The Headquarters and the Field

Expertise Networks and Communication Channels

Expertise constituted a cornerstone of the UN, permeating the organization and its organs, as Lucia Allais has argued.3 Legal consultants, career diplomats, and League of Nations veterans participated in committees negotiating the institutional frameworks of the UN organs. Architects, planners, engineers, construction companies, but also military technicians and acousticians, advised the Headquarters Planning Office on the building of their spaces. ECOSOC, the council that sought to address social issues, considered expertise a resource for resolving global economic and social inequalities. ECOSOC frameworks divided the globe into a developed industrialized world with access to expertise and technical knowledge and an underdeveloped decolonizing world in need of said technique and expertise to manage national resources, production, and administration. Following the signing of the UN Charter, ECOSOC officials started investigating possible ways to create and manage a network of vetted experts that enmeshed the institution with the field, organizing its geographies of development.

Professional organizations, anxious to see their advocacy organs partaking in the reconfiguration of the political and economic world order, also started organizing on the ground. In conferences and symposia, engineers, scientists, and scholars advocated openly for a new scientific internationalism centered on the circulation of expertise. These efforts built on earlier attempts to circulate and share scientific discovery on a global scale, while claiming a professionalized class of experts as its leading force.4 The idea was that scientific internationalism—the making and sharing of scientific inquiry—was world-making, in the sense that it required (and in fact created) community around the circulation of knowledge, regardless of national boundaries. Those experts, who had seen their professional organizations expanding and reconfiguring their networks in international meetings and congresses, promoted a view of the world where expertise and technical knowledge traveled globally as equalizers of political and economic inequities.

These parallel efforts came to a head in 1946 when the International Technical Congress (ITC) critically shifted the conversation toward the global problem of the built environment. Taking place at the Centre Marcelin-Berthelot in the governmental heart of Paris (the National Assembly was just minutes away), the ITC elevated housing and the built environment to a major aspect of its development agenda, while placing engineering and expertise at the core of the solution. Architects and planners, who had been closely following the discussions around reconstruction and economic development in war-affected European and decolonizing countries, were among those professional groups that hoped for a permanent position within the UN and its networks. If the UN opened its own platforms (construed inside and outside the organization’s and its specialized agencies’ headquarters) to these experts’ organizations, then these architects, civil engineers, planners, and structural engineers would set in motion the entire project of institutional internationalism, along with its governmental technocracies, liberal ideologies, and global bureaucracies. To that end, they agreed on a positivist plan for a battalion of associations wherein engineers and experts (among them architects and planners) would have the opportunity to meet and build international professional networks: a World Engineering Federation, a UN Technical Staff, an administration for housing and community planning, an International Institution of Scientific Management, and International Technical Schools.5

Presenting technocracy as the way forward for the UN, the engineers and technicians in attendance insisted that technique—unlike other means of internationalism such as diplomacy, or legislation, or even culture—did not involve politics. Focusing on technique, they argued, would allow the UN to move beyond political interests, economic hurdles, and national boundaries to reach and establish a presence inside other countries’ interiors. Technique could be the vehicle of internationalism that culture could not be. The ultimate goal of the Technical Congress was to forge an operative channel within the United Nations and its specialized agencies that would effectively bring engineers, architects, and planners within the organization. The more immediate concern was to locate which UN organs and specialized agencies would take on the organization of technical intervention in the decolonizing world. Participants’ answer was that ECOSOC should establish a center for the study of housing and town planning, devising a more permanent place for planners and architects in the organization. The Housing and Town and Country Planning (HTCP) Section of the UN Secretariat Department of Social Affairs was in many ways a response to this call. Representatives from CIAM and the International Federation for Town and Country Planning (IFTCP), who had been hoping for a more robust participation within the United Nations, were excited to see engineers and technical experts advocating for a concerted effort to address the built environment.6 Individual planners and architects, such as Constantinos Doxiadis, also supported such claims (Figure 4.1).

Yet the focus on North American and Western European expertise, especially within the Technical Congress in Paris, told a different story, revealing how ingrained in colonial projects the professional development of experts was. The Congress’s almost 130 presentations and reports on engineering, management of resources, scientific management of labor, standardization, planning, and public works, as well as telecommunications, transportation, and power grids, revered the state of engineering and technical expertise in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The knowledge circulation the Congress articulated was mostly unidirectional, describing technical transfers from North America and Western Europe to the decolonizing world and rarely vice versa. Arturo Escobar points to this very asymmetry, arguing that development rhetoric interpellated North American and Western European economies to be the models after which the world should be reconstructed and organized, actively producing the “Third World” as a category and a region awaiting development.7 In this sense, the focus on expertise and technical knowledge replicated the power imbalances already built into the institution, regardless of the presentation of equality.

The UN’s response to questions of the built environment and its infrastructures was initially uneven and only partially addressed by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the aid agency administering relief predominantly in Europe. UNRRA, however, offered an organizational roadmap for development projects that United Nations bureaucrats decided to follow, with the caveat that any expectations of financial and material support would be eliminated as unsustainable for the organization.8 Instead, setting aside questions of capital and equality, UN officials foregrounded the role of technical knowledge over the management of resources in development projects, in a sense presenting technique itself as a resource. This emphasis on expertise as the cornerstone of UN development projects, but also the UN edifice at large, resonated with a wish to base the new world order on research, rationality, technique, and a global circulation of knowledge, with the organization and its specialized agencies as clearinghouses at the center.

