Thomas Bender recently described international and transnational history as a watershed for the discipline akin to social history for the generation prior: we might love it or hate it, but henceforth we would be unable to ignore it. For many urban historians, however, national boundaries have proved permeable for quite some time: ideas, goods and people typically flowed through urban ports, cities served as spearheads of national expansion and international trade, migrants traditionally flocked to urban centres, colonization relied on entrepôt towns and architects made world cities their stomping grounds. Like diplomatic historians, then, urbanists face the challenge of creatively reframing topics that have been in our purview for some time.

New scholars are now embarking on topics that stretch and transform our understanding of cities. Comparative studies have tended to be the domain of scientists more than historians, with studies like Melissa Keeley's ‘Transatlantic exchange and sustainable urban development: transferring stormwater policies and technologies from Europe to the United States’ (Technical University of Berlin, 2007) advocating the transference of specific, successful German sustainability models to the USA and feeling very much like a latter-day version of Catherine Bauer, Charles Abrams or other transatlantic experts' writings of the mid-twentieth century. (Bauer, Abrams and others acted on the belief that best practices ought to be shared.) Political science studies like Robin Harper's ‘Does citizenship really matter? An exploration of the role citizenship plays in the civic incorporation of permanent residents and naturalized citizens in New York and Berlin’ (CUNY Graduate Center, 2007) uses the comparative approach to reveal structural similarities of urban centres, regardless of nation. Harper's comparison of two cities with very different naturalization policies and with obviously divergent national contexts reveals the ways in which metropolises like New York and Berlin consistently served as the ‘locus of incorporation’ for naturalization, civic engagement and identity transformation. Like Harper, Dorothee Brantz's ‘Slaughter in the city: the public abattoirs of nineteenth-century Paris and Berlin’ (University of Chicago, 2003) traces the historical emergence of common patterns in different cities: growing urban conglomerations required slaughterhouse reform in the nineteenth century, which in turn implicated parallel networks of technology and discourses about public health. Whether policy-oriented, structural or historical, comparative urban studies rely on the idea that key cities have something in common with each other, and that international comparison can provide fresh insights into when, how and to what effect local differences emerge. By creating an awareness of alternatives, comparative urbanists can open doors to creative, innovative problem-solving in the future, especially in pressing topics like sustainability.

Despite notable exceptions like Brantz, however, the majority of urban historians choose a transnational or international lens over a comparative one. Daniel Rodgers' Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age has been obviously influential, with both Chris Klemek's ‘Urbanism as reform: modernist planning and the crisis of urban liberalism in Europe and North America, 1945–1975’ (University of Pennsylvania, 2004) and my own ‘A citizen's right to decent shelter: public housing in New York, London, and Singapore post-1945’ (Columbia University, 2006) referring to the now classic text in our opening salvos. Brooke Blower's ‘The Paris of Americans: transnational politics and culture between the world wars’ (Princeton University, 2005) not surprisingly also references Atlantic Crossings when introducing industrial capitalism's legacy, the ‘“new understanding of common histories and vulnerabilities” that linked urban hubs together in transnational “landscapes of mind”’ (18–19). (Blower was a graduate student of Rodgers'.) Of course, one tome did not solely create this burgeoning subfield; research on intellectual exchanges amongst urban planners, the movement of expert advisors, the development of modern architectural form and the evolution (or devolution) of a liberal consensus has become well-traversed ground for a bevy of established scholars. Pierre-Yves Saunier has written a brilliant analytical piece on the Urban International, Richard Harris has explored late colonial urban development in the British Empire, Ray Bromley has added detailed studies of Constantinos Doxiadis to his large repertoire on Latin American development, Ellen Shoshkes has examined the work of Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and Gwendolyn Wright has most recently argued in USA that modernism did not come to the USA ‘as if in a suitcase’ in 1932, but rather that it constituted its own unique hybrid, sharing not only across the Atlantic, but also ‘appropriate[ing] from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as in a flow of ideas, capital and people that was always multidirectional’.Footnote ¹ Anthony King, Jyoti Hosagrahar, Pauline K.M. van Roosmalen, Abidin Kusno, Chris Silver, Jeffrey Cody, Jeffrey Hanes and Carola Hein have all published on colonial and postcolonial cities in Southeast and East Asia. This surge of scholarship demonstrates the waning dominance of exclusively transatlantic narratives in urban history, as the cities of Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Africa elicit more interest than ever before, typically as part of more comprehensive histories of colonial and postcolonial urban development.

