  N. Sridhar (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), 109–17; Kuchru, Alchemy of En­glish, 111. 34. Paroo Nihalani, R. K. Tongue, and P. Hosali, Indian and British En­glish: A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979); Vidal and Gupta, “Urban Vocabulary,” 19; Guha, Subaltern Studies Reader, xx–­x xi. On semantic shift, see Braj B. Kuchru, The Indianization of En­glish: The En­glish Language in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 174. I have confirmed with the urban historical geographer Richard Dennis that the term has never been extensively used in this context in Britain. Its root is the same as the Spanish colonia, and indeed the widespread use of this term by Hispanics in the southwestern United States has some similarities with the Indian usage of “colony.” Hélène Rivière d’Arc, “Colonia,” in Topalov et al., L’aventure, 334–38. 35. Archer, “Colonial Suburbs.” Observers such as E. M. Forster noted, and sometimes deplored, the suburban character of the civil lines. Todd Kuchta, “Suburbia, Ressentiment, and the End of Empire in A Passage to India,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36 (2003): 307–29. 36. A. E. Mirams, “Town Planning in Bombay ­Under the Bombay Town Planning Act 1915,” British Town Planning Institute, Papers and Discussion 6 (1919–20): 43–57; E. P. Richards, Report by Request of the Trust on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas (Ware, U.K.: Jennings and Bewley, 1914). Reprinted, with an introduction by Richard Harris and Robert Lewis (London: Routledge, 2015). 37. Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 38. Archer, “Colonial Suburbs”; Preeti Chopra, “­Free to Move, Forced to Flee: The ­Formation and Dissolution of Suburbs in Colonial Bombay, 1750–1918,” Urban History 39 (2012): 88, 102; Partho Datta, Planning the City: Urbanization and Reform in Calcutta c. 1800–­ c. 1940 (New Delhi: Tulika, 2012), 171–84; Miriam Dossal, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai 1660 to Pres­ent Times (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 173–74; Norman Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View ­Toward the West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 125, 206, 209; William Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 141–50; Sandip

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Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Confrontations in Bombay City, 1900–1925 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), 54–70; Rao, House, but No Garden, 2–4; Florian Urban, “Mumbai’s Suburban Mass Housing,” Urban History 39, no. 1 (2012): 128. 39. Chopra, “­Free to Move,” 88, 102. 40. World Bank, Urbanization Beyond Municipal Bound­aries: Nurturing Metropolitan Economies and Connecting Peri-­urban Areas in India (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2013). Cases could easily be multiplied. See, for example, Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds., Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 3, 14. 41. See, for example, Indrajit Roy, “Repre­sen­ta­tion and Development in Urban Peripheries: Reflections on Government in Ahmedabad Suburbs,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 42, no. 41 (2006): 4363–68. 42. Andrew Harris, “The Metonymic Urbanism of Twenty-­First-­Century Mumbai,” Urban Studies 49, no. 13 (2012): 2961–62, 2967; Andrew Harris, personal email communication, February 23, 2014. 43. K. C. Sivaramkrishnan, A. Kundu, and B. B. Singh, Oxford Handbook of Urbanisation in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); Trudi Bunting, Pierre Filion, and Ryan Walker, eds., Canadian Cities in Transition: New Directions in the Twenty-­First ­Century, 4th ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010). 44. K. C. Sivaramakrishnan and Leslie Green, Metropolitan Management: The Asian Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 120, 126, 161. 45. Biswaroop Das, Socio-­economic Study of Slums in Surat City (Surat, India: Centre for Social Studies, 1994), 21; Naresh Fernandes, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay (New Delhi: Aleph, 2013), 15. Local re­sis­tance to the use of “Mumbai” reflects its association with strident Hindu nationalism. See Thomas Hansen, The Wages of Vio­lence: Naming and Identity in Post-­colonial Bombay (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2001). Hansen speaks of “suburban trains” (21), but Sahana Udupa states that “local” is the more usual term. Sahana Udupa, personal email communication, February  20, 2014; Sanjeev Vidyarthi, personal email communication, June  30, 2011; Shail Mayaram, personal email communication, March 5, 2014. 46. Annapurna Shaw, personal email communication, July 4, 2011; Bimal Patel, personal email communication, June 29, 2011; Sanjeev Vidyarthi, “Re-­imagining the American Neighborhood Unit for India,” in Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices, ed. Patsy Healey and Robert Upton (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2010), 73–93. At least for the outer parts of the urban fringe, Shaw’s preferred language is “peri-­urban,” but this is not a vernacular term. See Annapurna Shaw, “Peri-­urban Interface of Indian Cities: Growth, Governance and Local Initiatives,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 40, no. 2 (2005): 129–36. 47. Kundu and Basu, “Words and Concepts,” 28; Sahana Udupa, personal email communication, February 20, 2014; Rafia Kazim, personal email communication, February 17, 2014. 48. Renuka Phadnis, “Good News for Commuters in Suburban Areas Travelling to Bangalore,” The Hindu (Bangalore edition), July  9, 2014, http://­w ww​.­t hehindu​.­c om​/­news​/­cities​ /­bangalore​/­good​-­news​-­for​-­commuters​-­in​-­suburban​-­areas​-­travelling​-­to​-­bangalore​/­article6190693​ .­ece​?­utm​_ ­source​=­Most%20Popular&utm​_­medium​=­Bangalore&utm​_­campaign​=­Widget%20 Promo. In Jagran, En­glish words are apparently transliterated into Hindi.



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49. K.  N. Venkatarayappa, Bangalore: A Socioecological Study (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1957); Mathew Idiculla, personal email communication, February 21, 2014. 50. Solomon Benjamin, “Urban Land Transformation for Pro-­poor Economies,” Geoforum 35 (2004): 177–87; Solomon Benjamin, personal email communication, February  18, 2014; Udupa, “Desire and Demo­cratic Visibility”; Janaki Nair, personal email communication, March 21, 2013; Sahana Udupa, personal email communication, February 21, 2014. Cf. Janaki ­ entury (New Delhi: Oxford UniverNair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth C sity Press, 2005). 51. Benjamin, “Urban Land Transformation,” 179, 180; Rafia Kazim, personal email communication, February 26, 2014. 52. Brosius, India’s ­Middle Class, 92, 96, 103; William Glover, “The Troubled Passage t wentieth from ‘Village Communities’ to Planned New Town Developments in Mid-­ ­Century South Asia,” Urban History 39, no.  1 (2012): 108–27; Shubhra Gururani, personal email communication, February 25, 2014; Ananya Roy, personal email communication, Febru­ auses, Consequences, and Policies (Delhi: B. R., 2012); ary 12, 2014; Abha L. Singh, Urban Sprawl: C Sahana Udupa, personal email communication, February 20, 2014. Cf. Shubhra Gururani, “Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s ‘Millennium City,’ ” in Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, Ecologies of Urbanism, 119–43; Ananya Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 53. Udupa claims that “suburb” is simply “not part of the regional language lexicon.” Sahana Udupa, personal email communication, February 20, 2014. 54. Emily Skop, personal email communication, May 5, 2014. See Emily Skop, The Immigration and Settlement of Asian Indians in Phoenix, Arizona, 1965–2011: Ethnic Pride vs. Racial Discrimination in the Suburbs (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2012). On South Asians in Toronto and Brampton, see Richard Harris, “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Ste­reo­t ypes,” Environment and Planning A 47, no. 1 (2015): 30–49; V. Kataure and Margaret Walton-­Roberts, “The Housing Preferences and Location Choices of Second-­Generation South Asians Living in Ethnic Enclaves,” South Asian Diaspora 5, no. 1 (2013): 57–76; Mohammed Qadeer, S. K. Angrawal, and A. Lovell, “Evolution of Ethnic Enclaves in the Toronto Metropolitan Area, 2001–2006,” International Journal of Migration and Integration 11, no. 3 (2010): 315–19.

Chapter 10 1. Richard Harris, “Transnational Urban Meanings: The Passage of ‘Suburb’ to India and Its Rough Reception,” this volume. 2. Ibid. 3. See the original articulation of the Bombay Improvement Trust’s suburbanization schemes, which sought to re-­create the garden suburbs of ­England and Germany: Report of the Improvements Committee No. IV, September 1, 1899, in Minutes of September 4, Bombay Improvement Trust Proceedings [1899], 79, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai Estates Department. The architect and planner in the employ of the Bombay provincial government, W. R. Davidge, expressed the official view on the preference for villas and cottages over multistory living: W. R. Davidge, “Re. Bombay Housing Schemes,” Maharashtra State Archives [Revenue Department], Development Department, File 31/2, 1924, 4. For more on Bombay’s apartment building suburbs, see Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden.

