Developing communities: the Ford Foundation and the global urban crisis, 1958–66

Between 1958 and 1966 the Ford Foundation embarked on a series of pilot projects of ‘urban community development’ in India and the United States. This article will highlight how both of these programmes emerged in response to what Ford officials understood to be a global urban crisis, caused by the migration of ‘backward’ rural populations into the cities. Rather than modernizing under the pressure of urban living, these newcomers appeared to be pooling into pockets of underdevelopment – ‘ghettos’ in the United States and ‘slums’ in India. Ford sought to tackle the problem by encouraging the participation of these marginalized communities in the process of urban renewal, a strategy intended to engineer the psychological modernization of their residents. In practice, however, Ford struggled to control the channels into which these mobilizations flowed, with poor urban residents utilizing the projects to push for radical changes concerning housing, policing, and tenant–landlord relations.