Keywords

Introduction

This chapter documents and analyzes the role of the English town planner, educator, and editor, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, in the internationalization of planning education in the post-World War Two period.Footnote 1 In doing so, it sheds light on three important mechanisms for the diffusion and cross-fertilization of planning ideas: educational and research institutions, professional associations and journals, and international development agencies. It focuses on the important role Tyrwhitt played, as Associate Professor of Urban Design at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), in the establishment of a school of Regional and City Planning within the Institut of Teknologi Bandung (ITB), Indonesia. The UN regarded the new school, which opened in September 1959 and emphasized comprehensive physical planning— the first of its kind in Southeast Asia—as a pilot for a global system of similar research and training institutes.

The idea for a new planning school in Southeast Asia evolved in the context of the reactivation of transnational exchanges of planning ideas and practices that had been interrupted by World War Two and the establishment, by the UN, of the first large scale system of technical assistance to facilitate such exchange. Tyrwhitt forged an influential set of planning ideas—a synthesis of the bioregionalism of Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and tenets of European modernism—that anticipated and helped shape UN policy in the 1950s, and was implemented at ITB. Tyrwhitt exerted her influence both directly and through networks she cultivated through her work in England during World War Two as director of research for the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction (APRR). The Correspondence Course in town planning for members of the Allied forces that she ran through APRR’s sister organization, the School of Planning for Regional Redevelopment (SPRR) was particularly notable. This chapter begins by describing that foundational effort, and examining how, in the first postwar decade, Tyrwhitt helped nurture her concept of planning and approach to planning education while a highly mobile independent scholar and consultant to the UN. This effort underpinned Tyrwhitt’s unique contribution, as a member of the Harvard faculty, to the creation of the new school in Bandung.

Formative Influences

Raised in London, Tyrwhitt trained to become a garden designer, which included a year at the Architectural Association (AA) (1924–5). She wanted to do more meaningful work, however. After studying economics at night, she became an organizer for the League of Industry, which called for industrial reorganization along the lines of “planned capitalism.” In 1935, in order to learn more about the integration of industry with agriculture, Tyrwhitt took a job at Dartington Hall, the experimental estate established by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. That was probably where Tyrwhitt came across Geddes’s Cities in Evolution (1915), which inspired her interest in town and country (i.e., regional) planning, just then emerging as a profession and academic discipline, distinct from its roots in architecture and engineering. In 1936, Tyrwhitt decided to study at the AA’s new School of Planning for Research and National Development (SPRND). The school’s principal, E.A.A. Rowse (1896-ca. 1982), and several members of the Advisory Board, notably Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) and George Pepler (1902–1959) were disciples of Geddes, whose ecological conception of planning—based on the region as the planning unit and emphasizing research about interrelated social, economic and environmental design factors—inspired the curriculum. SPRND instituted a much more comprehensive course than those existing at the time at Liverpool and London Universities, and was prepared to admit as students, graduates of any subject related to planning, such as sociology, public administration, geography and economics rather than only architects, engineers or surveyors. However, SPRND closed shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939. When Tyrwhitt passed her exams in July of that year she was among the school’s first and last graduates.

Mobilization for Postwar Planning

In 1940, Rowse formed APRR, a new entity to continue SPRND’s research work, and recruited Tyrwhitt to serve as its director. She assumed her new position in February 1941. It was in this capacity that Tyrwhitt’s ideas about planning and the education of planners crystallized. The war gave impetus to a consensus that had begun to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s on the conception of planning pioneered by Geddes—which was fostered by Anglo-American exchange and had inspired SPRND—and APRR developed multidisciplinary survey methods to apply Geddes’s planning principles to postwar reconstruction. APRR’s Advisory Board also asked Tyrwhitt to organize a correspondence course to train planners to do this work. This course would have to be recognized by the Town Planning Institute (TPI) and Tyrwhitt quickly gained the enthusiastic support of Pepler, a founding member and Honorary Secretary of TPI. In late January 1942, TPI’s Heads of Schools Committee accepted Tyrwhitt’s proposed course in principle, coupled with a short studio and survey course after the war before students could qualify for TPI membership (professional certification). Tyrwhitt then worked with Pepler to redesign Rowse’s prewar SPRND as a new School of Planning and Research for Regional Development (SPRRD), a subsidiary of APRR, to run both these courses. TPI formally recognized SPRRD in late January 1943. The problem now was arranging funding. Tyrwhitt was again instrumental in securing backing from the War Office.