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Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 4. For the early history of eminent domain legislation in India and its connections with British law, see Peter Satyanand Samuels, “Dysmorphic Sovereignty: Colonial Railroads, Eminent Domain, and the Rule of Law in British India, 1824–1857” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2013). 5. Pierre-­Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, eds., Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 6. B. W. Kissan, Report on Town Planning Enactments in Germany (Bombay: Government Printing Press, 1913). For more on town planning in Bombay and its connections to German legislation, see Nikhil Rao, “Town Planning and Municipal Growth in Late Colonial Bombay: ­Towards a Transnational Perspective,” in Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History, ed. Nicholas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2015), 131–48. 7. A. E. Mirams, “Town Planning in Bombay ­Under the Bombay Town Planning Act, 1915,” British Town Planning Institute, Papers and Discussions 6 (1919–20): 43–63. See especially p. 46. 8. For an example of how town planning schemes could take de­c ades to execute ­because of the efforts by vari­ous parties to adapt the scheme to their own interests, consider the history of a scheme like the Santa Cruz Town Planning Scheme No. 5, which took more than forty years to execute. See Government of Maharashtra, Urban Development Department, Town Planning Scheme: Santa Cruz No. 5 (Final Scheme) (Bombay: Government Printing Press, 1965), 1. Examples of the ways in which dif­fer­ent parties mobilize politics and the ­legal system can be seen in the following landmark case involving town planning, which went first to the High Court of Bombay and then to the Supreme Court of India: Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay v. Advance Builders (India) Pvt. Ltd. on 24/4/1969 (1971). The High Court decision is 73 BOMLR 657. The Supreme Court decision is 1972 SCR (1) 408. For more on the politics of town planning, see Nikhil Rao, “Town Planning and Urban Growth: Politics at the Urban Edge” (unpublished manuscript, 2017). See also Solomon Benjamin, “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy Beyond Policy and Programs,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 3 (September 2008): 719–29. 9. Nancy H. Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 10. I. J. Catanach, Rural Credit in Western India: Rural Credit and the Cooperative Movement in the Bombay Presidency, 1875–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). 11. Talmaki’s extensive studies of the cooperative movement worldwide are partially documented in his Co-­operation in India and Abroad (Mangalore, India: Basel Mission Press, 1931). 12. Talmaki rigorously distinguished cooperative socie­ties from both joint-­stock concerns and vari­ous forms of socialist collectives. Ibid., 13–17. 13. However, rather than “preserving community” in any s­ imple sense, I have argued that cooperative housing socie­ties came to constitute one impor­tant context where ideas of community ­were reworked and often modified in the face of urban imperatives. See Rao, House, but No Garden, ch. 5.



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14. Talmaki, Co-­operation, 123–24. 15. For an account of cooperatives in Bombay and Madras, especially an explanation for why socie­ties took dif­fer­ent forms, see Sukumar Ganapati, “A ­C entury of Differential Evolution of Housing Co-­operatives in Mumbai and Chennai,” Housing Studies 23, no. 3 (May 2008): 403–22. For Ahmedabad, see Abigail McGowan, “Ahmedabad’s Home Remedies: Housing in the Remaking of an Industrial City, 1920–1960,” South Asia 36, no.  3 (2013): 397–414. 16. This is the subject of Rao, House, but No Garden, especially chs. 3 and 4. 17. I have begun exploring some of ­t hese issues in Nikhil Rao, “Uncertain Ground: The ‘Owner­ship Flat’ and Urban Property in 20th-­Century Bombay,” South Asian History and Culture 3, no. 1 (January 2012): 1–25. 18. Kwak, World of Homeowners, ch. 5. See also Rupert Jones, “Housing Cooperatives: One Way to Find an Affordable Home,” Guardian, July 29, 2011.

Chapter 11 1. Carl Nightingale, “The Seven C’s: Reflections on Writing a Global History of Segregation,” in Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History, ed. Nicholas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2015), 27–42. 2. Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 53. 3. Presner et al., HyperCities, 7. 4. Eric Fischer, “Mapping Millions of Dots,” MapBox, 2013, https://­w ww​.­mapbox​.­com​ /­blog​/­mapping​-­millions​-­of​-­dots​/­; Michael Drapa, “Eric Fischer’s Social Maps Show World in a New Light,” feature on the University of Chicago website, 2011, http://­w ww​.­uchicago​.­edu​ /­features​/­20111017​_­fischer​/­. 5​.­­For a few examples of this commentary, see Rebecca Baird-­Remba and Gus Lubin, “21 Maps of Highly Segregated Cities in Amer­i­c a,” Business Insider, April  25, 2013, http://­ www​.­businessinsider​.­com​/­most​-­segregated​-­cities​-­census​-­maps​-­2013​-­4​?­op​=­1; Matthew Roth, “Radical Cartography and Urban Racial Maps,” StreetsBlog SF, September 27, 2010, http://­sf​ .­streetsblog​.­org​/­2010​/­09​/­27​/­radical​-­cartography​-­and​-­urban​-­racial​-­maps​/­; Cliff Kuang, “Infographic of the Day: How Segregated Is Your City?,” Fastco Design, September 20, 2010, https://­ www​.­fastcodesign​.­c om ​/­1662328​/­infographics​-­of​-­t he​-­d ay​-­how​-­segregated​-­is​-­your​-­city; Matt Johnson, “Maps Show Racial Divides in Greater Washington,” Greater Washington, September 21, 2010, http://­greatergreaterwashington​.­org​/­post​/­7220​/­maps​-­show​-­racial​-­divides​-­in​-­greater​ -­washington​/­. 6​.­­Dustin Cable, “The Racial Dot Map: One Dot per Person for the Entire United States,” Demographics Research Group at the University of ­Virginia, July 2013, http://­w ww​ .­c oopercenter​.­org ​/­demographics​/­R acial​-­Dot​-­Map. The  U.S. map itself is at http://­ demographics​.­coopercenter​.­org​/­DotMap​/­index​.­html. Discussion of the prison “puddles” is at Dustin Cable, “­Little Green Boxes,” StatChat, Demographics Research Group at the Uni­ versity of ­Virginia, September  18, 2013, http://­statchatva​.­org ​/­2 013​/­0 9​/­18​/­l ittle​-­g reen​-­boxes​ /­#more​-­3340. 7​.­­­Here I am referring to Jacob L. Vigdor and Edward L. Glaeser’s report, “The End of the Segregated ­C entury,” which was publicized by the Manhattan Institute using its