To explore the tools and systems that the organization needed to discuss the built environment on a multinational scale, the UN Secretariat invited American planner Jacob Crane to compile a study for international action; he responded with a robust program for expertise transfer and technical exchange. Crane, who served as housing consultant for the UN in its efforts to formalize a technical assistance program, proposed that the Secretariat install a “team of experts” on the built environment to guide any requests from policy to “construction and management.”9 He argued that the UN’s approach to development should focus on establishing a communications infrastructure and not on offering financial support. Building new “channels of communication,” as Crane referred to them, constituted the first step toward an effective and economically feasible assistance project. These communication channels included research projects, dedicated periodicals, manuals, and of course conferences and seminars, always with the goal of educating publics.10

In reports and memoranda, UN bureaucrats and external consultants articulated a similar desire for expert networks, referring, like Crane, to “channels of communication,” either as the main objective or as a foundational step in the organization’s outreach and development projects. One important channel was that between the UN and national governments.11 The goal was to ensure that the positionalities of new states and their governments shifted toward development and modernity. In all cases, there was a differential—a difference in power, resources, and knowledge—that activated each channel. There was a part of the world that in the mind of UN bureaucrats was lacking and a part of the world ready to provide. This differential logic enabled the project of development and forged a place for the UN, endowing the organization with authority while addressing territories and publics.

The figure of the network quickly emerged as a form of social and organizational structure that would help UN officials to connect the physical headquarters with strategic nodes of expertise exchange in the postcolonial world, namely field offices and conference sites. In this sense networks—systems of connections across space, disciplinary divisions, and professional institutions—became the lifeblood of the organization. Apart from potentially advancing public causes, the UN’s networks could also bring more work and connections back to the UN. And in becoming the organizational hub through which connections are made, the UN also further legitimized itself and its operations outside the Headquarters.

But the work of the network, as political theorists and sociologists show, is more complex than its schematic abstraction suggests.12 “Nodes” and “hubs,” Manuel Castells argues, organize the “network society” and the space of flows of capital and knowledge, accessed largely by “dominant, managerial elites.”13 Driven by a two-fold desire to diffuse and centralize the operations that drive their growth, human, institutional, and telecommunications networks are all foundationally uneven. Not all connections are equally valuable to members, and not all hubs hold the same significance within those networks. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note, networks—and in particular institutional networks of expertise—require a power differential to set in motion the movement from one hub to the next (in the case of the UN, from the Headquarters to field offices). They claim that this recuperation of difference is foundational to supranational agencies that step in to manage and negotiate the movement of expertise and capital. They argue that the communication networks springing from international institutions, apart from being necessary to “the movement of globalization,” ultimately legitimize and authorize the global institutions managing those interconnections.14 In this sense, communication networks and global institutions were interconnected and codependent in ways that the physical, political, and social design of the Headquarters anticipated.

To manage those channels of communication, in 1949 ECOSOC and the UN General Assembly launched a new agency, the Technical Assistance Administration (TAA), with the charge to coordinate research on economic development and public administration across the globe. Unlike former structures of colonial planning, the TAA guidelines required formal requests from member states for the UN to initiate technical assistance projects. After invitation, the TAA would send experts to consult with local agencies on the right course of action.15 By officially taking space within the UN Secretariat Tower, TAA officials would be part of both the UN’s physical and metaphorical global interior, mobilizing resources and expert networks to effectively reach the field. TAA administrators at the central Headquarters oversaw and instigated projects in member states’ interiors, actively establishing communication channels in the form of experts and reports moving back and forth. Bringing citizens from the decolonizing world into the UN’s publics expanded the cultures of assembly from inside the Headquarters into the world outside it. The TAA, firmly grounded in the UN’s physical global interior, would become an agent in the creation and expansion of the UN’s networks of expertise (Figure 4.2).16

UN administrators used the TAA to refine and strengthen relationships between the UN and its specialized agencies, nongovernmental associations, and private foundations, recalibrating the organization’s family of networks. Following resolutions that the General Assembly passed to support development in “war devastated areas,” “developing countries,” and “dependent” territories, the UN Secretariat invited specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) into diagnostic conversations to determine their involvement and contribution to TAA activities.17 The stated goal was to handle operational overlaps in the production of an institutional network dealing with the administrative problems, destabilized economies, crumbling infrastructures, and housing shortages in the areas of the world the TAA would address.

Comments by Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside, a career diplomat and the TAA’s Director-General, show how technical diplomacy was an effective but also risky tool for the UN:

International technical assistance is a new form of diplomacy, complicated by three factors: established usages do not exist; most of the technical problems involved are inextricably intertwined with political and social problems; and many envoys are not schooled in the techniques of diplomacy while at the same time they have to interfere more directly in the affairs of the recipient countries than did the old-time diplomats.18

The pretext for the TAA’s mingling with internal national affairs was of course the “people”—or the “welfare of the peoples,” as Keenleyside claimed, even when the agency intervened with administrative and governmental structures.19 However, the TAA did not directly reach publics and local communities. Similarly to the UN General Assembly, the agency aimed for connecting the professional class with the organization, hoping these professionals would transmit technique to the general public. In this sense, the TAA was a diffusion mechanism mobilized by the idea that the world community awaited the UN’s intervention to find its place within the new world order—a fantasy that drove the expansion of the organization.

Yet there were cultural and social differences to tend. Margaret Mead, who at the time consulted for UNESCO, proposed the management of those differences in terms of communication systems.20 For Mead, these differentials called for the establishment of feedback loops for intellectual exchanges. Similarly to Jacob Crane, she advocated for “channels of communication” between the “East” and the “West” to enlarge the “enlightenment” of both and bring the two into an equilibrium—an argument that she would also make at the Macy Conferences in the 1950s.21 This orientalist analysis of cultural difference in terms of East and West resonated with earlier colonial orderings of the world, but Mead, unlike her predecessors, envisioned a syncretic future.22 She stipulated rural representation in international organizations, as well as calling for the “institutions of the city” to “be extended deep into the life of the village.”23 In many ways, diagnosing the difference between urbanity and rurality activated developmentalist projects and the network-building they required.