Army Education and the Internationalization of Planning Education

The War Office had introduced compulsory education for the troops—a first in British army history—in August 1941, with the creation of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). ABCA aimed to give the troops an opportunity to discuss current affairs to foster the understanding that they were fighting for something beyond national survival—the building of a better Britain (Hawkins and Brimble 1947). A course in town planning would appeal not only to those who aspired to become town planners, but to everyone who wanted to participate, as informed citizens, in this larger endeavor.

Planning for peace by the government was gaining momentum by the summer of 1942, and military progress allowed the extension of correspondence courses to more troops. The Army Education Corps also increased the scope of compulsory education, setting aside three hours a week for training in addition to ABCA discussion groups (Bickersteth 1944). In December 1942, ABCA asked APRR to produce a pamphlet on town planning to be used to frame such discussions. It was in this context that Tyrwhitt established the contacts and credibility that convinced the War Office, in June 1943, to issue APRR’s correspondence course to the troops. Tyrwhitt’s career as a planning educator began when the War Office sent APRR the first batch of students in mid-December.

After D-Day, with the end of the war within sight, demand for the course continued to grow, along with its international reach. By September 1944 the Army had extended correspondence courses to the Central Mediterranean Forces (including American, French, New Zealander, Greek, Polish, Indian and African soldiers) and soon included all troops in the Mid-East. By December, troops in India, the Southeast Asian command and Malta were included (Hawkins and Brimble 1947). By war’s end more than 1,500 had participated in the town planning course, which Tyrwhitt had run practically single-handedly.

The need to prepare the curriculum for the town planning course—for which there were no textbooks—provided the opportunity for Tyrwhitt to codify the planning principles and survey techniques APRR was developing. In so doing Tyrwhitt began formulating a synthesis of Geddes’s principles and the tenets of European modernism, which had been brought to Britain by refugee Bauhaus teachers and students fleeing the Nazis, and which she and other members of the Modern Architecture Research (MARS) group, the British branch of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne), were adapting to suit postwar conditions in England.

Postwar Internationalism and Information Exchange

At the end of the war—and the restoration of freely flowing information—Tyrwhitt articulated this synthesis in “Town Planning,” in the first issue (1945) of the Architects’ Year Book, as well as in her North American lecture tour that year. Trywhitt had been invited to Canada on behalf of the British Information Service to report on plans being made for postwar Britain. Jacob Crane, then Director of the U.S. National Housing Agency’s International Office, arranged her itinerary in the US. Crane was also a follower of Geddes and knew of Tyrwhitt’s work at APRR through the International Federation of Housing and Town Planning (IFHTP), which, under Pepler’s direction, had survived the war years based in London. On the eve of the UN Conference on International Organization, Crane wanted to promote transnational exchange of ideas for postwar planning and strengthen connections among like-minded planners. The new contacts and friendships Tyrwhitt made on this journey made it possible to launch her transnational career and participate in the revival of prewar networks of exchange established by progressive reformers (such as Geddes), transnational organizations (such as IFHTP and CIAM), and academics, notably those based at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), where Dean Joseph Hudnut had been an early supporter of SPRND (thanks to Unwin’s involvement in both schools).

Hudnut hosted Tyrwhitt’s visit just as GSD was beginning to implement a new Regional Planning Program under the direction of G. Holmes Perkins along Geddessian lines as recommended by John Gaus (1943) and as elaborated in Chap. 1 earlier. Hudnut arranged for Tyrwhitt to meet with the multidisciplinary Regional Planning Advisory Committee, among them Catherine Bauer (later Wurster). Connecting with these distinguished colleagues as well as CIAM émigrés in North America reinforced Tyrwhitt’s determination to continue her work promoting modern Geddessian planning, and to become more involved in both, CIAM and IFHTP.

In October 1946, Tyrwhitt ensured that APRR had a prominent presence at the first postwar congress of IFHTP, where delegates from 23 countries adopted a resolution to “urge the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations to establish … a unit to deal specifically with the international problems of housing and planned reconstruction” (Ihlder 1946, p. 13). This resolution signaled the delegates’ desire to coordinate reconstruction and development efforts worldwide, their recognition of the need to plan such efforts, and the need to train physical planners (broadly defined) for this undertaking—especially in the new and emerging nations, where the emphasis was primarily on economic planning and development. Tyrwhitt and Bauer organized a meeting at the congress to form a committee on Education for Planners during which educators from various countries agreed to circulate their curricula for this emerging discipline; APRR agreed to act as a clearinghouse for that exchange.