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connections to all of the major print newspapers in 2011. Jacob L. Vigdor and Edward L. ­ entury: Racial Separation in Amer­i­c a’s NeighborGlaeser, “The End of the Segregated C w ww​ .­ m anhattan​ hoods, 1890–2010,” Manhattan Institute, January  22, 2012, http://­ -­institute​.­org ​/­html​/­cr​_­66​.­htm. ­There are many responses to this piece and to the favorable press it ­received in mainstream media. My own critique and summation of this response is Carl H. Nightingale, “Against the Manhattan Institute Report,” Global Segregation, accessed September 2014, http://­g lobalsegregation​.­c om​/­a gainst​-­t he​-­manhattan​-­i nstitute​-­report​-­on​ -­segregation​-­in​-­t he​-­u​-­s​/­. 8​.­­Robert  K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et  al., “Mapping In­equality: Redlining in New Deal Amer­i­c a,” American Pa­norama, ed. Robert  K. Nelson and Edward  L. Ayers, accessed January  18, 2017, https://­d sl​.­richmond​.­edu​ /­panorama​/­redlining​/­#loc​=­5​/­36​.­721​/­​-­96​.­943&opacity​= ­0​.­8&text​=­intro; “Chicago Mapping Proj­ect,” accessed July  2014, http://­worldmap​.­harvard​.­edu ​/­chicago​/­. See also the “Miami Affordability Proj­e ct,” a map produced ­u nder the supervision of Robin Bachin at the University of Miami’s Office of Civic and Community Engagement that indicates location of public and affordable housing in Miami and allows viewers to break that down by population served and an array of other filters. http://­c omte​.­c cs​.­m iami​.­edu ​/­housing ​/­m ap accessed 01/2017. 9. Colin Gordon, “Mapping Decline,” accessed July  2014, http://­mappingdecline​.­lib​ .­uiowa​.­edu​/­map​/­. 10​.­­Stephen Robertson, “Putting Harlem on the Map,” Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012, http://­writinghistory​.­trincoll​.­edu​/­evidence​/­robertson​-­2012​-­spring​/­. The blog is at Digital Harlem Blog, accessed September 2014, http://­digitalharlemblog​.­wordpress​.­com​/­digital​-­harlem​ -­t he​-­site​/­. 11​.­­I borrowed the term “multimodal” from Victoria Szabo’s description of the “Digital Cities Proj­ect” on the “Wired! Visualizing the Past” website, created by Duke University’s Wired Lab, accessed August 2014, http://­w ww​.­dukewired​.­org​/­projects​/­digital​-­cities​/­. Andrew Robichaud and Erik Steiner, “Trail of Blood: The Movement of San Francisco’s Butchertown and the Spatial Transformation of Meat Production, 1849–1901,” Spatial History Proj­ect, April  1, 2010, http://­web​.­stanford​.­edu​/­group​/­spatialhistory​/­cgi​-­bin​/­site​/­pub​.­php​?­id​=­31&project​ _­id​=­31; Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Erik Steiner, “Mapping Mobility in the Budapest Ghetto,” Spatial History Proj­ect, accessed August  2014, http://­web​.­stanford​.­edu​/­group​ /­spatialhistory​/­cgi​-­bin​/­site​/­viz​.­php​?­id​=­4 11&project​_­id​= ­#swf. 12​.­­The online version of the Lincoln Land Institute’s Atlas of Urban Expansion can be found at S. Angel, J. Parent, D. L. Civco, and A. M. Blei, “Atlas of Urban Expansion,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010, http://­w ww​.­lincolninst​.­edu ​/­subcenters​/­atlas​-­urban​ -­expansion​/­; Matthew Korman and Claudia Engels, “Cigarette Citadels,” Stanford University, accessed September 2014, http://­web​.­stanford​.­edu ​/­group​/­tobaccoprv​/­cgi​-­bin​/­wordpress/ and http://­web​.­stanford​.­edu ​/­g roup​/­tobaccoprv​/­c gi​-­bin​/­map​/­; Laura Kurgan, “­There  + ­Here: Transnationalism and Migration,” Spatial Information Design Lab, accessed September  2014, http://­spatialinformationdesignlab​.­org​/­projects​/­t herehere​-­t ransnationalism​-­a nd​ -­migration. 13​.­­I have described this dialectical method in greater detail in Carl H. Nightingale, “The 7 Cs: Reflections on Writing a Global History of Urban Segregation,” in Kenny and Madgin, Cities Beyond Borders.



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14. Hedwyg van Groenendaal, The Ultimate Prezi Guide (Tilburg, Netherlands: Via Milia, 2013). Online tutorials at www​.­prezi​.­c om describe how to operate the system quite adequately. 15. Some of ­these pre­sen­ta­tions ­w ill be soon available on my own website, http://­ globalsegregation​.­com​/­.

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Contributors

Erica Allen-­K im is assistant professor in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in American architecture and urbanism from Harvard University. She is the author of “Exile on the Commercial Strip: Vietnam War Memorials in L ­ ittle Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration” (Buildings and Landscapes, 2014). Leandro Benmergui is assistant professor of history at Purchase College, State University of New York, and the author of “The Alliance for Pro­gress and Housing Policy in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the 1960s” (Urban History, 2009) and “The Transnationalization of the ‘Housing Prob­lem’ ” (in The Housing Question, 2013). He is working on a transnational history of public housing and urban renewal in twentieth-­century Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Matt Garcia is director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University and the founder of ASU’s Comparative Border Studies Program. He is the author of A World of Its Own: Race, ­Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (2001) and From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of César Chávez and the Farm Worker Movement (2012). Richard Harris is professor of geography at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900–1950 (1999), Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900– 1960 (2004), and Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 (2012). He is also the current president of the Urban History Association.

322 C o nt r ibu to r s

Carola Hein is professor of the history of architecture and urban planning in the Department of Architecture of the Technische Universiteit Delft. Her books include The Capital of Eu­rope (2004), Cities, Autonomy and Decentralisation in Japan (2006), Brussels: Perspectives on a Eu­ro­pean Capital (2007), and Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (2011). Nancy H. Kwak is associate professor of history at the University of California–­ San Diego and the author of A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (2015). She currently serves as the editor for the Amer­i­c as for Planning Perspectives, the international journal on planning history. Carl H. Nightingale is professor of transnational studies and American studies at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of On the Edge: A History of Poor Black ­Children and Their American Dreams (1993) and Segregation: A World History of Divided Cities (2012). Amy C. Offner is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Socie­ties, Harvard University, and Duke University. She is writing a book on Cold War antipoverty programs and  economic thought in Colombia and the United States. Margaret O’Mara is associate professor of history at the University of Washington and lead curatorial adviser to the Bezos Center for Innovation at ­Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. She is the author of Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (2005) and Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Presidential Elections That Made History (2015). Nikhil Rao is associate professor of history at Wellesley College. He is the author of House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (2013). A. K. Sandoval-­Strausz is associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico and the author of ­Hotel: An American History (2007) and “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban Amer­i­ca” ( Journal of American History, 2014).

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323

Arijit Sen is associate professor of architecture at the University of Wisconsin–­ Milwaukee. He is the coeditor with Jennifer Johung of Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics and Placemaking (2013) and with Lisa Silverman of Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (2014). Thomas J. Sugrue is professor of social and cultural analy­sis and history and director of the Collaborative on Global Urbanism at New York University. His most recent book is Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States, coedited with Domenic Vitiello (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

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Index

Page numbers in bold refer to images. Aberdeen Centre (Richmond, British Columbia, Canada), 156, 158, 295n3 ABS-­CBN, 110–11 Acción Comunal, 56–57, 66–67 Ad Council, U.S., 60–61 Adrian, Kelly, 202 advertising: code mixing in, 229, 232; for housing in Ciudad Kennedy, 47, 48 African Americans, 258, 260 Ahmedabad, India, 248, 249 aided self-­help housing, 53–57, 58, 281n34; advertisement for, 47, 48, 58; austerity of, 59–60, 61–62; creation of community through, 65–66; favela residents’ objections to, 72; as focus of Lacerda’s housing policy, 81; in Puerto Rico, 53–54, 72; World Bank’s stance on, 105 Alliance for Pro­gress: and Ciudad Kennedy, 47, 49, 51, 57, 59, 63; end of, 94; launch of, 71 Almandoz, Arturo, 119 Almeida Magalhaes, Rafael de, 84, 85, 287n37 Anderson, Kay, 142 apartment buildings: and cooperative housing, 247, 249, 250; and suburbanization, 242, 243 Appadurai, Arjun, 225 Arbol Verde barrio (Southern California), 166–90, 168; and AVNU, 183–85; civic neglect of, 171–72; division of by Claremont Boulevard, 173–80; increasing diversity in, 180–81, 182; and local economy, 173; location of, 171; map of, 169, 172; park in, 168, 182–83, 186–87; as placeholder for ­f uture expansion of Claremont Colleges, 174–75, 181–87; as

source of academic research for Claremont Colleges, 174; as source of ­labor for Claremont Colleges, 173–74 Arbol Verde Neighborhood United (AVNU), 183–85 Arcasia, 35, 39 Archer, John, 230 architecture: of high-­tech suburbs, 20, 30; histories of, 4; impact of immigration on local design practices in Markham, Ontario, 138–39; spread of by corporations, 122–24; spread of during war­time, 120–21. See also transnational design Ardash Properties, 18–19, 43 arts, the, 174 Ascendas, 39, 42–43 assimilation: of Chinese Canadian immigrants, 133–34, 137, 140, 142; and Chinese condo malls, 133–40; linguistic, 232; views of white civic leaders on, 172–73 Association of Indians in Amer­i­ca, 204 Atlanta, Georgia, United States, 154–55 Atlas of Urban Expansion (Angel, Parent, Civco, Blei), 261 autoconstruction. See aided self-­help housing Bangalore, India: high-­tech suburbs of, 17, 19, 20–21, 39–42, 43; urban vocabulary in, 237, 238–39 Bargh, John, 213 barrios: use of term, 227. See also Arbol Verde barrio Barry, ­Father William, 177, 179, 180 Basu, Somnath, 228, 232 Bayview Landmark, 141

