This project discusses how ideas regarding urban planning circulated between North and South America between the 1940s and 1970s, deeply transforming cities across the continent. As the imagination of an urban future in the Americas ventured increasingly further away from European schools of urbanism from the 1940s on, planners in North and South America engaged in an exchange of practical experiences and theoretical approaches focused on functionalist regional planning, which would come to define the tenets of city development in the twentieth century. US-based planners such as Francis Violich, Maurice Rotival, José Luís Sert, Robert Moses, Lloyd Rodwin and John Friedmann significantly advanced their careers planning cities and creating academic programs and institutions in Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and Brazil. Through their work, the concept of integrated regional urban planning held a powerful influence on key development projects for Caracas, Ciudad Guayana, Santiago, Bogotá, Chimbote, Havana and São Paulo, among several others. In the political context of Cold War domestic authoritarianism, economic liberalism, and US international aid, South American cities often posed fewer obstacles for the execution of planning ideas, mostly when compared to urban spaces in the United States, where the decline of New Deal domestic policies made their execution less likely.
While literature on the history of urban planning largely acknowledges the influence of US planners and aid agencies on South American cities, it often structures its narrative on dependency theories that neglect the transformative character these experiences had on both ends of the circulation of ideas. The years Maurice Rotival spent planning New Haven in the early 1940s, for instance, deeply transformed his plan for an extensive renewal of Caracas in 1946, as he moved further away from modern French design ideas, and upheld a pragmatic American doctrine to urban development. Upon his return to New Haven following his time in Caracas, however, Rotival had become highly aware of the political challenge planners needed to overcome to implement their projects. His practical experience in the South American country had also further developed his functionalist approach to urban planning – a consequence of planning entire cities anew to reproduce a booming oil-based economy. Like Rotival, Violich, Sert, Moses, Rodwin and Friedman were involved in South American urban planning projects that would, in turn, inform their approach to the urban crisis across the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.
This project is being developed by Eduarda Araujo and Professor Lizabeth Cohen.
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