At that time Tyrwhitt was finalizing the curricula for SPRRD’s short intensive completion course for returning soldiers. There was so much demand for that three month course that she ran seven consecutive sessions in 1947. Tyrwhitt (1947b) shared that experience with an international audience in her article “Training the Planner in Britain” for the IFHTP newsletter. She was especially proud that SPRRD trained a small, but influential cohort who made significant contributions to postwar reconstruction worldwide as they assumed positions throughout the Commonwealth, in developing nations, and as advisors to the UN and other international development agencies, just when they were needed most.

Tyrwhitt strengthened her international connections as it became clear that she would have to leave England, as openings for women in the workplace created by the war closed in favor of returning veterans. When Rowse returned from his wartime service in 1947, Tyrwhitt helped him develop a one-year Diploma Course on comprehensive regional planning focusing on world regions—international development; in January 1948 she resigned as director of SPRRD so Rowse could take over. Tyrwhitt (1953) recalled: “I left hoping that the Diploma Course would be able to get going on the next stage of its career—the institution of the first integrated course in regional planning (meaning world regions rather than local ones).” Tyrwhitt now also hoped to work internationally, with the UN or UNESCO.

Tyrwhitt clearly had an international audience in mind in producing Patrick Geddes in India (1947a), a collection of excerpts drawn from the town planning reports Geddes did for Indian cities between 1915 and 1919. Tyrwhitt selected texts to demonstrate the relevance of Geddes’s town planning principles to the worldwide task of urban reconstruction and the realization of a new world order based on cooperation that the UN would foster. These planning principles included “diagnosis before treatment” (survey before plan) and “conservative surgery,” a process that respects local traditions and builds on their strengths. Tyrwhitt also selected passages that highlighted Geddes’s concept of “bioregionalism.” That is “what makes this book particularly apt and timely for the days ahead,” Lewis Mumford (1947, p. 9) declared in his Introduction: “One cannot appreciate Geddes’s regionalism unless one also appreciates his internationalism, his universalism…What he says about India has a lesson for other lands.”

UN Technical Assistance Program in Housing and Town Planning

That same year, Crane helped the UN Secretariat establish a program on housing, building and town planning within the Department of Social Affairs. Initially, the main project of that program was to stimulate international exchange of information on practical and transferable experiences. The vehicle for this project was the bulletin first called: Housing and Town and Country Planning. Pepler nominated Tyrwhitt to be the editor, but that position was not immediately filled, as the UN’s housing and planning program evolved in tandem with the UN’s Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA), launched in 1949. To prepare for EPTA, the Department of Social Affairs charged Crane to lead a reconnaissance Mission of Experts on Low-Cost Housing in South and Southeast Asia from November 1950 through January 1951. Crane must have had some say in appointing the four members of his mission, as they all shared his Geddessian perspective on regional planning (Gardner-Medwin 1952).To signal this consensus, the Mission’s report includes many references to Geddes and even includes a long citation from Tyrwhitt’s Geddes in India as an appendix (Mission of Experts 1951).

The Crane Mission’s recommendations provided the framework for future UN activities in Asia and the Far East. Notably, the Mission (1951, p. 21) observed that while some form of national social and economic planning was underway in each of the countries visited, the countries were relatively weak in the incorporation of regional planning: “the physical interpretation of this national policy—the actual use and development of land on a regional basis.” The Mission believed that the UN could be of great service by providing technical assistance in regional planning, for example, by assisting in creating professional training facilities to address the widespread shortage of skilled personnel. However, despite agreement on the important long-term need for university-based training of planners, there was not consensus about the wisdom of importing foreign experts to help. Consequently, the Mission recommended further study of the issue and UN coordination of arrangements for international cooperation with regard to research and training programs for the region as a whole.