This explosion of new research corresponds with a new generation of dissertations, including the aforementioned work by Klemek, Blower and myself, as well as Mark Kehren's ‘Tunnel vision: urban renewal in Rio de Janeiro, 1960 to 1975’ (University of Maryland, 2006), Kazuyo Tsuchiya's ‘The contested terrains of welfare: race, gender, and the politics of citizenship in the U.S. and Japan, 1964–1982’ (UC, San Diego, 2008), Panayiota Pyla's ‘Ekistics, architecture, and environmental politics, 1945–1976: a prehistory of sustainable development’ (MIT, 2002), Nicole Leah Cohen's ‘Children of empire: growing up Japanese in colonial Korea, 1876–1946’ (Columbia University, 2006), and Todd Henry's ‘Keijō: Japanese and Korean constructions of colonial Seoul and the history of its lived spaces, 1910–37’ (UCLA, 2006), among others.

What do these new dissertations add to the existing body of work on transnational and international urban development? Dissertations are products of their time, and while the specific topics may be widely disparate, two common themes consistently emerge in these recent international or transnational studies. First, much of the new writing wrestles with the contradictions of place-making and globalization, of the often false dichotomy evident in ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’. Like Jyoti Hosagrahar, many dissertations work from a principle of indigenous modernities, where ‘context and locality’, the ‘paradoxical features of modernities rooted in their particular conditions and located outside the dominant discourse of a universal paradigm centered on an imagined “West”’ take shape.Footnote ² Second, most offer some sort of commentary on the nature of American global power, whether in its ‘softer’ forms or through dollar diplomacy.

Unique places versus global spaces

Brooke Blower begins her dissertation with an almost literary description of a typical Parisian morning in the early twentieth century. Sleepy daughters fetched pitchers of milk, men washed down the streets and workers began their commutes on open-topped buses. It is not by chance that she begins thus, even though the real heart of Blower's argument is in transnational urban culture, in the formation and reformation of national identity within increasingly cosmopolitan spaces. ‘Americans learned in Paris to cast themselves in all kinds of roles that emphasized their own integrity in a treacherous and tumultuous world’ (423), but they did so in real homes, neighbourhoods and even buses that were imbued with personal meaning (or at least, ritual). Blower adroitly moves between discussions of how Parisians of all nationalities variously interpreted changes within the capital city, from growing commercialism and politicization to cosmopolitanism, as evidenced in everyday venues like bars, churches, streets and marketplaces, to an analysis of how this heterogeneous contact resulted in transatlantic dialogues about ‘mass politics, social and sexual practices, and the changing nature of modern life’ (18, 23). Her descriptions of street walkers, their beats and their Johns are not for titillation or even for color; Blower weaves vivid details into every chapter in order subtly to underline her point that transnationalism and place-making actually evolved together in inter-war Paris.

Blower's approach is elegant, but she is not alone in thinking about the relationship between particular spaces and the twin processes of modernization and globalization. There are a multitude of reasons to care about this relationship, the first and most important being that urban planners, housing experts and government officials from at least the 1920s themselves worried about how to create, respect and preserve community bonds while improving material living conditions. In addition, more recent studies of place-making – the creation of spaces that carry personal or communal meaning – have become overtly political. David Harvey defines the politicization of place as the moment when ‘individuals invest in places and thereby empower themselves collectively by virtue of that investment’;Footnote ³ those interested in addressing the ability of poorer, disadvantaged, minority, ‘third world’ and/or female urban dwellers to reoccupy their cities have added incentive to study the problems of place.