Mead was not alone in that. UN and UNESCO officials targeted villages not only as primary sites in need of technical assistance and fundamental education, but also as the sites where international organizations would install their physical and metaphorical platforms. In 1951, the Preparatory Commission of UNESCO opened its first physical regional center in Patzcuaro, Mexico. Courier, UNESCO’s main publication, called Patzcuaro “the world’s most unusual social experiments,” a “laboratory” for “rural educators” that sought to “help them to do things themselves.”24 For a bit over a year, UN experts taught fifty-two “students” from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and other countries in South and Central America the techniques of training villagers back home in what the organization understood to be a better version of village life. Students practiced fundamentals and demonstrated agricultural techniques for populations in a network of neighboring villages, emulating the teaching methods to bring back to their countries later on. Once back home, the students would reinscribe UNESCO’s methods on the ground as expert carriers of change (Figure 4.3).25 In the erasure of eidetic difference between the “laboratory” and the site of implementation, UNESCO was actually entangling global models with local actors, and in doing so turning the world community into its pupils. But the students would not only learn technique, but also how to enter those international spaces as appointed national representatives of their countries and how to interact with one another—in short, they would learn how to form an international social space with UN programs at its center. The students of this new global reality would play a twofold role: first, to carry change beyond the temporal and spatial realities of UN–organized seminars; and second, to naturalize imports of expertise and technology as already local. It was people who would travel and forge the UN’s new paths, translating and infusing standardized methods for everyday life and building with local traditions. And while participating in the UN’s vision for the future of the postcolonial world, those very students of development would enact the UN’s cultures of assembly directly in these field sites, forming part of a metaphorical, expanded global interior.

Early technical reports targeted rural sites for technical assistance. In 1951, a group of experts reached South Asia to survey housing conditions for low-income families in the “humid tropics.” The three-month expedition traveled to India, Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore and Malaya (the Philippines were included in the report without the experts visiting). In the eyes of planners Jacob Crane, Jacobus Thijsse, and the rest of the team the trip confirmed the rural—which they registered as “underdeveloped”—status of much of South Asia, but also produced South and Southeast Asia as a cohesive region with similar planning problems, requiring, or so the team hoped, analogous solutions. The results echoed reports reaching the TAA from missions in Latin America. The problem of housing, the advisers observed, extended beyond the sites of major cities to include villages where the vast majority lived in “substandard quarters” without “proper” infrastructure for food storage and personal hygiene. But more importantly, the report urged the UN to prioritize rural populations and their built environments within its development agenda, outlining two main lines of interrogation for future seminars and exhibitions: villages and self-help programs. The built environment gave the UN a reason to activate channels of communication that would permit the TAA to reach South Asian countries and their interiors. These networks, although predominantly concerning development and education projects, extended the media architectures installed at the UN’s physical Headquarters, but this time with experts carrying the organization outwards, and seminars inviting international participants to enact the modalities of UN’s global publics.

The Seminar as Medium

Once the TAA was established and its mission outlined, scientists, technical experts, and architects set out to convene conferences for the reception of the UN’s mission outside its Headquarters. As historians of international relations discuss, conferences and congresses offered rich sites where industrialists, diplomats, and scientists tested and figured out the contours of an operative global community.26 These conferences often used the visual vocabulary that the UN had developed for its Headquarters: gray-blue banners, the UN logo, flags. But in reality, these platforms—often in the form of workshops, seminars, and conferences—did not emulate the Headquarters’ global interiors to the letter. What was exported instead were the cultures of assembly and spatial structures that architects had helped build within the organization.

In 1951, the UN Bulletin called for new “international channels of information” for a “fundamental education” in South and Southeast Asia, arguing that the presence of more experts would support rural areas in their emancipation from colonial rule and the dependencies it had installed.27 Yet these fights for sovereignty were coming to fruition during the Cold War. So it was fortuitous that in 1952 the Indian government reached out to the UN for assistance in organizing an exhibition for its growing building sector.

Following independence and partition, the Indian government under the guidance of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize the economy and infrastructure. Nehru’s “development planning,” as Partha Chatterjee shows, invested in technique so as to claim a place “outside politics,” and hence more easily become “an instrument of politics,” especially in relationship to Nehru’s nationalist anti-colonial plan for India’s self-determination.28 Community planning was one of these strategies that allowed the Indian government to implement larger reforms in the economy, as well as to work toward a welfare state. Nehru, of course, was not the first to implicate Indian statehood with infrastructure and technique. In fact, Gyan Prakash reminds us, the British colonial presence had invested in modern technique and science to seize territory and govern its peoples (he refers in particular to railways).29 What was new about Nehru’s technocracy was the intertwining of technique with national anti-colonial governmentality.30 For Nehru, however, a collaboration with the UN’s TAA would validate his development plan and present it on a global stage.

The executive secretary of ECAFE, Palamadai S. Lokanathan, saw in the TAA a well of resources for South Asia at large and brought the Indian government’s request to the UN Department of Social Affairs. The TAA and the Indian government reached an agreement to co-organize a conference in 1952 that soon transformed into a more robust event with workshops, seminars, and an exhibition component to take place in 1954 in New Delhi.31 Advocating for the proposal, Ernest Weissmann mobilized TAA funds for an International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing and a United Nations Regional Seminar on Housing and Community Improvement in New Delhi.32 Weissmann’s ambition was to amplify HTCP’s presence in Asia by helping bring to fruition a regional nongovernmental organization for housing that would attract interested regional authorities and planning departments, while encouraging contact with the UN.33 The Regional Seminar and International Exhibition in India offered an opportunity for the UN–affiliated TAA to sort out administrative procedures and protocols, although, as Ijlal Muzaffar notes, TAA projects continued to exist in a state of “perpetual management” that asked the advisers to coproduce its administration.34 Most importantly, the seminar and exhibition enabled the UN’s TAA and ECAFE to build bridges, cultivate connections, and establish a presence in the political and economic scene of South and Southeast Asia.