326 index Beckert, Sven, viii Bell, Carole, 133, 142, 148–49 Bender, Thomas, vii Benjamin, Solomon, 238, 239 Berlin, Germany, 128–29 big-­box retail stores, 149, 150, 151, 155, 161 Blagojevich, Rod, 205 Bogotá, Colombia: crime in, 66–67; housing areas in, 67; map of, 67; urban growth in, 50–­51. See also Ciudad Kennedy Bombay, India, 314n45; and cooperative housing, 246–50; and suburbanization, 233, 234, 235–36, 241–45, 251 Bombay Improvement Trust, 244, 246, 248 Bombay Town Planning Act (1915), 245 Bom Jesús favela (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 72, 73 border spaces, and Arbol Verde barrio, 176, 177–78 bound­a ries: diverse character of, 116–17; and urban form, 121 Bourdieu, Pierre, 211 Brahmin community, 248. See also caste Brazil: class formation in, 74–75; urban growth in, 74. See also Rio de Janeiro Brenner, Neil, 29 Brizola, Leonel, 73, 79 Brosius, Christiana, 231 Budapest, Hungary, 261, 264 building materials, and slum clearance, 90, 91 built environment, 8–9, 12, 195; Devon Ave­nue layout, 202–3; and transnational urbanism, 211. See also material culture, and India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade Burroughs, Roy J., 100 bustees, 227, 228–29 Cable, Dustin, 258 Cairo, Egypt, 229 Calcutta, India, 233, 234, 235–36 California school of art, 174 Calsat, Henri-­Jean, 125 campus-­garden-­suburb model, 29, 30 Canada: development of retail condos in, 134–35; idealized rural past of, 142–44, 147–48; immigration policy in, 134, 135, 137–38. See also Markham, Ontario, Canada Canada Immigrant Investor Program (CANIIP), 134, 137, 141, 145, 152, 164, 165

Caracas, Venezuela, 124, 282n40 Casa Campesina Inter-­A merica (Inter-­ American Campesino House), 60, 61 Cassin, Barbara, 231 caste, 242, 243, 248, 249. See also class Castro, Iná Elias de, 93–94 Catholic Church: in Arbol Verde barrio, 172, 177, 178–79, 180; Syro-­Malabar, 191–93, 206 Cavalcanti, Sandra, 82, 93 Central Institute for the Training and Relocation of Urban Squatters (Philippines), 103 Central Nacional Provivienda, 51 Certeau, Michel de, 214 Chan, Sucheng, 148 Chartrand, Tanya, 213 Chavez, Linda, 166 Chavez Ravine barrio, 178 Chen, Cecilia, 142–43, 158 Chennai, India, 236 Chicago, Illinois, United States: ethnic parades history in, 195–96; and map data, 259. See also India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade (Chicago, Illinois) “Chicago Mapping Proj­ect” (Sampson), 259 Chicago school of urban sociology, 4–5, 172 China: high-­tech suburbs of, 38–39. See also Chinese Canadian immigrants, in Markham, Ontario Chinatown Centre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 138, 141 Chinatowns, 162–63 Chinatown West (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 138, 141 Chinese Canadian immigrants, in Markham, Ontario, 133–65; concentrated population of Chinese businesses, 140–41; and crossover to mainstream of condo malls, 157–65; and reinvention of malls, 149–52; white residents’ re­sis­tance to, 141, 147–49 Chinese Canadian National Council, 142 Chopra, Preeti, 234 Cidade de Deus (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): construction of, 86–87; design of, 88; population of, 96; relocation from, 93; tenants’ claiming of, 94; transnational importance of, 72 “Cigarette Citadels” proj­ect (Korman and Engels), 261

index 327 CINVA (Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento; Inter-­A merican Housing and Planning Center), 54, 55, 56–57, 60, 281n34, 282n42 CINVA-­R AM, 55, 56, 60 Cities of Tomorrow (Hall), 4 citizenship, and Chinese condo malls, 148, 150 citrus industry, 173 Ciudad Kennedy, 47–70; advertisement for, 47, 48, 58; class formation in, 66–67, 68; and clientelism, 63–64, 67; and governance crisis in Colombia, 50–60; and ideals of economic production, 47–49; income requirements for, 62–63; as midcentury crossroads, 69–70; modernism of, 69–70; name of, 57; planning of, 57–59; and residential property as source of income, 61, 64–65, 68, 70; and stage theories of development, 49; and state institutions, 65; and uses of property, 60–69, 282n42 Ciudad Techo. See Ciudad Kennedy civil lines, 233 Claremont, California: construction of county-­line road in, 175–80; economy of, 173; zoning changes in, 182, 183–84, 186–87 Claremont Colleges: Arbol Verde as placeholder for ­f uture expansion of, 174–75; Arbol Verde as source of academic research for, 174; Arbol Verde as source of ­labor for, 173–74; and assimilation of Mexican youth, 173; development by, 168–69; establishment of, 302n8; and international students, 188–89 Claremont McKenna College (CMC): development by, 168; gentrification by, 180–87; international students at, 169–70; ­ ouses by, 181–82; student relocation of h protest at, 189 class: and cooperative housing, 248; and suburbanization, 242, 243 class formation: in Brazil, 74–75, 93; in Ciudad Kennedy, 66–67, 68; and homeownership policies, 282n47; and urban growth in Latin Amer­i­ca, 74–75 Clavin, Patricia, 115 clientelism, 63–64, 67, 92 Clifford, James, 225, 230 CMC. See Claremont McKenna College

code mixing, 229, 232–33 COHAB. See Companhia de Habitaçao Popu­lar Cohen, Lizabeth, viii Cohn, Bernard, 226 Cold War: and Brazil-­U.S. relations, 73; influence of on Berlin, 128–29; and transnational urbanism, 73. See also Alliance for Pro­gress Cold War defense spending, and high-­tech suburbs, 21, 24, 25–26, 44 Cole, Tim, 261, 264 Colombia: National Front government of, 52, 56, 57; Rojas dictatorship in, 51–52; urban growth in, 50. See also Ciudad Kennedy colonialism: of Claremont Colleges’ relationship with local Mexican community, 170; and cooperative housing, 248; and segregation, 263; and suburbanization, 250, 251; and suburbanization, in India, 233–34; and transmission of planning ideas, 125; and vernacular speech, 226 colonialization: and cooperative housing, 247; and suburbanization, 241–45 colonial urbanism, lit­er­a­ture on, 4 colonias. See barrios colony, Indian use of term, 233, 237–38, 241 color, and mapping, 255 commodity flows, 122–24 communalism, in Ciudad Kennedy, 65–66 communism: and Brazil-­U.S. relations, 79–81. See also Alliance for Pro­gress; Cold War Communist Party, 51, 77–78 community, 248, 249 community action programs, as method of governance, 52, 55–57, 69–70 Companhia de Desenvolvimento Comunitário, 95 Companhia de Habitaçao Popu­lar (COHAB; Popu­lar Housing Com­pany), 86, 88; and displacement/relocation, 89, 90–91, 92; establishment of, 85 Companhia de Progresso da Guanabara (Com­pany for the Pro­gress of Guanabara; COPEG), 86, 287n45 computer industry, 26–27, 41–43 concentric model of urban development, 4–5

328 index condo malls, 133–65; crossover to mainstream, 157–65; definition of, 134; densities of, 137, 141–42, 147; design of, 141–42, 144, 145–­46, 153–54, 155–56, 158–59, 160–61; owner­ship structure in, 152–57; pricing of, 155; and reinvention of malls, 149–52; white residents’ re­sis­tance to, 141, 142–44 condominiums, 135 construction materials. See building materials Consuelo Zobel Alger Foundation, 111–13 contact zones, 75–76 contrapuntal motion, 218 cooperative housing: and India, 246–50; and suburbanization, 244 COPEG. See Companhia de Progresso da Guanabara Cornell Village (Markham, Ontario, Canada), 157 corporate networks, spread of planning and architecture ideas by, 122–24 COVICA, 48, 58–59 Crane, Jacob L., 54 credit socie­ties, 247 Crewe, Katherine, 29 Cullen Country Barns (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 143–44. See also Pacific Mall cultural meaning, flows of, 223–24 cultural mobility of property, 134 cultural studies, and language, 225–26 Currie, Lauchlin, 68 Daley, Richard, 196 Das, Biswaroop, 236 data, and digitalization, 254–57, 259–60, 262, 264 The Death and Life of ­Great American Cities (Jacobs), 176 defense spending, and high-­tech suburbs, 21, 24, 25–26, 44 Le défi Américain (Servan-­Schreiber), 27 de Gaulle, Charles, 23–24, 25 del Castillo, Richard Griswold, 166 Deng Xiaoping, 38, 274n47 Denmark, 248 density, 150; of Chinese condo malls, 137, 141–42, 147 Depression-­era policies, and Ciudad Kennedy, 49, 54–55, 59, 69