In 1950, trained personnel were especially scarce in newly independent Indonesia, which had suffered extensive destruction during the Japanese occupation (1942–1945) and the Indo-Dutch war (1945–1949). Due to Dutch-imposed restrictions on access to higher education there were fewer than 15 professionals with town planning expertise in the archipelago to take over from the departing Dutch. Civil engineer J. Thijsse, a member of the Crane Mission, was one of the few Dutch to remain after 1945, when Indonesia first declared its independence. Thijsse had lived in Bandung since the 1920s and provided a link to Dutch colonial planning practices. Significantly, Geddessian planning ideas became influential in the Dutch East Indies after they were introduced in the 1930s by J.M. de Casseres (1902–1990) (Bosma 2014). Casseres’ Geddessian methodology, “planology”, was embraced by Thomas Karsten (1884–1945), the “founder of modern city planning” in Indonesia (Prijitomo 1996, p. 4). Thijsse was a disciple of Karsten, and helped him produce an analysis of Bandung for the 4th CIAM Congress in 1933, when Dutch planner Cornelis van Eesteren was CIAM president (Roosmalen 2005). In 1946, Thijsse, then head of the Central Planning Bureau, was named Professor of Planologie at the Technische Hoogeschool (TH) in Bandung. While on a tour to study planning practice and education in Western Europe, Thijsse attended the 1946 IFHTP congress—and may well have attended Tyrwhitt’s meeting on planning education (Roosmalen and Shoshkes 2016). In 1949, Thijsse returned to Bandung where he lectured on town planning at the Engineering School, which opened in the former TH as a division of the new Universitas Indonesia (UI).

Converging Transnational Networks

Meanwhile, Tyrwhitt was becoming a transnational actor, working on both sides of the Atlantic as a member of the CIAM inner circle, and helping Charles Abrams establish a new planning course at The New School for Social Research in New York. She also continued to facilitate interchange between the Regional Planning program at Harvard’s GSD and SPRRD (recreating Unwin’s prewar role as the agent of that exchange). SPRRD had almost closed in the summer of 1948, since Rowse’s Diploma Course didn’t conform with TPI’s curriculum, which narrowly focused on implementation of Britain’s 1947 Town & Country Planning Act (TCPA). Tyrwhitt had recognized early on that the school would need help from former students and had inspired a group of alumni to form the School of Planning Club, which convened its first annual meeting in 1949. Both Tyrwhitt and the Club tried to help save SPRRD, by reorganizing the school to focus on planning for the British Commonwealth and Colonies, from where many of its students had come and a large proportion of graduates were working. With the UN’s TA program and the Colombo Plan, which began in 1951, there were more opportunities for planners overseas than in Britain, which was struggling with a prolonged postwar recovery.

Tyrwhitt had her first chance to work for the UN in 1950, when Abrams enlisted her to write the introduction for an issue of the UN Bulletin he was editing (see Tyrwhitt 1951). This marked the beginning of Tyrwhitt’s long association with Yugoslavian architect and longtime CIAM member Ernest Weissmann (1903–85), who, with Crane’s support, became Assistant Director of the new Town and Country Planning Section of the UN Division of Social Affairs in 1951. That year Tyrwhitt worked closely with Weissmann and CIAM president Jose Luis Sert in New York on inter-related UN and CIAM projects. Weissmann’s staff attended the 8th CIAM congress—largely organized by Tyrwhitt and hosted by the MARS group (including many School of Planning Club members)—and a concurrent IFHTP meeting to encourage their participation in the UN’s Technical Assistance (UNTA) program and research projects, which included studies of low-cost housing in tropical areas and the education of planners.

Based on her close working relationship with Weissmann, in 1952—when she was based in Canada, setting up the first graduate planning program at the University Toronto—Tyrwhitt sought his help in securing UN funding for the proposed reorganization of SPRRD to specialize in Commonwealth planning. She suggested as a model the newly established Inter-American Housing Research & Training Center (CINVA), where the director, Anatole Solow, was an SPRRD alumnus (and Club member.) Weissmann (1952) agreed in principle, “since it will provide instruction in housing and community planning on a regional basis within the region itself. It may be possible to initiate a number of such institutions.”