Seminars differed from exhibitions, however, in that they operated as zones of exchange. Building on the outcomes of the Progressive Education Association, a U.S. educational reform group, and its Committee on Workshops that had published reports on effective training, UNESCO launched a research program on “techniques” of convening.35 “An international seminar is an intensive short study course . . . aimed towards an exchange of experiences and knowledge of techniques on a strictly defined subject,” a UN observer of UNESCO seminars reported. Although similar to a “workshop,” the observer continued, an “international seminar” was not a conference or a cycle of lectures. Seminars worked toward defining “directives for further action and progress.” They outlined “plans to be carried out,” after an intense focus of “trained minds” and “exchange of opinions.”36

Guidelines for “regional seminars” delineated the financial responsibility of each part, with the UN covering costs for international experts and the host country costs for national representatives and facilities. The UN guidelines also indicated space requirements, necessary equipment and personnel—translators, interpreters, typists—to support seminars on the ground.37 In fact, such was the conflation between the global spaces inside and outside the UN’s physical Headquarters that seminar participants often anticipated the treatment and amenities of the UN Headquarters. The perceived informality of seminars took after the “study groups” and committee meetings that the UN and its organs had been setting up.38 The same “cultures of assembly” that ordered the workings of the physical Headquarters, then, also organized the structures of these international platforms.

At the same time that the UN aspired to organize the postcolonial world via regional seminars, particularly within the context of technical assistance,39 the Indian government was striving to become a political and economic hub for South Asia. The suggestion of using a regional seminar to network India with other South and Southeast Asian countries could not have arrived at a better time: Jawaharlal Nehru’s plan for a strong Indian presence within an Asian coalition required the building of regional networks. But presenting India as the regional center of South Asia was only one part of the equation; the other part was to bring the UN in immediate contact with Indian projects in front of a South Asian audience of administrators, politicians, and planners, to open the possibility of a different set of alliances.

To direct the UN’s Regional Seminar and to advise the Indian government on the International Exhibition, Weissmann suggested Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, who at the time was looking for ways into the UN’s housing and planning work. Born in South Africa, raised in England, educated in Germany, well-traveled and cosmopolitan, Tyrwhitt not only had the capacity to traverse informational networks, but also to expand them.40 She was a teacher (she led a war correspondence course in the United Kingdom and taught in a number of Canadian and U.S. institutions), and as such she understood the UN’s educational imperative. Being entangled with the main professional associations for architecture and planning of her time (CIAM and the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction are just two examples), Tyrwhitt could also bring modernist debates on planning and architecture into contact with conversations on development and internationalism, important qualities for a UN technical adviser on a mission to connect developing peripheries with world organizational centers.41 Intrigued by her work, Weissmann had first recruited Tyrwhitt for a seminar and exhibition on housing and community improvement to tentatively take place in Morocco, cohosted by CIAM and the UN.42 When funding fell through, he redirected her to the seminar and exhibition in New Delhi, India.43

Similarly to other technical advisers, Tyrwhitt started the preparation work for her role as director of the 1954 UN Seminar and Exhibition by weaving a network of experts and planners, while reinforcing the centrality of institutional hubs of internationalism on the way. Unlike UN administrators at the Headquarters, technical advisers like Tyrwhitt actively produced the links and edges of the network, introducing new centers of activity and their institutions to the stratified world order that the UN Secretariat was undertaking. From Toronto to New Delhi, Tyrwhitt roamed the administrative and metropolitan centers of old and new world orders, gathering institutional knowledge and contacts.

UN–appointed directors of TAA projects addressing the built environment often tapped into IFTCP and CIAM networks of planners and architects, but also pursued connections with UN officials, building relations with local experts. In the temporary headquarters in New York, Tyrwhitt acclimated to the organizational realities of the UN, while sketching a possible roster of speakers and collaborators. In London, she mapped out the political and planning scene of newly independent India with the help of architects and planners, while pooling imperial knowledge on South Asian housing and planning for the UN. In Geneva, where UN officials were appropriating League of Nations infrastructure, she met with representatives of specialized agencies and discussed ways of opening the platforms of the seminar and exhibition to them.

During those initial conversations, Tyrwhitt, who understood how networks spring from and expand through conferences and seminars since her involvement at the organization of CIAM congresses, used the Regional Seminar to plan the networks she hoped it would reinforce within the UN.44 By the time she set foot in India in early June 1953, she had an outline for a regional seminar with international experts and some thoughts for an exhibition. She organized the seminar discussions around three themes, each headed by UN technical advisers and discussion leaders: Jacob Crane, with Rafael Picó and Constantinos Doxiadis, led the conversation on Housing and Community Improvement; Charles Abrams, with Frederick Adams and Arieh Sharon (who replaced the Tennessee Valley Authority’s David Lilienthal), led the panels on Physical Planning; and Robert Fitzmaurice, with Jacobus Thijsse and Anthony Atkinson, led the discussion on Building Materials and Techniques.45 The decision to invite those and not other architects and planners to chair each section spoke to the UN’s practice of having Western experts frame the conversation. Even the few seeming exceptions—Puerto Rican geographer Picó, Israeli architect Sharon, and Greek planner Doxiadis—represented national elites. The UN asked the session leaders to frame mostly regional conversations, for which the Indian government had solicited papers and participation from “governments in the region.”46 In this sense, the Regional Seminar followed the workshop structure implemented at the UN Headquarters, with experts arriving from different member states to head conversations meant to inform local development plans. It created a platform for the diffusion of the UN’s organizational structures in the same way that television networks allowed the UN to diffuse resolutions of the General Assembly.

In India Tyrwhitt continued her network-building, this time primarily as an adviser to the Indian government. She embarked on an exhaustive trip around South Asia, identifying possible collaborators in urban planning and the building industry, ultimately producing the regional network that UN Secretariat officials would tap into and of which the Indian government would be the center. Her job was to make the UN’s presence known, as much as to mobilize local governments and ignite interest in technical assistance.47 To actively construct the Economic and Security Council’s regional classification of South Asia and to establish the ECAFE region as a coherent cultural, economic, and political reality, she solicited participation from local governments, preserving old and building new connections with other architects and planners later to be invited to the seminar.48 Tyrwhitt’s networking practices promised to bring about development and connections to resources and institutions. For example, Minnette de Silva warmly welcomed Tyrwhitt’s seminar, hoping that this would propel the transformation of Marg, CIAM’s regional group in India, into a solid institution of architectural modernism in the area.49

But in order for the seminar and workshop to create a discursive space for intellectual exchanges and collaborations, the organization needed to divest experts from politics. The truth was that UN administrators saw politics as an obstacle to—rather than the foundation of—their expanding network. UN employees, the “international servants” of the organization, were expected to fuel and operate the “vast and complicated machine” as mute channels that could “be seen but not heard.”50 TAA advisers, similarly to other technical experts hired in UN missions and seminars, came with a promise of transparency and objectivity that in reality enabled them to dissociate their proposals from the politics that these proposals (and future interventions) carried. This dissociation allowed UN consultants to argue that their presence was not part of a political act and that the UN, although a political and diplomatic organization, prioritized objective knowledge over political interests. Neutralizing the TAA’s work benefited the organization, which rushed to insert its platforms in the field.