developmentalist states, and Ciudad Kennedy, 70 Devon Ave­nue (Chicago, Illinois), 194, 197, 199–203 dialectic: and digitalization, 252–54; and digital mapping, 261, 262; and segregation, 257; and textual media, 264 Dictionary of Transnational History (Iriye and Saunier), 225 “Digital Harlem” proj­ect, 260 digitalization, 252, 255, 258, 261; and textual media, 253–54, 256–57, 259–60, 262–64 displacement. See slum clearance Dominguez, Johnny, 171, 180, 184, 185, 188, 189–90 dot-­mapping, 257, 258, 260 Drexler, Milton, 63–64 Dyer, Henry, 123 Economic Development Board of Singapore (EDB), 33, 35, 39, 44, 274n47 economic interests: and Devon Ave­nue shops, 202–3; ethnic shops and informal hucksters, 197–99, 214–15 Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981), 136, 152, 153 Économie et Humanisme movement, 82 Economist, 227 El Barrio Park (Arbol Verde, California), 168, 182–83, 186–87 electric ser­vices: in Ciudad Kennedy, 61–62; in high-­tech suburbs, 17, 42, 43 electronics industry, 33–34, 40–41 Ellis, William A., 95–96 embryo model, 83, 88–89, 92 eminent domain, 244 enacted environment, 8 Engels, Claudia, 261 En­glish language, 226–29, 231 En­glish Town Planning Act (1909), 245, 246 environmental effects of urbanization, 1 eradication. See slum clearance esteros, 111 ethnoburb model, 136 Eurocentric narrative, 7 Eu­rope: and American high-­tech suburbs, 26–27; and cooperative housing, 247, 248, 250 Eu­ro­pean Union, 125

index 329 exceptionalism, 142 “extensions” (urban vocabulary), 238 Exxon, 123–24 Fairchild Tele­vi­sion, 134, 295n3 Fals Borda, Orlando, 57, 281n34 families, and resettlement, 107, 110 Favela do Esqueleto (Vila São Jorge), 89–90, 91, 287n51 favelas: expansion of in Rio, 77; po­liti­cal organ­ization of, 79–80. See also ­under Vila Federation of Indian Associates (FIA), 196–97, 204, 205–6, 210 Fernandes, Naresh, 236 festival marketplace, 150, 152 Fischer, Eric, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263 Fishman, Robert, 5, 229–30, 270n3 floods, 87 Food for Peace program, 84 Forsyth, Ann, 29 Forsythe, William, 218 Fowler, James, 63 France: high-­tech suburbs of, 29–32; and segregation, 263 Freedom to Build movement, 95 Friendly Socie­ties Act (1896), 247 Friends of the Mexicans, 173 Fukuda Shigeyoshi, 127 Gabaccia, Donna, 5 Gandhi, Mahatma, 201 Gandhi, Rajiv, 41–42 garden-­villas, 242 Gauger, Earl, 100 gender, 90 gentrification, 180–87, 250, 258. See also Claremont Colleges; condo malls Germany: and cooperative housing, 247, 248, 249; and suburbanization, 242, 251; and town planning legislation, 245 Giannoulias, Alexi, 206, 209–10 Gilbert, Alan, 67, 68, 282n40 Giordano, Alberto, 261 Glaessner, Philip, 83 globalization: and corporate networks, 122–24; vs. transnational urbanism, 115 globalization studies, pitfalls of, 6 Goldman, Michael, 21 Goldstein, Marcia, 183 Google Maps, 260 Gordon, Colin, 259, 260, 261, 263

Gordon, Lincoln, 71, 80 Gorelik, Adrián, 74 Goulart administration, 73, 79 ­Great Britain: and cooperative housing, 247, 248, 249; and segregation, 263; and suburbanization, 241, 242, 244, 251 Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Ontario, Canada, 133; first condo mall in, 138; nonresidential condominium developments in, 139; white residents’ re­sis­tance to developments by Chinese immigrants in, 142–44. See also Markham, Ontario, Canada Guanabara Housing Program, 71–97, 75; closing of, 95–96; as contact zone, 75–76; criticism of, 94–95; U.S. involvement in, 75–76, 79–83 Guha, Ranajit, 223 Guillen, Manuel, 154–55 Gutierrez, Albert, 182–83 Habitat for Humanity, 113 Halacsy, Peter, 263 Hall, Edward, 215 Hall, Peter, 4, 28, 276n71 Hamburg, 124 Hannerz, Ulf, 225 Harris, Andrew, 118, 235 Harris, Richard, 241, 250 Harvard University, Worldmap platform of, 259 Heritage Town at Pacific Mall (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 146, 148 Herman, Bob, 175–78, 180, 185 Herrera, Trinidad, 103 high-­tech industry, 26–27, 41–43, 158 high-­tech suburbs, 17–46; and American technocracy, 24–28; and defense spending, 21, 24, 25–26, 44; East Asian designs for, 28–29; elitism of, 19–20; in France, 29–32; growth of, 45–46; in India, 17, 19, 20–21, 39–42, 43; localizing forces in, 20–22, 45; and public/private relationship, 21–23, 25–26, 29–32, 44–45; in Singapore, 32–39; state action in, 20–23, 25–26, 30–32, 44–45 Hindi, 229, 232, 237 Hindu (daily newspaper), 237 Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), 40–41 Hispanics, 258. See also Arbol Verde barrio

330 index historical inquiry, 2, 3–4 historiography, U.S., 3–6 Home Financing Commission (Philippines), 101, 289n7 homeownership, 47–70; advertisement for, 47, 48; and aided self-­help housing, 53–57; as austere government, 50–60; in barrios of Southern California, 171, 179, 184, 185–86; as basis of new civil society, 73–74; by Chinese immigrants, 152–53; and cooperative housing, 247, 249, 250; and favelas, 83–85, 91–92; ideals of, 60–61, 64–65; and ideals of economic production, 47–49; as midcentury crossroads, 69–70; in Philippines, 102–3, 107–13; and resettlement, 107–13; and retail condos, 152–53, 154–55; and stage theories of development, 49; and uses of property, 60–69 Home ­O wners’ Loan Corporation, 259 Hong Kong: high-­tech industry in, 33, 41; immigration to Canada from, 133, 134, 137, 138–39, 141, 145; and Pacific Mall proj­ect, 145; and ­People’s Republic of China, 133, 136–37, 164; and transmission of planning ideas, 123 Hon Sui Sen, 34 hospitals/health clinics, 90, 287n43 Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), U.S., 54 Humphrey, Hubert, 27 HyperCities proj­ect, 256, 261 HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Presner), 254, 256 IBM, 30, 41 IDB (Inter-­A merican Development Bank), 81, 83, 85, 286n26 idealized rural past, and Chinese condo malls, 142–44, 147–48 immigrants, Bangladeshi, 201 immigrants, Central American, 218–19 immigrants, Greek-­A merican, 196 immigrants, Irish-­A merican, 196 immigrants, Italian-­A merican, 196 immigrants, Mexican: and India In­de­pen­ dence Day Parade, 218–19. See also Arbol Verde barrio immigrants, Muslim, 201, 204–5, 306n18 immigrants, South Asian, 199–201, 211, 240, 304n2

immigration, 12. See also Arbol Verde barrio; Chinese Canadian immigrants, in Markham, Ontario; India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade immigration history, 4–5 immigration law, Canadian, 134, 135, 137–38 immigration law, U.S., 199, 205 imperialism, 4 India: Chris­tian­ity in, 191–92; and cooperative housing, 246–50; English-­ language speakers in, 231; high-­tech suburbs of, 39–43; linguistic borrowings in, 228–29; local languages in, 231–32; and suburbanization, 241–45, 251; use of “slum” in, 227. See also specific localities India, and “suburb,” 223–40; and flows of cultural meaning, 223–24; linguistic complexity in, 231–33; local terms for urban fringe, 229–31; urbanization in, 224 India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade (Chicago, Illinois), 191–222; American parade culture, 203; attendance experience, description of, 203–10; attendees, 198–99; audience participation, 194, 206, 208, 213; Devon Ave­nue description, 194, 197, 199–203; floats, 203–4, 206–8, 213; history of, 195–99; per­for­mance stages, 213–18; po­liti­cal and economic influence and interests, 196–99, 204, 208–10, 214, 218; rival parades, 204; route of, 194, 197, 199–203 Indian Consulate General, 197 Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), 40 informality: expansion of in Latin Amer­i­ca, 74–75; in Philippines, 101–2, 108–9; in retail environments, 150–51, 161–62, 165 informal settlements (unauthorized colonies), in Indian cities, 230 Instituto de Crédito Territorial (ICT), 53, 56, 57, 60, 62–63, 64–65, 278n10 intellectual border crossings, 126–28 Inter-­A gency Task Force to Undertake the Relocation of Families in Barrio Nabacaan, Villanueva, Misamis Oriental (Philippines), 103 Inter-­A merican Development Bank (IDB), 81, 83, 85, 286n26 Inter-­A merican Housing and Planning Center (Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento, CINVA), 54, 55, 56–57, 60, 281n34, 282n42