Not surprisingly, then, tensions between place-making and globalization or modernization crop up in all manner of dissertations, including Christopher Klemek's ‘Urbanism as reform’, in many ways a polar opposite of Blower. While Blower brings readers down to smell the flowers and taste the water, Klemek unapologetically deals in the world of ideas. As he rightly notes from the start, ideas had important consequences. In his dissertation – one of the fullest transatlantic explorations to date of urban renewal's demise in late twentieth-century Berlin, London, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Toronto – Klemek narrates the ways in which both liberalism and modernism became ‘tangled up together in the urban setting’ and ‘run aground’ by the 1970s. Klemek takes one step back, describing the motives and deeply held beliefs fuelling debates between those who valued place over large-scale renewal and modernization (and vice versa). Instead of describing neighbourhoods and street corners, he adopts an intellectual historian's approach to urban planners, architects, community activists and experts of all sorts, arguing that ultimately the abandonment of cities by both camps left no one ‘to control or harness the volatile forces of private investment and disinvestment in real estate’. There are no thick descriptions of life in New York City's public housing units, no narrative of urban decay and arson in Philadelphia, but the debate between place-making and modernization nonetheless plays a central role in his story. For Klemek, local traditions and community cohesion are both the reason and the tool by which activists fought total planning.

While struggles over the scale and scope of urban change might reflect class and race conflicts in Paris, London, New York and Berlin, it is often assumed that colonial cities witnessed a more straightforward struggle between modernizing colonizers eager to sweep away unhygienic, disorderly and often overcrowded districts, and the subjects they intended to dislocate from more ‘traditional’ ways of life. Nicole Cohen's and Todd Henry's separate dissertations on the evolution of Keijô (Japanese-occupied Seoul, 1910 to 1945) quickly disabuse us of that sort of simple model. Cohen is not an urban historian, and her overarching description of Seoul's evolution, from the north–south split along the Ch'ŏnggyech'ŏn River during the Chosŏn period, to the reorientation of power from the northern yangban elite to southern Japan Town during Japanese colonialism, generally follows the secondary literature. According to the Japanese residents at the time, Japan Town ‘was characterized by its modern, multi-storied buildings, its spacious and brightly lit avenue, asphalt and concrete in roads and facades, and convenience to department stores, theaters, modes of public transportation, and the city center’ while the old northern Korea Town ‘was reputedly recognizable from its squat and rundown buildings, the high population density of its neighborhoods, its narrow, meandering alleyways, darkness, and according to many Japanese, its smell – an unsavory brew of sewage and garlic’. Henry, by contrast, immediately launches into an attack on this sort of segregationist approach, arguing that although both Japanese and Korean nationalists find black–white binaries politically useful today, in fact the realities of Keijô were far more nuanced, with power being constantly negotiated and struggles occurring at the ground level, whether through literal demonstrations or through the more intractable ‘traditions’ of a road system that could not be completely straightened, widened and labelled. This was not simply a case of a colonial power being unable thoroughly to eradicate Korean place-making; basic population statistics made it impossible for true segregation to exist, according to Henry. Even in supposedly modernized, colonial Japan Town, Koreans constituted some 35 per cent of the population in 1925 (8). At some basic level, the north–south divide did not stay steady, as Koreans and Japanese met, intermingled and overlapped with each other in their uses of a multilayered city.

This does not mean that Henry's dissertation disproves Cohen's, however; Cohen's description of colonial Keijô is mere backdrop for the more important argument she launches about the process of place-making itself. Using extensive and hitherto unheard oral histories of Japan Town residents – then children, now a dying generation – Cohen argues that these Japanese expatriates carved unique nationalist identities out of their everyday lives in the specific stores, street corners and houses of the southern district. This identity would be horribly jarred when these same children returned to the Japanese archipelago after the war and discovered unfamiliar towns, an unfamiliar nation. What makes Cohen's discussion of Keijô interesting is not the explanation of colonial expansion and modernization processes alone; the movement of European architectural ideals through Japanese colonial officers and into the Korean landscape has been detailed by other scholars like David Tucker, for instance, and the development of sewage systems, modern roads and public facilities like parks and zoos also fits with broader settler community patterns, as Cohen herself is the first to point out. Rather, Cohen's unique contribution is in her ability to give us a very tactile, human perspective of Japanese residents' day-to-day experiences. What was life like in this outpost city? What made life pleasurable for children, for the normal Japanese citizen? While planners, government officials and architects certainly made earth-shattering changes in the infrastructure, design and ‘look’ of the city, ultimately the residents themselves assigned meaning and worth through everyday rituals and experiences. Cohen reminds us that national identity is slippery and ever-changing, even for colonizers, and that these identities shifted and fluxed in the contested, transnational spaces of cities like Keijô.