In preparation for the TAA event in India, Doxiadis compiled a manual of instructions for the future UN expert (understood as a man throughout the report), outlining UN expectations and guidelines regarding reimbursement, protocol, rules of contact, and procedures of intelligence collection. The technical adviser, Constantinos Doxiadis noted, “is the United Nations,” carrying the weight of representation for the entire organization. The most important quality in outside experts, he argued, was their capacity to serve the international organization regardless of personal and political views. To be a valuable expert in the eyes of the organization, the technical adviser needed to remain transparent and shed any “prejudice or bias” in the face of internationalism, as if those were easily discarded. International meetings often involved people from different “nationalities, religions and cultures,” and a UN representative (for Doxiadis, technical advisers in particular) should carry the content produced on the ground back to the physical Headquarters and vice versa without, however, attaching to the information personal judgment and bias.51

Part of the role of the technical adviser was to divest these channels that connected the field with the Headquarters—and by extension the concept of international aid at large—from any financial expectation. As mentioned previously, TAA administrators centered the agency on “technical assistance” and the circulation of expertise, rather than financial support, in their efforts. The technical adviser’s job was to distinguish this circulation of expertise from the circulation of resources, or, even better, to articulate expertise as a resource equal in value to manual labor, materials, and equipment. As the UN TAA’s mouthpiece, Tyrwhitt tirelessly reminded Indian authorities of the UN’s limitations regarding funding.52 She stated that housing, the Indian government’s main concern for the seminar, constituted for the UN a local problem regardless of its global scale.53 Therefore the TAA asked experts for final reports that would give applicable and actionable recommendations within a member state’s internal budget and technical limitations.54 Similarly to the public sphere articulated within the UN Headquarters, direct participation was structured and limited to professional and governmental representatives the same way that only officially appointed national representatives and their advisers would participate inside the UN’s global interiors back at the Headquarters. And in both cases the public outside would receive UN technique either through literal media—radio, television, and so on—or metaphorical media, as was the case with the technical advisers in the various fields of operation. Inside the seminar venues, the invited experts, activating the channel infrastructure that they were installing, would network the seminar with the UN Headquarters and even project outwards, to new seminars and workshops (Figure 4.4). The space of the seminar, in this sense, formed the public interior that fed this metaphorical architecture of expertise exchange, a generative node in the UN’s network of technical expertise.

Exhibiting Worlds

If the space of seminars and small-scale workshops transferred the UN’s architectures of assembly from the Headquarters into the field, then exhibitions forged a place for the sharing of ideas and expertise, demonstrating, at the same time, how an active connection with the UN’s technocratic networks would order those exchanges to transform life on the ground. Not all exhibitions, of course, addressed the same audience. The UN Department of Public Information, following the model of the U.S. State Department, had frequently used exhibitions to illustrate the organization’s scope, its growing membership, and its initiatives, aiming at educating North American and Western European audiences. With statistical tables, photographs, charts, and drawings, exhibitions outlined the work of the organization, rendering graspable the institutional framework within which delegates, politicians, and consultants operated. But when the exhibitions turned to postcolonial publics, the tone changed to cultivate a positive disposition toward the organization on the ground, while visualizing what a relationship with the institution and its techniques could mean for publics at large.

For the international audience of planners, regional industries, local professionals and politicians from South and Southeast Asia, globetrotting experts, and governmental officials of the 1954 UN Regional Seminar, Tyrwhitt proposed two distinct exhibitions, both taking place on the fairgrounds outside the Red Fort in New Delhi. Building on the UN’s exhibition strategies deployed in the United States and Europe, Tyrwhitt mounted inside the permanent fair buildings a display of models and drawings from around the world, with plans and mock-ups of housing and community development creating an international “trading zone” of ideas exchange (Plate 11). Following Tyrwhitt’s invitation to member states participating in the Seminar, models from Ceylon and Thailand arrived, as well as architectural drawings and plans from community planning projects in Europe, constructing the landscape of development that national representatives, Indian politicians, and Seminar participants visited. This first display built on CIAM approaches to conference exhibitions, hoping to organize and rationalize development outcomes and practices that grounded the Seminar exchanges in comparison and then circulated both regional and international networks.

The second exhibition, more ambitious in scale and scope, created a demonstration center with life-size replicas of low-cost housing and public buildings, exemplifying how the UN’s networks of expertise circulation would transform rural life and its platforms (Figure 4.5). Indian officials invited governmental and private companies to build these low-cost housing replicas and place the growing Indian building industry at the center of South and Southeast Asian networks.55 But this second exhibition would also show how the reception of UN technique turned villages into central hubs of regional networks. During her earlier trip in South and Southeast Asia, Tyrwhitt had assembled the parts of her life-size exhibition that would cast the potential of the rural as the pragmatic and future agent of global networks.56 In villages around Punjab, but also outside New Delhi, she captured scenes from village life, turning the “village” into a kit of parts: “A Village Well,” a “Village Carpenter,” a “Village Cart,” read the captions of photographs she mailed to former CIAM secretary-general Sigfried Giedion late in October (Figure 4.6).57 Channeling the TAA’s program, Tyrwhitt would reassemble this kit of parts on the exhibition grounds to show how technique alone, especially when vetted and cleared by an international institution such as the UN, improved conditions on the ground, as if financial support and politics did not play any role in development. In doing so, she also installed a village center for the reception and diffusion of UN technique in the form of community functions. In other words, the organization interpellated the village as a broadcast medium for UN messages, similarly to how North American and Western European world citizens received news via the radio or the television at home.