index 331 Intercultural Council of Claremont (ICC) neighborhood, 168, 174, 181, 189–90 international institutions, transmission of planning concepts by, 124–26 international students, 169–70, 188–89 International Technology Park Bangalore (ITPB), 17–19, 39–40, 42–43 Ishikawa Hideaki, 127–28 Italy, 248 Iwakichi Kajima, 123 Jackson, Kenneth T., 5 Jacobs, Jane, 176, 178 Jaffe, Jennifer, 181–82, 183, 184, 187, 188 Jagran (newspaper), 237–38 Japan: effects of commodity flows on urban spaces in, 122–23; high-­tech industry in, 28–29, 34; intellectual border crossings of planning tools in, 127–28 Jardine Matheson, 122–23 Jewish ­people, 200, 261 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali, 201 Joint Philippine-­A merican Commission, 101 Joseph, Gilbert, 76 Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community Action Boards, or JACs), 56, 66–67 Jurong Town Corporation (JTC), 33, 34, 35, 39, 42 Kajima Corporation, 123 Kaplan, Sam, 183–84, 187 Karachi, Pakistan, 248 Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (KEONICS), 41 Kazim, Rafia, 237, 239 Kennedy, Dane, 226 Kennedy administration, 57, 68, 71, 80–81 Kennedy Corners (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 143 Khan, Sharukh, 204–5 Kim, Steve, 209, 210 King, Anthony, 4, 118, 223, 228 kiosks, 151 Kissan, B. W., 245 Klemek, Christopher, viii Koenigsberger, Otto, 121 Korman, Matthew, 261 Krishna, S. M., 42 Kuchru, Braj, 228, 232–33 Kundu, Amitabh, 227, 228, 232

Kurgan, Laura, 262 kutcha, 228–29 Lacerda, Carlos: and aided self-­help housing, 81–82; and clientelism, 92; and COHAB, 85; and Cold War, 73; and COPEG, 86, 287n45; on homeownership, 84; as journalist, 78–79; modernization of Rio by, 78, 79–80, 82–83; and U.S. del­e­ga­tion’s tour of favelas, 71, 72; and U.S. relationship, 80–81 Laffitte, Pierre, 29, 30 Lai, David Chuenyan, 135 Lam, Henry, 142 land acquisition: and suburbanization, 243–46, 250 Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement Act (2013), 246 Land Acquisition Act (1894), 244, 246 land invasions, 50 land-­reparcelling, 245, 246 land rights, in postwar Philippines, 102–3 land use conversion, 244–46, 250 language, and transnational cir­cuits, 225–27 Lasner, Matthew Gordon, 136 Latin American City trope, 74–75 Latin American transnational and immigrant business practices, 154–55 “layouts” (urban vocabulary), 238 Lebovits, Yehuda, 207–8 Lebret, Louis-­Joseph, 82 Lee, Martin, 164 Lee Kuan Yew, 32, 39 Levitt, Peggy, 155 Lex Adickes law (1902), 245 Ley, David, 134, 136, 148, 152 Li, Wei, 201 lifestyle malls, 149, 150, 151 Lina Law (Republic Act No. 7279, Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992) (Philippines), 104 Lincoln Land Institute, 261 Linovski, Orly, 161 Lleras administration, 56–57 Lo, Lucia, 135, 139, 142 localities, as subject of urban history, 5–6 local politics, in transnationalism, 12 Longmore, T. Wilson, 54, 55, 278n14 Longstreth, Richard, 154 Lopez, Gina, 111 López, Ignacio, 171

332 index Lopez, Sarah, 155 Los Angeles, California, United States: and Chavez Ravine barrio, 178; Mexican community’s marginalization in, 166–67. See also Claremont, California Los Angeles Times, 182, 183–84 Madras, India, 233, 249 Malcolm, Richard, 175 malls: reinvention of, 149–52. See also condo malls Manbro Holdings Ontario, 138 Manila, Philippines, 98–113; criminalization of informal settlements in, 100–104; homeownership in resettlement communities of, 107–13; and slum upgrading vs. resettlement, 104–7; U.S. advisers in, 100, 101; World Bank funding in, 104–7 mapping: and digitalization, 253, 256, 258, 261–62; and segregation, 257–60, 263; and thick mapping, 254–55 Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Gordon), 259, 260 “Mapping In­equality: Redlining in New Deal Amer­i­ca” (Nelson, Winling, Marciano and Connolly), 259, 261 “Mapping Mobility in the Budapest Ghetto” (Cole and Giordano), 261 map shading techniques, 258, 260 Marathi, 232 Marciano, Richard, 259 Marcos, Ferdinand, 102–3 Market Village (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 143, 144; redesign of, 136, 150, 158–59, 162, 164, 165. See also Remington Centre Markham, Ontario, Canada, 133–65; committee on multicultural issues and planning decisions, 144, 148–49; crossover mainstream condo malls in, 157–65; development of retail condominiums in, 138–39; owner­ship structure of condo malls in, 152–57; population growth in, 139, 140; and reinvention of malls, 149–52; transformation to ethnoburb, 133–35, 140–49; zoning changes in, 133 Martínez, Daniel, 167 Martínez, Marciano, 178–79, 179–80, 188 material culture, and India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, 193; parade floats, 203; in per­for­mance stages, compared, 213–18; and physical location, 194, 195, 199–203

Mayaram, Shail, 236 McArthur, Tom, 232 McDonogh, Gary, 162–63 McNamara, Robert, 27 Meraj, Shaheen, 232 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 212 Mexican Americans. See Arbol Verde barrio Mexican In­de­pen­dence Day, 196 mi­grants: planners as, 119–22; world population of, 1 migration, 12 mimesis, 212–14, 217–18 Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japa­nese (MITI), 28 Mirams, A. E., 245 Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, 141, 155 modernism, 120–21 modernist cities, 28–29 Mohammad, Hyder, 204 Molina, Ben, 182–83 Le Monde, 27 Moore, James, 229 Moore, Susan, 118 Moscoso, Teodoro, 71, 72, 284n1 motion, contrapuntal, 218 multilocality, 137 Mumbai, India. See Bombay, India Murdie, Robert, 149 nagars, 237–38 Nagpur, India, 232 National Front government of Colombia, 52, 56, 57 National Housing Authority (NHA) (Philippines), 105–7, 109, 110 National Housing Bank (Brazil), 87, 93 natu­ral disasters, 87, 113, 120 Negrão de Lima, Francisco, 87, 95 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 40, 41 Nelson, Robert K., 259 neoliberalism, 250 New Deal, and Ciudad Kennedy, 49, 54–55, 59 new urbanism, 117–18, 157 New York City, New York, 153–54, 262 New York Daily News, 56 New York Times, 27, 38, 72, 73 NGOs, and resettlement communities, 110–13 Nightingale, Carl, viii Nishiyama Uzō, 128

index 333 nonresidential condominiums: drawbacks to, 153; emergence of, 135–36, 153. See also condo malls Oakley, David, 125 oil, spread of planning ideas through global network of, 123–24 Oldenborg Center at Pomona College, 169 Operation Bootstrap, 72, 287n45 Organ­ization of American Historians, vii Organ­ization of American States (OAS), 54, 56 Orr, J. P., 248 Out of the Barrio (Chavez), 166 Oxford Handbook of Urbanisation in India, 235 Pacific Mall (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 143–46, 145, 146, 147, 148, 163; delaying of approval for, 141; as example of mall design, 149; floor plan of, 145–­46; Heritage Town at, 146, 148; marketing to mainstream at, 150, 161; promotion of, 145, 159; social function of, 162; turnover rate of businesses at, 150 Pakistan, 200–201 Pakistan In­de­pen­dence Day Parade (Chicago, Illinois), 201, 203, 208 Palm Meadows subdivision (Bangalore, India), 18–­19, 43 Paris, 31, 124, 125–26 Park, Robert S., 172 Patel, Bimal, 236 Patiño Sepulveda, Clímaco, 63–64, 66 pedestrian malls, 154 “­People’s Capitalism” exhibit, 60–61 ­People’s Homesite and Housing Corporation (PHHC) (Philippines), 101, 103 periphery, 241. See also suburbanization Perlman, Janice, 93 philanthropy, shaping of built environment through, 124 Philippines. See Manila Pieterse, Jan, 225 La Pietra Report (Organ­ization of American Historians), vii pirate urbanization, 50 Plan Calcul, 26–27 planning history: scholarship in, 4, 118–19, 128–29; and transnational flows, 114