American global power

Japan's imperial past continues to plague not only East and Southeast Asian political relations, but also the retelling of various histories including the occupation of Seoul. The USA's rise to power and the launching of Henry Luce's so-called ‘American Century’ has had similarly incendiary effects in academia, with urban historians attempting to trace influence both to and from American cities. Alas, as Eric Foner once stated in a graduate seminar, ‘It's pretty difficult to write a history of influence.’

Happily, some graduate students have still attempted to do so: Kazuyo Tsuchiya is now completing a simultaneously comparative and international history about the uses and abuses of the American Community Action Program in Los Angeles and Kawasaki in the 1960s, and Mark Kehren's dissertation closely analyses the role of American aid in governor Carlos Lacerda's wide-ranging urban renewal programme in Rio. The American Century is more typically characterized as an era of soft and hard power rather than direct colonization, but Nathan Connolly's ‘By eminent domain: race and capital in the building of an American South Florida’ (University of Michigan, 2008) neatly inverts the ‘America in the World’ formula for the twentieth century by explaining how and why various interest groups in South Florida constructed an American region ‘neighborhood by neighborhood from “Caribbean” and “Southern” fragments’. And finally, my own work on the history of public housing in London, New York and Singapore after World War II explains how Americans helped shape national housing policies around the world.

Amongst completed dissertations, Mark Kehren's research on urban renewal in Rio de Janeiro stands out. This dissertation is ostensibly limited to one city within one nation, but in reality, Kehren moves effortlessly from local urban competition (Rio versus São Paulo) to national politics (Rio versus Brasilia) to international funding strategies. Because Kehren chooses to examine urban renewal in the 1960s and 70s, he must in some way analyse and explain the importance (or unimportance) of foreign aid as manifested in John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and the Inter-American Development Bank.

In addition to bilateral and intergovernmental assistance, transnational agents like Doxiadis Associates played a critical role in shaping the city by the bay. Doxiadis Associates could hardly be termed an agent of American soft power, given its intellectual debts to European planning giants like Patrick Geddes, Geddes' student, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne or British ideas about garden cities, but there are still interesting traces of influence both to and from the USA. For instance, Tyrwhitt worked closely in tropical housing research, where her path often crossed with those of American advisors working for intergovernmental advisory teams; the American connection became solid when Tyrwhitt came to teach at Harvard. Doxiadis, of course, famously recruited American Marshall Plan funds to Greece and used Ford Foundation money to develop new towns around the world. Kehren does not dwell at length on the history of Doxiadis or his firm independent of their work in Guanabara, but he does tell the fascinating story of how Doxiadis' work came to be associated with unnecessary, unhealthy foreign influence. Unlike Blower's inter-war Paris, where ‘the presence of American people and things had a haphazard, cumulative effect determined by local conditions at the neighborhood level’ and where ‘the city had been affected not only by the importation of Americanness, but also by the creation of Americanness on site’ (122), Lacerda's opponents framed modernity as either ‘native’ or ‘foreign’, but not both. Lacerda, meanwhile, objected to the communist tendencies of native architects like Oscar Niemeyer, whose design of Brasilia had proved to many that Brazilian architects had come into their own. Kehren explains that the city's contentious relationship with lawmakers in Brasilia made Lacerda more financially dependent on foreign technical and capital assistance, and the governor employed stridently anti-communist rhetoric to great effect: programmes like Fundo di Trigo under the Alliance, for example, gave Brazil a loan of wheat (a result of American overproduction) which could then be sold and used for specific development projects such as public schools and to new public housing estates on the periphery. One such public housing site was aptly named Vila Kennedy (103).

