Urban studies for conspiracy theorists or Maoists
The Ford Foundation and the creation of a discipline
In 1959, Martin Meyerson (of Harvard) and Lloyd Rodwin (of MIT) received a grant of $675,000 ($6.9 million in 2022 dollars) to institute the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard University (JCUS), the forerunner of today’s Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard Kennedy School.1 The two illumined scholars appealed to Paul Ylvisaker, the head of the Ford Foundation’s Public Affairs Program, for their funding, finding in Ylvisaker a similarly conscientious technocrat who disdained the rigidity of urban planning and saw in the new social sciences, particularly sociology and behavioral psychology, the possibility of a satisfactorily productive partnership, all united against the already-diagnosed intractable issues of juvenile delinquency, urban blight, and social degradation.2
The Ford Foundation had began in the late 1930s as a glorified tax shelter, before a massive expansion following the deaths in 1947 of Henry Ford, Sr. and his son Edsel which immediately catapulted the Foundation into the great heights of American philanthropic organizations – and with almost no idea what to do with all the money (which was, at the time, 90% of non-voting shares in Ford Motor Company). Seeking guidance, San Francisco lawyer and RAND consultant H. Rowan Gaither (and later president of the Foundation) prepared a report which advised the Foundation orient its vast endowment towards fulfilling five exceedingly vague directives: “the establishment of peace”, “strengthening democracy”, “strengthening the economy”, “education in a democratic society”, and “improved scientific knowledge of individual behavior and human relations”.3 Under Gaither’s tenure as president, the Foundation undertook investments in ‘practical’ multi-year projects in collaboration with universities and other institutions, enshrining a long-haul “moving the needle” approach. We can argue back and forth as to whether the Foundation’s by-degrees method was by design or by necessity – the International Directory of Company Histories writes that Gaither’s presidency was defined by “intense scrutiny by Communist-hunter Senator Paul McCarthy” prompting the sale, in 1956, of 22% of its Ford shares on the public market, the proceeds of which were awarded “‘noncontroversial’ recipients such as 600 liberal arts colleges, 3,500 nonprofit hospitals, and 44 private medical schools”4 in key congressional districts.5 Ylvisaker’s investment in JCUS came on the heels of these noncontroversial investments, and can be read as a decisive statement in favor of the new order: hereafter, “urban problems” can and will be solved with academics at the helm, those strange creatures prepossessed of the singular power to unite theory and practice.
The JCUS was to convene a multidisciplinary who’s-who of “experts from all fields” who “would be welcome”, writes Christopher Loss, “but especially experts ‘from fields not previously involved in urban studies’ — education, philosophy, business, and, in particular, the social sciences”, all working out of a building to be “modeled on the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto”.6 The intent of their fledgling center was “to inject the field of city planning with a new multidisciplinary method”, thus inaugurating the discipline of “urban studies” as a chimera.7 Meyerson and Rodwin were both animated by a hope to soften the blow of the Tugwell-esque planners of old, in light of mounting criticism of urban renewal’s “slum clearances”, and in their place forge a new urban clerk for a new post-war world: “unlike old-school master planners who thought only about the built environment, or latter-day advocacy planners who worried only about the people, urban studies offered a third way that claimed to treat people and the physical environment as constitutive parts of the planning process”.8
To say that the previous generation of New Deal technocrats, albatrossed with their uncomfortably radical ideas, had by 1959 fallen from grace was an understatement, replaced with a sort of slicked-back venal Keynesianism with a fetish for industrial relations. The planning schools of the time, along with mounting popular sentiment, “can be characterized by an increasing amount of anecdotal and empirical evidence of design failure and harm to the city through rebuilding and urban renewal practices”. As such, the Ford Foundation (as well as Rockefeller) turned its attentions and its vast treasury at least partially toward the new attempts to solve the forever crisis of the “urban condition” via an avalanche of funding and research centers into the urban sphere,9 beginning with an exhaustingly comprehensive study of New York City’s economic landscape in the mid-1950s.10
To combat the rising threat of the inner-city underclass (or really, the rising fear of a suburbanizing middle class), the Foundation developed a program in “urban and regional problems” by identifying strategic points of investment which could be activated to combat and extirpate the most cancerous elements of the rotting cities. To this end, the Foundation invested some $75 million over 2 decades in interdisciplinary centers and applied research, including investing $5.4 million for the creation of the still-extant thinktank Resources for the Future, which at the time dealt less with climate change and resource scarcity and more with the need to create a “healthy” inner-city environment.11
Vitiated by Ford Foundation money, the JCUS hit the ground running. The output from the Center in those early days served to set the agenda of urban studies as it stands to this day. In the first few years of the Center’s existence, it published Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City (1960), Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), Sam Bass Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs (1962), Edward Banfield and John Q. Wilson’s City Politics (1963), Martin Anderson’s The Federal Bulldozer (1964), William Alonso’s Location and Land Use (1964), Bernard Frieden’s The Future of Old Neighborhoods (1964) and finally, Charles Abrams’ Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (1966). Of these, Lynch’s and Alonso’s texts can be reasonably argued to form the basis of urban studies in general; the sociology of wonderment from the former (cities are beautiful crystallizations of human activity that have the greatest legibility as private systems of meaning) paired with the neoclassical economics of reaction from the latter. It should come as no surprise that the Foundation’s authors, architects, researchers, and so on were the original “pioneers” of what we now call “bottom-up urbanism” or “cities for people” or whatever bullshit you prefer.12 That the Foundation, Rodwin in particular, sought to ‘prove’ their theories (to hilariously catastrophic effect) via the construction of colonial new city outposts in countries like Venezuela and Yugoslavia, can also be seen as forerunner of the contemporary primacy of a braindead empiricism of empire that borrows its fundamental logic from the neoclassical economics it protects: when confronted by real life, blame it for not conforming to the model. Democracy qua individualism and capitalism: the two lodestars of Foundation urban studies.