planning ideas, global exchange of, 114–29; and corporate networks, 122–24; and intellectual border crossings, 126–28; and international institutions, 124–26; and planners as mi­grants, 119–22; and transnational urbanism, 115–19 Point IV, 54, 55 po­liti­cal mobilization, Chinese condo malls as staging ground for, 164 polycentric capital, 125–26 Pomona College, 167, 169, 174, 302n8 population demographics: of India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, 216–17; of South Asian immigrants in Devon Ave­nue, 201–2 Prasad, Sheela, 20 Pratt, Mary Louise, 76 Presidential Assistant on Housing and Resettlement Agency (Philippines), 103 Presidential Committee for Housing and Urban Resettlement (Philippines), 103 Presidential Decree 772 (1975, Philippines), 102–3 Presidential Decree 814 (1975, Philippines), 103 Presner, Todd, 254, 255, 256 Preston, Valerie, 139, 142 Prezi (software application), 263 professional groups and associations, 121 property rights, and cooperative housing, 247, 249, 250 Prus­sian Fluchtliniengesetz (1875), 245 public housing proj­ects (state sponsored): in Colombia, 57–59; in India, 230–31; in U.S., 58, 280n26 public/private, lines between and high-­tech suburbs, 20–23, 25–26, 29–32, 42, 44–45 Puerto Rican Housing Authority, 72, 284n1 Puerto Rican Industrial Development Com­pany, 284n1, 287n45 Puerto Rico: aided self-­help housing in, 53–54, 72; homeownership programs in, 59; real estate advertisement from, 229 Puetz, Michelle, 212 Quinn, Pat, 205 racial profiling, 204–5 racism: in Ciudad Kennedy, 67; and homeownership policies, 282n47. See also segregation

334 index Raiffeisen, Friedrich Wilhelm, 247 Ramachandraiah, C., 20 Rankin, Bill, 257 real estate as primary source of wealth, 135, 136–37 redlining, 171, 179, 259 Rehabilitation Finance Corporation (Philippines), 101, 289n6 Reig, Martín, 67–68 religion: and India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, 191–93. See also Catholic Church relocation: in barrios of Southern California, 177–82; and suburbanization, 243. See also slum clearance Remington Centre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 136, 150, 158–59, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165 Remington Group, 136, 144, 150, 155, 158, 159, 162 Republic Act No. 8368 (Anti-­squatting Law Repeal Act of 1997) (Philippines), 104 research parks. See high-­tech suburbs resettlement. See slum clearance residential real estate industry, in India, 18–­19, 43 restrictive covenants, 171, 260, 264 retail condos. See condo malls Revolución en Marcha, 49 Richardson, Miles, 216 Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, 301n128; Aberdeen Centre, 156, 158, 295n3 Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, 133, 140, 142 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 71–97; administrative status of, 78; and closing of Guanabara Housing Program, 94–97; displacement and isolation in, 89–94; foreign housing aid for, 79–83; housing crisis in, 76–79; transnational design in, 88–89; transnational housing policy in, 83–88; U.S. del­e­ga­tion touring favelas of, 71–72 Rios, José Arthur, 81–82 Risager, Karen, 231 Robertson, Stephen, 260, 261 Robichaud, Andrew, 260, 261 Rocke­fel­ler, John D., 124 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 51–52, 53 Rotival, Maurice, 124 Rouse, Roger, 106 Roy, Ananya, 21 Rusk, Dean, 73

Saint Louis, Missouri, United States, 259, 260 Saint Patrick’s Day parade (Chicago, Illinois), 195 Salmen, Lawrence, 93 Sampson, Robert, 259, 261 São Paulo, Brazil, 76, 285n14 Sapang Palay Development Committee, 103 Saraswat Cooperative Housing Society, 248 Saunier, Pierre-­Yves, 9, 225, 245 Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, 133, 140, 141 Scarpitti, Frank, 159 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 68 schools: in Arbol Verde barrio, 171; in Ciudad Kennedy, 65 Schubert, Dirk, 119 Scott, James C., 69 Scripps College, 174, 302n8 segregation: and barrios, 166–68, 171–72, 175, 176–77; and big-­data, 264; by class, 66, 91; and digital mapping, 257–59, 261–63; and dot-­mapping, 260; local dynamics of, 253 Sengupta, Annis, 195–96, 197 September 11, 2001, border control ­a fter, 205 Shah, Niranjan, 204, 205 Shaw, Annapurna, 236 Shepherd, David, 254 shopping centers: reinvention of, 149–52. See also condo malls Silicon Valley, 24–25, 37. See also high-­tech suburbs Singapore, 32–39, 42–43 Singapore Science Park, 35–36 Singapore-­Suzhou Industrial Park, 39 Sino-­British Joint Declaration (1984), 136–37 Skop, Emily, 240 slum clearance, 98–113; in Brazil, 72–73, 82–83, 89–91, 95; and criminalization of informal settlements in Manila, 100–104; definition of, 98–99; and homeownership in resettlement communities, 107–13; in Indian cities, 230–31; and land rights, 102; and postwar governments, 99; re­sis­tance to, 80; upgrading vs. resettlement, 104–7; and World Bank, 104–7 slumification, 89 Slum Improvement and Resettlement Program (1978), 106–7 slums: use of term, 226–27, 237. See also barrios

index 335 Small Homes Council (SHC) of University of Illinois, 55, 56 Smiley, David, 154 Smith, Michael Peter, 115 socialism, and cooperative housing, 248 Somlai-­Fisher, Adam, 263 Sophia Antipolis, 29–32 Soto, Enrique, 167 South Africa, 230, 263 South China Morning Post, 134, 295n3 Southern California: immigrants in, 170; urban development in, 187–88. See also Arbol Verde barrio Spatial History Proj­ect, 260 Spatial Information Design Lab, 262 spatial media, 254, 256, 258, 263. See also mapping specialized trade or business districts, 162 Spellman, Mary, 189 sporting fields/stadiums, 17, 18, 87, 89–90 squatters: in Brazilian vilas, 93; in Colombia, 50–51, 66–67; criminalization of in Philippines, 102–4 Stallmeyer, John, 20 Standard Oil, 123, 124 Stanford Research Park, 24–25 Stark, Jack, 181–82, 183–84, 185, 186 state power: and high-­tech suburbs, 20–21; and suburbanization, 242–45, 250–51; within transnationalism, 10–11 Steiner, Erik, 260 Stone, Bernard, 201, 208 subaltern studies, 225, 226, 228 suburbanization: and Chinese condo malls, 142–44, 147–48, 150; and cooperative housing, 246–50; and India, 241–45, 251; in Southern California, 187–88 “suburbs,” and India, 223–40, 241–42; academic use of term, 233–35; Anglophone use of term, 229–30; and flows of cultural meaning, 223–24, 225–26; and Indian diaspora, 240; local terms for, 229–31, 236–39 swap meets, 147, 151 Syro-­Malabar Catholic Church, 191–93, 206 Taiwan: high-­tech industry in, 29, 34, 41; immigration to Canada from, 134, 141, ­ eople’s Republic of China, 164 145; and P Talmaki, S. S., 248 Talman Ave­nue Mela (fair), 216, 218

Taussig, Michael, 212 Tchen, John, 142 technoburbs, 230, 270n3 technology, globalization of, 27 technopoles, 28–32; Soviet, 273n31 telecommunications industry, 31, 42. See also high-­tech suburbs temporary housing, in Rio de Janeiro, 89, 91, 287n51 textual media, and digitalization, 253–54, 256–57, 259–60, 262–64 “­There  + ­Here: Transnationalism and Migration” proj­ect, 262 thick maps, 254, 260 Tierney, John, 100 Times Development, 141 time-­series maps, 260 Tokyo, Japan, 123, 127 Tondo (Manila, Philippines), 102–3, 105–6 Tondo Foreshore Development Authority, 103 Tondo Foreshore Land Act (1956), 102 Topalov, Christian, 228, 309n2 Torchin Plaza (Scarborough, Ontario, Canada), 141 Torgan Group, 143, 144, 145, 146 Toronto, Canada: early Chinese concentration in, 140–41. See also Greater Toronto Area; Markham, Ontario, Canada Torres, Rudy, 167, 302n12 Town Planning Institute (London, ­England), 245 town planning legislation: and cooperative housing, 248; in Japan, 127; and retail condos, 142; and suburbanization, 245–46, 251, 316n8 traffic: as concern about condo malls, 141–42, 147; as prob­lem in Manila slum relocation, 107. See also transportation ser­vices “Trail of Blood: The Movement of San Francisco’s Butchertown and the Spatial Transformation of Meat Production, 1849-1901” (Robichaud and Steiner), 260 transnational cir­cuits, 9–10; of cultural meaning, 223–24; and words, 225–27 transnational design: emergence of in Rio de Janeiro, 88–89; and high-­tech suburbs, 20, 30; and malls, 138–39, 149–52; and technopoles, 28–29. See also architecture