Concurrently, members of the School of Planning Club were crafting their own curriculum to train planners in developing areas and had launched a Bulletin, intended to be “an informal screed” devoted to new material on regional planning worldwide. The editors, based in Singapore, Gold Coast and London, invited Tyrwhitt to write an editorial for the second issue, published in 1952. She observed that the editors’ “far-flung-ness was deliberate.” In Britain, preoccupation with implementation of the 1947 TCPA tended to blind planners “to the wider issues of regional planning in the world at large, or even in Britain vis-à-vis the world of the future,” (Tyrwhitt 1952, p. 1) argued. “All those who have had experience outside Britain will be … well aware of the need for Regional Planning—and it is to those people, and from those people, that this Bulletin is directed.” The School of Planning Club provided an important network fostering exchange and mutual support among SPRRD alumni and friends worldwide.

Impressed by Tyrwhitt’s expertise, organizational skills and ability to operate through transnational networks, Weissmann was eager to enlist her in the work of his section. When the Indian Government requested UN assistance with an International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing, Weissmann successfully recruited Tyrwhitt as Project Director both to advise the government on its exhibition and to organize a concurrent seminar—where a main discussion topic would be the education of planners— to further promote the exchange of information.

Tywhitt began her preparatory work at UN headquarters in New York in June 1953, lining up seminar discussion leaders, including Crane, Abrams and Thijsse. She traveled to India after meeting in Europe with representatives of the four UN specialized agencies participating in the seminar and exhibition. In July 1953, Tyrwhitt returned to Europe to attend the 9th CIAM congress in France. In this way she established linkages between CIAM members working in tropical regions, Sert, who was now Dean at GSD, and the UN Seminar, furthering the cross-fertilization of planning ideas and paving the way for future institutional collaboration.

In September 1953, Tyrwhitt toured India and Southeast Asia to confer with key people involved with the seminar and newly placed UNTA advisors in the region. In Jakarta she met with the chief Indonesian delegate to the Seminar, Ir. (engineer) Kus Hadinoto, head of the Department of People’s Housing; and British architect Clifford Holliday, a UNTA advisor on a master plan for Jakarta. Tyrwhitt spent two days in Bandung with Thijsse. She was delighted to discover that Geddessian and modernist planning ideas were well established in Indonesia.

Tyrwhitt also made an unofficial visit to Singapore, where she met with two SPRRD alumni, Kenneth Watts and Lincoln Page, who worked there. Watts, an editor of the School of Planning Club Bulletin, wanted to work in Indonesia and sought Tyrwhitt’s help. Later, when Holliday was hiring his replacement in Jakarta, he asked Tyrwhitt for a reference for an SPRRD alumnus applying for the job; Tyrwhitt instead recommended Watts. Once established in Jakarta, Watts played a key role in establishing the new school in Bandung.

UN Seminar, New Delhi, 1954

The UN Seminar on Housing and Community Improvement in Asia and the Far East—the first of its kind—convened in New Delhi in January 1954. Official delegations were sent from eleven countries and observers arrived from four more. Five alumni of SPRRD came from all over India, and Page attended from Singapore. The delegates affirmed the importance of comprehensive physical planning as a distinct profession. The challenge was how to introduce planning education in countries where the profession was not yet well established. Thijsse reported that a separate course in planning was rejected in Indonesia, since “the need was not only for planners, but also for engineers and architects, so it was thought better to give some extra training in planning in the architectural and engineering courses” (United Nations 1957, p. 100).The discussion then turned more theoretical, and considered an ideal long-term program. Tyrwhitt proposed six hypothetical stages for training town planners—based on various levels of national readiness—culminating with a specialized degree course “when everybody has come to realize that now is the time that a-hundred-per-cent planners are absolutely necessary” (United Nations 1957, pp. 100–101). The group agreed on Tyrwhitt’s typology, and also resolved to request UN support for another meeting specifically on regional planning, as this specialization was of particular importance in Southeast Asia.

In making its recommendations the Seminar confirmed that “eventually planning schools should be established in each country or State in Southeast Asia. The needs of students interested in planning throughout the region are somewhat similar, and this fact should be taken into account in developing the curricula for those schools which are first established, as these will have to serve as ‘regional’ schools for the time being” (United Nations 1957, p. 110). Those recommendations—and Tyrwhitt’s typology—were ratified in the subsequent UN Regional Seminar on Training for Town Planning held in Puerto Rico in 1956. Thus, Weissmann’s idea to create a global system of regional research and training institutes was adopted as UN policy. The question now was to find a willing host country to implement the idea. Indonesia was a good candidate because a foundation had already been established that resonated with the approach that Crane, Weissmann, and Tyrwhitt were promoting.