Such fascinating stories of transnational and international crossings abound, but Kehren makes the unexpected argument that that we ought not to get carried away when thinking about international influence in Rio. According to Kehren, American assistance was only a very small percentage of the total funding of urban renewal programmes, and in fact, Lacerda's highly visible courting of American and later Greek assistance damaged his popularity amongst domestic professionals eager to provide local jobs and to take advantage of local expertise instead of spending hard-earned reais paying for outsiders' exorbitant fees. In this way, the international aspects of Rio's urban renewal programme had more to do with local suspicions of American ambition on the part of the anti-Lacerda faction, and larger Cold War stratagems on the part of Lacerda himself, rather than with the literal movement of vast sums of money or advisors.

Like Kehren, my own research addresses these questions of how much advice and money, with what intentions and to what effect – but rather than focusing on Latin America, I look at American interactions with British and Malayan (and after 1965, Singaporean) counterparts and the formation of local public housing programmes from the late 1940s until mass privatization schemes took over in the 1970s. Briefly, I argue that Americans reimagined themselves as international leaders in regional planning and housing finance over the course of these years, in equal parts because of rising American economic power (including the dominance of US dollars in technical and financial assistance programmes like the United Nations' Technical Assistance Administration (1950), Special Fund (1958), and Development Programme (1966)), because of the relatively untested nature of government-directed urban renewal in the early 1940s, and because of American Cold War fears that burgeoning slums and shantytowns in transitional or postcolonial regions made democracy and capitalism vulnerable to communist propaganda.

American officials began by touting Euro-American planning education as the model, or what Eleanor Roosevelt condescendingly called ‘the knack of teaching natives how to teach other natives’;Footnote ⁴ subsequently, they encouraged the development of strong domestic savings programmes, aided self-help and other routes to self-sufficient housing; and finally they promoted single-family resident homeownership as the ideal. These steps laid the groundwork for later work specifically implementing American-style savings and loans and ‘democratic’ homeownership programmes. (Interestingly, Americans tested home mortgage guarantees first in Latin America and then deemed them ready for export to East and Southeast Asia by the late 1960s.) While Americans talked less openly about what they learned from others, the international exchanges was truly multidirectional: Congressional representatives went on countless trips to the UK, Sweden and Germany to examine public housing programmes there; American engineers participated in technical assistance programmes and discussed air-conditioning research with tropical housing advisors the world over; American housing experts jet-setted around six continents, researching, discussing and learning.

I tell this history through four distinct sections: first, I introduce the widespread professional exchange of ideas amongst planners in New York and London in the 1940s. I argue that these earlier town planning debates laid the foundations for international housing standards post-1945 in the USA and UK, but also in former British colonies like Singapore. Second, I detail the rising American model of urban renewal and public housing, and the controversies surrounding American export of these ideals to the UK through aid programmes like Lend-Lease and through advisors and construction industry experts during the late 1940s and 1950s. National economic recovery, the development of better living conditions and economic rights for citizens all grew in tandem. Third, I detail the importance of anticommunist motivations in American intervention into former colonies; I look at Singapore as a case study of a larger interest in so-called tropical development. I argue that active American participation in United Nations regional committees and development assistance programmes vitally shaped conceptions of home and citizenship for Singaporeans during the 1950s and post-independence in 1965. Fourth and finally, I conclude by analysing the way politicians in London and Singapore came to assess their own public housing as either a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in relationship to the perceived crises of American race relations and desegregation efforts during the 1960s.

What is the common thread in dissertations addressing American global power? Simply, dollar diplomacy mattered to the evolution of cities and housing policies around the world, but not in predictable ways: this was no mere story of strong-arm tactics and die-hard anticommunism. Local political struggles assigned conflicting meanings to American aid, and American planners, government officials and building industry leaders (among others) in turn redefined national policies vis-à-vis lessons learned abroad.