Description
Book Synopsis2022 On the Brinck Book Award, University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning
Special Mention, First Book Prize, International Planning History Society
Landed Internationals examines the international culture of postwar urban planning through the case of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. Today the center of Turkey''s tech, energy, and defense elites, METU was founded in the 1950s through an effort jointly sponsored by the UN, the University of Pennsylvania, and various governmental agencies of the United States and Turkey. Drawing on the language of the UN and its Technical Assistance Board, Erdim uses the phrase 'technical assistance machinery' to encompass the sprawling set of relationships activated by this endeavor.
Erdim studies a series of legitimacy battles among bureaucrats, academics, and other professionals in multiple theaters across the political geography of the Cold War. These differe
Trade Review
A meticulous investigation of the founding years of [Middle East Technical University] (1954–1969) in the broader context of the postwar politics of planning, design and technical assistance…Erdim’s book is full of insights from his detective-like and eye-opening work about both the cooperation and the struggles that marked the funding, administration, curriculum, location and design of METU...With its beautiful display of plans and photographs, Landed Internationals will be deeply evocative for anyone who has walked down the campus allée, the long pedestrian walkway connecting its diverse set of buildings and students. It is a richly textured book that meticulously demonstrates the role that housing and planning experts played in contestations over postwar visions of nation-building, development and expertise. * Middle East Research and Information Project *
[A] highly stimulating study...this book is a precious contribution to present trends in historiography that insist on the necessity to critically analyse the notion of models and their circulation, and focus on the dynamics of constant interaction and mutual redefinition of international expertise and local societies. * Planning Perspectives *
Table of Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction. Housing Internationals and the Postwar World Order
- 1. Encounters in Housing and Land Economics
- 2. Redefining Technical Assistance: From Policy to Training and Education
- 3. An Institute or a University? Assembling Experts and Inperts
- 4. A New Industrial Order: The Forum and the Nation
- 5. The Campus and the National Imaginary: Competing Narratives of Citizenship and Nationhood
- 6. Stewards of the Land: Culture, Currency, and the Nation
- Epilogue. METU at Large: METU as Revolution
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