If the exhibition on low-cost housing showed how the state could make housing a public concern, the “village centre,” demonstrating “the social aspects of community development . . . in a practical manner,” showcased the UN’s assistance plans for the decolonizing part of the world.58 For UN TAA officials, the exhibition, especially within the context of the international body of expertise invited, would transform development projects from “purely local projects to wider territorial schemes,” this time under the purview of an international organization.59 In addition, the village exhibition would advertise the merits of technical assistance, putting on display the built environment that technique and expertise improved without using words. But, also, the exhibition placed emphasis on village planning for the rest of South and Southeast Asia, setting an example of institutional internationalism at work for the postcolonial world.

Tyrwhitt had been developing her idea for a community center (later renamed village center) on the fringes of CIAM debates about “urban cores.”60 When appointed as director of the 1954 Regional Seminar, Tyrwhitt had just finished editing The Heart of the City, where a group of CIAM modernists, faced with the problem of post–World War II reconstruction, revisited the question of public space in terms of “cores” (Figure 4.7). The book was the result of the CIAM meeting at Hoddesdon that claimed “cores” as part of an essential grammar to organize communities across scales, from villages and neighborhoods to metropolitan areas.61 The presentations (and later the published essays) divorced those centers from the economic infrastructures that supported them—the home, the colonies, the church—and the histories that produced them, presenting them as universal ideals and models.62 The discussion mostly evoked earlier conversations on monumentality and community centers that, as Daniel Abramson notes, Giedion used to legitimize and naturalize a Western idealization of “cores” for an urban elite.63 This way CIAM planners and architects promoted the idea that cores—civic centers with public platforms and institutions—could travel and define urban and rural spaces beyond the jurisdiction of North American and Western European cities.

Without using the language of networks, CIAM participants addressed cores as nodal points that concentrated and diffused people, commodities, and ideas, hence presenting them as part of a network architecture. Speaking to this articulation of cores as nodes in the UN’s network of technical assistance, Josep Lluís Sert proposed media centers with television screens and loudspeakers for the decolonizing world, transforming the civic centers (and along with them villages as well) into interiors of an expanding global network that tied anew the periphery to centers of global power.64 Tyrwhitt insisted, however, that unlike “civic centers” that interfaced governments with the body politic, “cores” concerned people.65 “The Civic Center—that monumental group of buildings standing in isolated grandeur—is not what is meant by the Core. The Core is not the seat of civic dignity: the Core is the gathering place of the people,” she noted in her own contribution.66 She continued implicating CIAM with the New Delhi Seminar and Exhibition not only on a conceptual level, but also on the organizational level, as a constitutive presence in the events. Tyrwhitt even recruited CIAM members for the Seminar and solicited the presentation panels on urban cores for the New Delhi International Exhibition, an initiative that fell through when the panels remained in Boston with Sert and only photographs of a smaller selection of visual material was dispatched to Tyrwhitt at the end of December.67

At the village exhibition, Tyrwhitt used CIAM’s idealization of the “core” to make room for new rural institutions built from sun-dried bricks and rammed earth—the Education Centre, the Health Clinic, the Grain Storage, and the Craftsmen’s Sheds. These institutions defined an open platform, a “microcosm of village culture,” illustrating “certain fundamental principles of community living” for the entirety of the village to partake in (Figure 4.8).68 Tyrwhitt, who claimed that the organization and structure of the village center held more gravity than its outward appearance, placed the school and the assembly under the same roof, insinuating that the education and reorganization of rural citizenry also started there, in the village. Designed to replace the cultural and political centers of the past, Tyrwhitt’s village center acted both as an extension of the state (in the sense that the exhibition proposed those centers as platforms for launching national policies) and a hub in the UN’s network that promised to educate local villagers according to standards and procedures developed at the promised heart of this new world order. The exhibition modeled not only structures of village planning and building, but also ways of life: a large tree to mark a public open space, the correct placement of drinking-water wells, kitchen gardens with separate pits for manure and smokeless chulas, cattle dip and compost, workshops for crafts, open drains, and a rationalized waste management system:

As far as possible this village centre should be made to come alive. That is there should be real children in the school, a nurse should be in attendance at the health centre, and people should be working in the craft workshops. The impression should be given that this is the focus of active and friendly village life—simple but not drab, down to earth but full of vitality.69

Echoing colonial exhibitions of the early twentieth century, the village center staged the new roles it proposed for architects, villagers, and the state in India’s development. The labor on display did not produce any surplus value but sustained the life of the village in a constant recycling feedback loop. Manual labor reinscribed within development the body of the villager as a catalyst and agent of progress: a Punjabi potter making cottage tiles, a blacksmith for bolts and hooks, a carpenter, and a weaver were all parts of the exhibit for international and local visitors (Figure 4.9).70

The village that Tyrwhitt conceived of as a platform for modernist planning ideals and UN institutions was the same that Indian authorities had been articulating as a springboard for independence and sovereignty. The village constituted a powerful engine in Gandhian utopianism and its claims to an essential Indian identity.71 Gandhi’s craft-based economy called forth villages to be the central sites and vehicles for home rule. “If the village perishes, India will perish too,” he wrote.72 Later Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who diverged from Gandhi to emphasize development, likewise reclaimed villages as sites of governmental intervention. Villages enabled the Indian government to mobilize precolonial predilections and to give “a national sense of direction” to Nehru’s plan that distanced itself from centralized colonial practices of urban planning.73 The goal was to make the state anew the “ultimate owner” of land and transfer power to a decentralized but networked form of self-government that directly connected villages to Nehru’s government, circumventing any forms of preindependence local governance that were blocking the Nehruvian top-down technocratic project of development.74 Within this context, the Indian government had already understood the importance of villages as reception and projection nodes in networks of state control.

