Francisco Quintana
Urban Cold War: Development Politics of US housing Operation in the Third World during the 1970s

This research traces the history of an urban development operation implemented by the United States on a geopolitical scale. It shows how architecture and urbanism in developing countries across the world were instrumentalised to fortify the conflict lines of Cold War confrontations. One aim of my thesis is to explore the role that large-scale housing constructions –argued to bring development and modernisation to the ‘Third World’– played in this confrontation. Another one is to examine how the US helped to promote alternative architectural practices of self-help as a rapid and low-cost strategy to provide housing but were aimed at disseminating liberal ideas of capitalism propagated under the slogans of freedom and democracy.

In this thesis, I particularly analyse the World Bank’s Sites and Services housing program, deployed through modularised design that was implemented in more than thirty developing countries in America, Africa and Asia between 1972 and 1981. The fact that there are similarities in the architectural features of these housing programmes makes it possible to compare the operation’s impact on built and social environments transnationally across the Global South.

This research examines several institutional, national, and personal archives –such as the World Bank, USAID and John Turner’s files. While looking at these collections, this thesis builds on a series of new interviews held with architects, planners and politicians of the period. It investigates newspapers and specialised literature such as magazines, journals, critical reviews, and exhibition catalogues, among other documents.

While the thesis sets out its analysis to regard the Cold War period along its dichotomy of ‘exploiters and victims’, it will also show the ambivalent nature of the conflict lines in the relationship between the US and developing countries. As such, this research explores new stories of collaboration, resistance and negotiation engaged in the post-war period.