The story thus far: at a crucial point in the development of urban scholarship, the Ford Foundation applied a significant amount of money in order to steer urban academics in a particular way – capital from one of the great Molochs leavened into the universities during a time in which hatred of the left, of Communism, was perhaps even more at the forefront than it is today. Posed in the form of a question, we could ask: what are the ramifications of “direct” “market” “entry” into a particular discipline which empowered certain professors placed at certain universities with the power to condense, direct, shape, and develop a new line of theorization ex nihilo?
Note that urban studies is not alone here; it would be hard to find a single discipline in the “social sciences” that wasn’t at least in some way helped along by Ford money, from international studies (funded CENIS at MIT) and area studies ($270 million to thirty-four universities for area and language studies from 1953—1966),13 urban economics,14 and GIS (supported the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory of Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis). The connections between all of the above, urban studies included, are all bright lines connecting the Foundation to the State Department, RAND, and all the other elder gods of America's bloody Cold War empire, all involved in their own way in the perpetuation of a world-spanning war machine that continues churning into the present day.15
When it comes to the discipline as such, it behooves one to realize that to speak of “urbanism” at all, in the American context, is rather a construct of the Cold War. The “systems of meaning” type approach which undergirds it was introduced by Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics and made twee by Kevin Lynch, and they, perhaps unknowingly so, established the discipline as one in which urbanity is about experience, and experience is the province of psychology; and where class is not relevant. Thus all that there is left to do is to hew closely as possible to the established and appropriate amount of bright-eyed wonder at the particular ways in which individuals around the world attempt to make their brutal exploitation slightly more bearable.
Which is not actually a “joint center” at all anymore, with MIT leaving the project in 1988 (following the name change from “Urban” to “Housing Studies” in 1985.
The Public Affairs Program had only really arrived at its focus on urban issues after a period of relative senescence after about five years of basically putzing along with nothing to do. See O’Connor, A. (1996). Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight against Poverty: The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program. Journal of Urban History, 22(5), 586–625. https://doi.org/10.1177/009614429602200503, 594.
Study Committee. (1950). Report of the Trustees of the Ford Foundation. https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2411/1950-annual-report.pdf
Pederson, J. P. (2000). International Directory of Company Histories. St. James Press.
O’Connor, A. (1996). Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight against Poverty: The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program. Journal of Urban History, 22(5), 586–625. https://doi.org/10.1177/009614429602200503, 591.
Loss, C. P. (2021). “The City of Tomorrow Must Reckon with the Lives and Living Habits of Human Beings”: The Joint Center for Urban Studies Goes to Venezuela, 1957-1969. Journal of Urban History, 47(3), 623–650. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144218808752, 630.
Ibid., 624.
Ibid.
Laurence, P. L. (2006). The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, The Rockefeller Foundation and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955–1965. Journal of Urban Design, 11(2), 145–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574800600644001, 146.
Winnick, L. (1995). The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved. Cityscape, 1(3), 104.
Birch, E. L. (2011). Making Urban Research Intellectually Respectable: Martin Meyerson and the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University 1959–1964. Journal of Planning History, 10(3), 219–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/1538513211412483, 225-226.
Birch, E. L. (2011). From CIAM to CNU: The roots and thinkers of modern urban design. In T. Banerjee & A. Loukaitou-Sideris (Eds.), Companion to Urban Design. Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=668432, 19.
Cumings, B. (1997). Boundary displacement: Area studies and international studies during and after the cold war. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 29(1), 6–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.1997.10409695, 10.
Perloff, H. S. (1973). The Development of Urban Economics in the United States. Urban Studies, 10(3), 293. As Louis Winnick notes, the Committee of Urban Economics is the birthplace of “moving chain” housing theory, which as you may already know, I hate more than anything in the world.
For more on this horrible tangled web of ghouls, look no further than Light, J. S. (2003). From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America. JHU Press.