By 1953 the Community Projects Administration (CPA), an Indian government initiative to recenter village networks around agrarian reform and refugee integration, had launched a growing program of development projects that targeted villages as both physical and administrative entities. Building on the Pilot Project that the American planner Albert Mayer had launched in the Etawah region of Uttar Pradesh, CPA aimed to organize larger constellations of villages around training centers that connected villagers to expertise, therefore enacting Nehru’s project of modernization.75 The sixty-four villages that Mayer chose in 1948 formed the foundation for CPA’s efforts to recalibrate the networks of rural economies and refugee influx around Nehru’s state.76 Mayer used training centers to transform villages into the hubs of an outward-looking network of rural communities, where experts would “funnel” technique and development to villagers, not so much through abstract teaching and lecturing, as through engagement and demonstration on the ground. The idea was that sustained change could only happen from within, and that all the state would do is build a knowledge infrastructure. The locals, and not the experts, would be the media to diffuse the new knowledge and enact agricultural reform (Figure 4.10).77 In doing so, Mayer and CPA established villages as nodes in a network of expertise transfer, ripe for the UN to plug into.

Tyrwhitt convinced the UN that her village center would bring the organization to the very heart of the social change already underway in rural India. Farhan S. Karim details how the village exhibition shaped ideas around postcolonial Indian modernity, as well as brought CIAM conversations to New Delhi.78 Tyrwhitt willingly appropriated the postcolonial rural networks that CPA put together for TAA’s developmentalist discourse, making the case for their utility in reaching rural publics. This view of Indian villages was already evident in her edited anthology of reports that the Scottish planner and sociologist Patrick Geddes had compiled during his time in India. There Tyrwhitt put together a view of Indian villages as the product of social and economic networks particular in scale and scope to rural economies.79 The exhibition, though, entangled those rural publics with UN networks of expertise. In forming a village out of the low-cost housing exhibition and claiming for the UN a place at its heart—regardless of how inconspicuous—Tyrwhitt spoke to the organization’s desire to intervene and restructure the very networks spanning from the village center to the postcolonial countryside.

At the village exhibition, Tyrwhitt made room for UN specialized agencies to inhabit and structure the very space of informality and communal living. The intention was that the village center would serve as “a valuable field demonstration centre for the Agencies involved,” while also promoting CPA’s work.80 A health center, an industrial center for craftsmanship, an educational center, and an open area with cattle and well would serve as footholds for the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Labor Organization, and UNESCO respectively, which would provide for equipment proving that, rather than decentralizing in a Gandhian fashion of self-sufficiency, these villages were designed to hook the rural into other networks of the distribution of modernity.81 The Village Center, in this sense, connected “learning and responsibility” behind dried brick and rammed earth, embedding and naturalizing the UN as an administrative structure for India’s interior.82 In contrast to Nehru’s technological vision of progress and modernist aesthetics that disrupted the colonial past, UN programs proposed a return to a reformed tradition, whereby it would undertake the rationalization and organization of local expertise and technique to produce a traditional form, hence sustaining the differential that instigated the arrival of international experts in the first place.

Strikingly, although the exhibition posited tradition as the path toward postcolonial India, the model village itself lacked any religious center. The TAA made no space for a shrine, or temple, or mosque in the village to model development. In place of a shrine, the UN, in collaboration with Indian architects and engineers, built a replica of Gandhi’s hut, proclaiming it a site of spiritual commemoration.83 Leaving out the question of religion erased the difficulty of dealing with caste by pretending that somehow the problem would magically disappear. A major side benefit of this structural shift in the organization of the village for the UN would be a condition in which caste hierarchies could be discarded, and along with them caste-oriented networks, making space for institutional networks, both national and international, to step in.

Nehru and the UN hoped that the exhibition would ignite “enthusiasm to introduce certain aspects of this demonstration into their own home villages.”84 UNESCO encouraged Tyrwhitt to dress her village center with “fundamental education” programming, turning the core of the village into a training center for technical expertise.85 Similarly to Gandhi’s imagined villages and Nehru’s rural networks, the UN’s village center served also as a school introducing the villagers-pupils to the UN’s world of technique, fundamental education, and administrative culture. The village center was where villagers would learn how to be villagers in postindependence times, with the UN’s guiding hand and in connection to other hubs in the UN’s expanding network of headquarters, seminar rooms, and field offices. The idea was that the exhibition would teach administrators and rural communities how to produce the village—both in terms of the operations necessary for its construction and maintenance, and the organization of rural economies and the communities around them. And more so, the exhibition, in placing the UN at the very center of the village, also constructed the rural population as its constituents.

CPA representative R. B. Gupta applauded the self-help approach to village improvements.86 Central Public Works Department’s N. Krishnaswami embraced the focus on village development that Tyrwhitt’s center enabled.87 The same agency also stressed the importance of model villages for the “settling” of “displaced persons,” calling for the emulation of the UN’s village center in the creation of a model core for all surrounding villages.88 Israeli architect Joseph M. Neufeld, who had been thinking about the design of hospitals at the time, noted during the 1954 Delhi Seminar that a “community core is not only an important part of the community plan, but is itself a tool for planning.”89 He saw community cores as “ideal planning center[s]” for the larger region surrounding them.

But the purpose of the village exhibition was not only to entangle rural life with the UN’s technical assistance programs, but also to become a lesson in UN world-making. To circulate the village exhibition beyond the fairgrounds, the UN solicited the help of media, ultimately creating a reverberant space with radio announcements, drawings, reports, photographs, and films. Kodachrome rolls, cameras, and filming equipment documented photographically both the exhibition and the seminars.90 In New Delhi, G. F. Middleton, who was invited to build a rammed-earth house using the mold he had been perfecting in Israel, filmed the UN exhibition.91 The Indian Films Division produced a short documentary on the Village Centre, creating a permanent record for the Indian government.92 Radio was also essential in creating an imagined community around this ideation of the village and the UN’s presence in South Asia. The publics that films and photographs could not reach, radio would, announcing to the world the reordering that was taking place in New Delhi and the folding of India deeper into the UN’s techniques. The remnant of a previous fair that celebrated railways, a relay antenna on the fairground in New Delhi, became an evocative celebration of connectivity, marking the desire to plug the exhibition into larger networks. It offered the UN an opportunity not only to make the seminar a nodal point, but also to denote the immediate connection with other nodal points and practices of development, particularly the physical Headquarters back in New York City. The idea was that media would carry this instance of platform-making as content for other experts and their networks to learn from, while reports and clippings, mainly meant for the libraries of specialized agencies and experts involved in similar development projects, became the record of reference.93 Apart from mediating UN’s cultures of assembly and techniques of expertise transfer, the Village Center—and alongside it the Seminar—needed physical media, spools of film, and radio, to reach the UN’s publics back in the UN Headquarters and beyond, wherever the UN sought to install its operations.

