Overpromising Technocracy’s Potential: The American-Yugoslav Project, Urban Planning, and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy

Abstract

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Ford Foundation funded an urban planning exchange between American academics and Yugoslav urban planners as something of a test case in transferring American planning technology to the socialist world. The American-Yugoslav Project was one of several international urban development projects the Ford Foundation pursued at mid-century as part of its Cold War-era cultural diplomacy efforts. The largely unsuccessful technology transfer at the center of the American-Yugoslav Project was a contributing factor to the Foundation’s retreat from international urban development and provides a case study in how one-size-fits-all development models falter when challenged by real-world conditions.