A Planning School in Indonesia

Hadinoto, who became director of the UN-sponsored Regional Housing Research Center that opened in Bandung in 1955, had long been interested in establishing a physical planning course within the School of Architecture at UI Bandung. In 1956, he discussed this idea with Watts, who arrived in Indonesia that year as Halliday’s successor (thanks to Tyrhwhitt). When Indonesian President Sukarno signed an agreement with the US Government in 1956 to help modernize Indonesian higher education, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—then known as the International Cooperation Administration—contracted with the University of Kentucky (UK) to develop an engineering and scientific research and training center in Bandung by reorganizing existing UI Bandung departments. This resulted in the formation of an independent institution, later known as the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). Hadinoto, a member of the faculty, recognized the opportunity to propose a planning school as part of this new institution, a pilot for the global system of research and training institutes Weissmann envisioned.

Hadinoto found an influential ally in the engineer Soefaat, a graduate in planning from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), who returned to Indonesia in 1956 to become Chief of the National Bureau of Town Planning. At that time, G. Holmes Perkins, then Dean of the School of Fine Arts at Penn, was leading a UNTA team in setting up an architecture and planning program at the new UN-sponsored Middle-east Technical University in Turkey (Abrams 1970). Soefaat had discussed the idea of getting similar assistance from an American university with Weissmann, who lectured at Penn, and Penn professor Martin Meyerson, who was then about to become a senior member of the GSD planning faculty. These discussions continued at Harvard with Sert and Tyrwhitt, who had joined the GSD planning faculty in 1955.

The emerging UN-Harvard partnership was reinforced by Watts, who had been traveling around Indonesia to advise on UN assistance projects and assess training needs. In September 1957, Watts (1997) reported to Indonesian government agencies and the UN that he had confirmed the need for a planning school, and recommended UN assistance to create this school at the new ITB. This institution building effort became more urgent in December 1957, when President Sukarno seized Dutch assets and 50,000 Dutch citizens left the country. Only one Dutch professor, an architect, remained (Roosmalen 2005).

In 1958, the Bandung Faculty Senate approved the creation of a physical planning department within the Engineering School, triggering Meyerson, Tyrwhitt, and William Doebele, who became a key member of the team when he joined the Harvard faculty that month, to begin work. Hadinoto and Soefaat served as Indonesian advisors to the UN-Harvard team. The challenge, Doebele (1962, p. 97) recalled, was “to attack head-on the question of education for a kind of planning that does not yet actually exist.” The issues they addressed included: transferability of Western planning ideas to an Southeast Asian developing country context; selection of faculty from Indonesia who would be trained in North American universities and then return to teach; and creation of a sustainable capacity to engage in urban development research that would serve the Southeast Asian region. They named the new department Regional and City Planning—reversing the conventional order—to underscore the importance of regional planning in developing countries.

Watts joined the discussions at Harvard—which were proceeding in tandem with preparations for a UN Asia Seminar on Regional Planning to be held in Tokyo in July—when he visited Tyrwhitt in 1958. Following his visit Tyrwhitt felt assured enough to mobilize her networks: she wrote to one of her students, then in Australia, who would be attending the UN Seminar in Tokyo, that confidentially, Harvard was “about to undertake the sponsoring (in quite a big way) of a new SE Asia School of Planning,” and asked her “to make certain contacts in this connection” during her travels (Tyrwhitt 1958).

The UNTA mission in Indonesia approved a 7-year plan for the UN-Harvard team to establish the school, and the formal agreement was signed at the UN Seminar in Tokyo. Meyerson went to Bandung in January 1959 to finalize arrangements to open the school that September. That year, Doebele and his wife, Mary, served as the first resident UNTA advisers. Sert and Tyrwhitt were to go together the following year, but Sert had to cancel. Tyrwhitt had agreed to spend only six months as the resident adviser; she would be on her own.

Tyrwhitt in Bandung

Luckily, when Tyrwhitt arrived in Bandung in December 1959, she found that much of the hard work had been done; taking advantage of her familiarity with the region, she moved the program forward without difficulty. In 1960 Tyrwhitt wrote to a friend:

It is so easy here! First I am doing something I find interesting and something I have done many times before: training young and intelligent people in the elements of the practice of urban planning. The simple techniques of conducting a survey and interpreting material and determining the main lines of a plan. … It’s also extremely interesting for me to see how to vary the same basic techniques to meet the conditions of this country….