336 index transnational identity: and Chicago parades history, 195–96; as constantly reforming, 210–11, 217–18; and India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, 193–94, 199–203; mimesis in, 212–14 transnationalism: constitution of in par­tic­u ­lar localities, 9; governance and politics within, 10–11; local politics within, 12; scholarly interest in, 2–3. See also transnational urbanism transnational per­for­mance, and India In­de­pen­dence Day Parade, 210–19; Jesus repre­sen­ta­tion in, 191–93, 206; and mimesis, 212–13, 217–18; recurring yearly, 211 transnational urbanism: approaches to, 7–12; and built environment, 211; definitions of, 115–18; historical approach to, 74; and planning, 115–18 transportation ser­vices: in high-­tech suburbs, 17; lack of in Brazilian vilas, 92, 93; lack of in Ciudad Kennedy, 65; lack of in Manila resettlement communities, 107; in Rio de Janeiro, 77 Tribuna da Imprensa, 78–79 Trieste center, 38 Tsang, Yok-­Sing, 164 Tse, Cecilia, 156 Turner, John F. C., 95, 281n34 Turner, Victor, 218 Udupa, Sahana, 237 UNESCO, 125–26 ­unions, lack of in Ciudad Kennedy, 66 Union Square (New York, New York), 153–54 United Nations: and international housing issues, 104; and research parks, 38; and Singapore, 32; and transmission of planning ideas, 125–26 United States: and cooperative housing, 247, 250; and digital mapping, 257; retail condos in, 153, 154–55; segregation in, 263. See also specific localities United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Guanabara Housing Program in Brazil: closing of proj­ect, 95–96; and construction of vilas, 86, 87; and disaster relief, 87; high expectations of, 84–85; and Lacerda, 81; loans from, 83–84; and Moscoso, 284n1;

and transnational design, 88; Wagner Report, 92–93 United States Census (2010), 257, 258 university campuses, 90. See also Claremont Colleges University of Iowa Libraries, 259, 260 urban deconcentration, 127 urban form. See planning ideas, global exchange of urban fringe, in India: diversity of, 224, 233, 236; high-­tech centers located at, 41; local terms for, 229–31 urban history: expansion of, viii–­i x; focus of on localities, vii–­viii, 5; foundations of, 4–5 urbanism: definitions of, 117–18. See also transnational urbanism urbanization: increase in, 1; linked to regional economic development, viii; and suburbs, 150, 224 Valle, Victor, 167, 302n12 Vancouver, Canada, 133, 134, 152–53, 295n2 van Western, A. C. M., 20 Vargas, Getúlio, 73 Venezuela, 124 Vidyarthi, Sanjeev, 236 Vila Aliança (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): assessments of, 92–93, 95; construction of, 86; design of, 88; population of, 96; relocation to, 72; transnational importance of, 71–72 Vila Esperança (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): construction of, 86; design of, 88; population of, 96; transnational importance of, 72 Vila Kennedy, formerly Vila Progresso (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 284n2, 287n51; assessments of, 92–93, 94–95; construction of, 86; design of, 88; population of, 96; relocation to, 89, 92; transnational importance of, 72 Vila Progresso. See Vila Kennedy Vila São Jorge (Favela do Esqueleto) (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 89–90 Villanueva, Al, 182–83, 186, 188 villas, in India, 231, 242 vivienda de interés social (low-­income or low-­cost housing), 57–58 Votaw, Gregory, 105

index 337 Wagner report (USAID), 92–93 Wallace, Marcia, 138, 142, 147, 149, 158 Wall Street Journal, 34, 94–95 Wang, Shuguang, 135, 149 Ward, Doug, 165 Ward, Peter M., 67, 68 Ward, Stephen, 118 Ware, Caroline, 57 Warner, Sam Bass, viii wars, migration resulting from, 99, 120–21. See also Cold War ­water ser­vices: and aided self-­help programs, 56; in Ciudad Kennedy, 61–62; in high-­tech suburbs, 43; in Manila resettlement communities, 112; in Rio de Janeiro, 77, 83, 87 waterways: and Arbol Verde barrio, 171; and resettlement communities in Philippines, 111; and Rio’s favelas, 77 Wei Li, 136, 201 welfare states: and Ciudad Kennedy, 49, 59, 70; and homeownership in Manila, 109 West Barrio (Claremont, California), 170–71 Western Union, 197, 198, 305n9 Westwood Square (Mississauga, Ontario, Canada), 155–­56 white flight, 167–68, 258, 260 white ­people: and Arbol Verde barrio, 175, 180, 181–82, 187–88; and assimilation of Mexican youth, 172–73; in Devon Ave­nue

area, 200; re­sis­tance to Chinese investment in Toronto area, 141, 142–44 Wilentz, Sean, viii Winling, La Dale, 259 Winsemius, Albert, 32–33 ­women: at Devon Ave­nue parade, 216–17; and favela relocation, 90; informal ­labor by, 68 Wong, Cindy, 162–63 Wong, Joseph, 142 Wong, Stephen, 145 World Bank: and cooperative housing, 247; housing policy of, 95; and research parks, 38; and slum clearance in Philippines, 104–7; terminology used by, 234–35; and transmission of planning ideas, 125 Worldmap platform, 259 A World of Its Own: Race, ­Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (García), 168 Yeo, George, 43 Zaluar, Alba, 94 Zhuang, Cecilia, 149, 150 Zone One Tondo Organ­ization (ZOTO), 102 zoning policies: and Chinese Canadian immigrants, 133, 134, 141, 148–49, 295n2; in Claremont barrio, 182, 183–84, 186–87; and mapping techniques, 260

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A c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

As we have traveled the long road from scholarly concept to edited collection, we have depended on a broad range of participants, institutions, administrators, editors, and staff without whom none of this would have been pos­si­ble. For their indispensable support for the conference in Albuquerque, at the University of New Mexico we would like to thank V ­ irginia Scharff of the Center for the Southwest, Chris Wilson at the School of Architecture and Planning, Mark Peceny of the C ­ ollege of Arts and Sciences, and Melissa Bokovoy in the Department of History. In addition to the ­people whose writings compose this volume, we wish to thank Daniel Arreola, Muchan Park, Roger Rouse, and Lucien Wilson for bringing their expertise, experience, and sheer intellectual energy to the proj­ect. Thanks also go to the gradu­ate students of the University of New Mexico’s History 678, “Transnationalizing Urban History,” for their enthusiasm and insight that semester in the seminar room and beyond. Tom Sugrue has been a stalwart ally and rigorous interlocutor from start to finish. He interrogated and encouraged us as we wrote and revised what he half in jest and half in earnest called our “manifesto,” and he helped us put vari­ous drafts in front of our colleagues at national meetings of the Urban History Association, the Social Science History Association, and, with help from Tim Neary and Tim Gilfoyle, the Organ­ization of American Historians. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Bob Lockhart exceeded even his sterling reputation. He expressed early interest in our subject ­matter and ex­ ere ready with the peditiously arranged for an advance contract. When we w full draft, he lined up three extremely sharp readers to whom we are grateful for their thorough and honest evaluations and suggestions for revision. And throughout he offered his keen editorial eye and logistical guidance about ­every line of text and each step of the publication pro­cess. The incomparable ­people of the Prince­ton University–­Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities

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helped shape our thinking through discussions of the subject and close readings of key parts of the text, for which we express heartfelt thanks to principal investigators Alison Isenberg and Bruno Carvalho, proj­ect man­ag­er Aaron Shkuda, and fellows Pedro Alonso, Elsa Devienne, and Joseph Heathcott. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of California at San Diego provided subvention support for the program of illustrations in this volume, for which we offer our sincerest thanks. Last but certainly not least, ­family: our parents, who ­were born in four countries on three continents, and our spouses and children, who transcend borders of all kinds but still picture well-­loved couches and small, tidy kitchens in Albuquerque and San Diego when they dream of home.