Thinking Small
Reflections on Daniel Immerwahr’s Essay About “The United States and the Lure of Community Development”
“[Within] a context in which rich nations continue to rig the international system to ensure that wealth accrues disproportionately to certain places, lock poor people out of those places, and then consume resources at a rate that will probably render much of the planet inhospitable, there is something bizarre about the current obsession with helping poor people help themselves.” (p. 183)
If authoritarian planning from above resulted in some of the biggest social failures of the 19th and 20th centuries, as argued by James C. Scott in “Seeing Like a State,” development from below did not bring about more hopeful outcomes. “Thinking Small,” by Daniel Immerwahr, is a good critique of U.S-sponsored community development campaigns during the mid-20th century, both abroad and in national territory. As Immerwahr narrates, most of these ambitious “bottom-up” endeavors ultimately also provoked social dystopias not very different from those unleashed by high modernist projects — a surprising fate given that the “quest for community” was precisely a reaction to the pitfalls of modernizing obsessions. What went so wrong?
The passion for small groups and local communities became trendy in the US between the 1930s and 1960s. Cities were becoming increasingly hostile, with millions of individuals inhabiting the same urban spaces, yet completely detached from each other. Escaping from poor living conditions in the countryside, or migrating from countries in war, people were moving to big cities in the US looking for jobs that would let them pay for a life. But life in cities was precarious for most, against the expectations of a brighter and modern future for everyone. US thinkers and public figures would soon start crafting a way out of these inhumane environments, envisioning the planning of places where people could enjoy the benefits of living in smaller communities.
Loyal to its imperialist tradition and inspired by Truman’s famous call to help the “underdeveloped” countries of the world — as if things were already fine at home — the US first looked outside of its own boundaries to find a social context where to experiment with community planning. With this mission in mind, India became the ideal setting for a nation-wide community planning experience. Immerwahr makes it clear that the motivation behind this effort was not completely off: American architect Albert Mayer genuinely believed in the democratic potential of a self-governed life in Indian villages. President Nehru also advocated for a significant decentralization of power to provide local agents with tools to make the decisions that mattered locally. But forms of oppression inherent in Indian villages and traditions — patriarchy, local elite’s power, segregated castes — were never questioned, hence destining communities to perpetuate their own patterns of structural oppression. Over the years, the program scaled up massively, soon behaving as a huge bureaucratic machine not unlike that of Tanzania’s villagization processes or the Soviet agrarian plans through which central governments exerted their control.
Things were even creepier in the Philippines, where the “barrio fever” was intentionally leveraged to build a counterinsurgent culture that would prevent a communist revolt in the country. In the middle of the “Cold War,” the U.S. needed to position itself as the hegemonic nation worldwide to secure its own economic model, and that would take the global fight against Communism to the smallest Filipino village. Again, there were some well-intentioned practices associated with the community development program, such as the creation of research units in local universities to study the practices of community planning. But the counterinsurgent nature of the community development effort in the Philippines necessarily implied repression against dissident voices, reminding that of totalitarian states.
Finally, the US took the practice of community development back home, once it was publicly recognized that the purportedly most advanced nation of the world was also hiding an “underdeveloped nation” within its borders. Extreme poverty both in urban and rural areas; structural racism that justified treating an entire sector of the US population as less human than the rest; the risk of ghettos of high delinquency; and the possibility of political upheavals indicated that there was domestic work to do. Community development seemed to be a less invasive entry point to many of these challenges. Jane Jacob’s “city of neighborhoods,” though often rightly accused of incentivizing the creation of “white enclaves,” responded to that logic. So was the rationale behind the Peace Corps, an agency genuinely conceived to bring good to the world, locally and abroad.
Some lessons stand out from Immerwahr’s detailed account of the history of community development as discourse and as practice. First, an over-romanticization of community life can conceal a complex local reality that is also full of violence and oppression. Local power relations do exist and often materialize in harmful behaviors. Sentimentalisms around “traditional” communities can perpetuate these forms of violence. Instead, understanding that all human communities are subject to evolve over time can open spaces for more meaningful conversations around community development.
Second, trying to only change things on the ground without challenging the larger picture is also doomed to hit dead ends. Planners, thinkers, activists, practitioners, and citizens — all of us should make the effort to zoom out and, as Immerwahr says, look for causal relationships between the privileged lives of some and the challenging living conditions of most. Once identified, we must fight to break those ties and contribute to building new patterns that reduce the structural conditions of social inequality.
Third, we need to be careful when we hear about community engagement as an innovative approach — especially if it comes from multilateral organizations like the World Bank. As “Thinking Small” makes clear, there is a decades-long culture of community-based planning that, much like top-down planning, has also carried out important successes. Understanding that current efforts to prioritize community planning are building on an ongoing tradition is not only humbling for those of us who still advocate it, but it also helps us to learn from past achievements and failures.
Lastly, while one of the biggest lessons from the community development lure back in the 1950s was the shift from “planning for” to “planning with” communities, it seems to me that this shift of mindset still hides a certain degree of othering. Many community planners, or advocates for community development, cannot get rid of the us-them binary, talking about communities as an external reality that makes it impossible to blur the gap between the planners and the planned (that is of course not always the case, especially when those advocates belong to the communities in question). As Pink Floyd sang, “us and them, and in the end, we are only ordinary men” (emphasis added). Taken to the community planning practice, this evocative verse would mean shifting from “planning with” to planning together.