As with other UN workshops and conferences around the world, the 1954 New Delhi seminar and exhibition enlarged and strengthened the UN network of professionals working to diffuse the modernity of this new world order. The village center tied planners, administrators, and experts—both local and foreign—into a network of learning that expanded beyond the site of the seminar and exhibition itself. As a strategy, the regional seminar and exhibition invited participants to engage in conversations that moved beyond the space of the nation, ultimately creating what McLuhan later called the “global village,” the experience of the world as a space of collapsed distances.94 In New Delhi, Tyrwhitt was introduced to Doxiadis at the same time that Doxiadis and other UN consultants–such as Charles Abrams and Jacob Crane—were introduced to the developing world (Figure 4.11). Ekistics, the journal around which Doxiadis built a community of planners, started in 1954 as an annotated bibliography—Tropical Housing & Planning Monthly Bulletin—responding to the UN event in Delhi that identified a gap in print media actively producing the common ground between development and planning.95 The 1954 Seminar and Exhibition modeled relationships between the UN and urban planners, who as technical advisers could now shape and contain the world of tomorrow, reconfiguring the network of urban planning actors in the post–World War II period as CIAM was heading toward its resolution. And in truth, the ramifications of the Regional Seminar were larger than the very moment that it happened, not only for the planning of the built environment and the circulation of expertise, but also for the UN and its proliferating publics.

If at the signing of the UN Charter the organization invited mass media inside its workings to connect with a public outside, if at the Nuremberg Trials it used architecture to fabricate its perspective, and if at the UN Headquarters it further elaborated the stratification of the international polity and produced the general public as an audience to the theatrics of multilateralism, then the UN Seminar at New Delhi turned the global interior into a strategy for creating UN publics anchored outside of the Headquarters. Although the seminar did not explicitly target the general public—quite to the contrary, the seminar was exclusively designed for experts—the village center exhibition did. Architects, planners, and administrators, as well as local communities, entered the space of the village exhibition as students of development. The UN invited them to learn and teach each other methods and techniques of planning and building in the Global South, ultimately instituting a platform, a metaphorical public interior that expanded (and to some extend informed) the organization’s global interior.

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt returned to the role of a UN technical consultant three more times, establishing programs on town and regional planning in universities around the world, from Toronto to Bandung and from the United Kingdom to Mumbai. The UN Seminar and Exhibition in New Delhi set up a cascade of other UN seminars, workshops and exhibitions that intensified activity on planning and housing as a matter of technique and its circulation. Those exhibitions and seminars that extended the work of the UN outside its headquarters aimed at a controlled and self-managed implementation that, in the end, rendered networks of expertise invisible to the general public. UN Seminars offered the illusion that a global village of experts, contracting and retracting, convening, and then diffusing the lessons of their meetings throughout the world, could act as UN ambassadors.

From the headquarters to the field, the UN rearticulated the workshop, once imagined taking place within the rooms of its New York City Headquarters, as a technique of internationalism at large. It is not that international meetings did not exist before the advent of the UN. The UN’s innovation was to place workshops and conferences within its larger architecture of expertise networks as the public interiors to expand, and in certain ways globalize, the relationships and publics that the physical headquarters structured. The physical Headquarters in New York would determine the social and political space of multilateralism, as well as the media representations of its global publics of diplomats, politicians, and civic society. The metaphorical public interior that traveled outside that space would further allow new publics to form around the practices already established at the center. It will come as no surprise, then, that the 1954 UN representatives at the Regional Seminar and International Exhibition requested the institutionalization of periodic seminars for experts, declaring such forums important sites of internationalism.96

The UN, and UNESCO in particular, invested resources and time in investigating different conference structures. When in 1968 Margaret Mead published her research on the “small conference,” a “new and powerful communication form,” she critically shifted from discussing proceedings as the place of knowledge production, to examining the platforms themselves.97 Mead understood very well that the purpose of the “small conference” was not really to produce a publication but rather to allow for the participants to build “rapport,” to form a public and by extension a discourse.98 Mead was not only referring to her experience at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation conferences, but also the UNESCO, WHO, and UN seminars and conferences in which she had participated. For her, the atmosphere of “temporary parity” that these seminars created was the necessary condition for the formation of active publics around problems.99 She noted that the form of the “small conference”—what UN officials called the “seminar”—could help institutions to internationalize their platforms while channeling “historical forms” of gathering, such as the classroom or the parliament. “Within the United Nations the struggle between the demands for representativeness and authoritative materials, and the need to keep face-to-face groups small enough to do any work, is reflected in the variety of devices, ranging from world conferences to small working parties and task forces which are continuing features of its activities,” she explained.100

Most importantly, these platforms created the conditions for new organizations and alliances, both professional and political, to form and multiply. Although situated within the institution and designed to be contained by the organization, the spaces of seminars framed a different experience of internationalism, demonstrating the potential to create different structures and networks around platforms. These seminar spaces, in a way, proposed their appropriation for purposes outside the scope of United Nations operations. In fact, when the Non-Aligned Movement sought to organize their constituents in a series of meetings, it used these same techniques to critique and move beyond the limitations of the UN’s institutional platforms. In multiple ways, to address and sustain the relationship between headquarters and the field, the UN turned its forums into itinerant platforms that traveled and organized publics around the world, proliferating and disseminating the ways of the organization as the habitus of liberal internationalism on the ground.