Before leaving in July, Tyrwhitt (1960b) reported on what she had accomplished and outlined the next phase of work. The main tasks during the start-up period (1959–61) “have been and still are: to get good students enrolled and to teach them; to get adequate building space and a good library; to frame the long-term curriculum and to enroll a first class Indonesian faculty to be trained abroad.” Tyrwhitt taught an introductory lecture course and co-taught two planning studios. Students undertook field surveys of nearby villages, which formed a basis for the determination of plot sizes in the plans they would make for those areas; they assumed that people would build their own houses with local materials.

As there were no texts for those courses, Tyrwhitt devised a cost-effective strategy to publish provisional manuals; Watts authored the first one, on survey methods. To supplement class work with field experiences, Tyrwhitt helped organize paid summer internships, which were a success. Tyrwhitt also took a special interest in the school’s library, to which she donated a large slide collection. In a report on the ITB planning school in Ekistics—a journal she co-founded with Greek planner Doxiadis in 1956 to report on planning for human settlements in developing regions—Tyrwhitt (1960a) noted with pride that it represented what her “mentor,” Crane, considered to be one of “the most hopeful areas of achievement” in international cooperation: “the promotion of technical education within the country receiving technical aid.”

Looking ahead, Tyrwhitt (1960b) thought: “The end of 1963 probably represents the first moment that the school could safely make its existence widely known in Southeast Asia.” To celebrate this final phase, she proposed that a long-discussed UN Seminar on Planning, Training and Research in Southeast Asia be held there in January 1964: “It is reasonable to believe that by then the need for UNTA/Harvard guidance of the school’s development could be considered to have reached its end. The whole project should be ripe for a new stage of development: the actual setting up of an SE Asian Center for advanced training and research in regional planning.”

Meyerson wrote to Tyrwhitt in July 1960: “The UN is very pleased with all that you have done and are only astonished, as we all are, at your energy.”

Institutionalizing the ITB School of Regional and City Planning

Back in the U.S., Tyrwhitt collaborated with UN personnel in New York, and with Meyerson and Doebele at Harvard, to support the new school. She identified candidates for UN faculty training fellowships and agreed to help oversee their studies; much thought was given to “the selection of talents who would draw up the detailed curriculum later” (Tyrwhitt 1961b). Tyrwhitt (1960b) was particularly concerned about “the whole question of the organization of a worthwhile and financially sound program of research, both to make full use of the newly developed skills of returning Indonesian faculty members and to provide them with additional income.” At a meeting at UN headquarters in October 1960, she reiterated a previous plea to restore funding for a second UN expert in Bandung to deal specifically with the research program. She hoped the UN could diplomatically suggest that the Government include this position in its 1962 program budget; that did not happen, though. Tyrwhitt also proposed that the Indonesian faculty members in North America on UN fellowships meet at Harvard in the spring to review their work with Harvard staff. The UN agreed to sponsor that meeting if Tyrwhitt convinced other funding organizations to send their fellows, too, which she did.

Due to the rapport she established in Bandung with students and faculty, in 1961 the chairman of the newly formed Indonesian Planning Students Association wrote asking for her help in making contacts and in setting up their own professional association. Tyrwhitt (1961a) urged them to contact the future Indonesian faculty now abroad, as this problem “must be worked out in Indonesia,” and assured them that their letter would be “thoroughly discussed” by all future faculty, UN officials and Harvard faculty when they met at Harvard.

At the Harvard conference, future faculty discussed their studies, courses to be taught at ITB, their research program, and how best to collaborate. Particular attention was paid to the student organization’s letter, as Tyrwhitt promised, to underscore the importance of institutional development. Participants agreed, “that the establishment of the profession was one of the most important and difficult issues that will arise once the first graduates have been produced. This was a matter which both the faculty and the students should cooperate in solving … in a way that would be most useful in the culture and institutions of Indonesia” (Harvard University 1961).

Conditions in Indonesia were turbulent during the next several years. Even though she was unable directly to influence the course of events, Tyrwhitt remained dedicated to the planning school. She also accepted an invitation from Soejoedi Wirioatmodjo, head of ITB’s Architecture Department, to represent them in the U.S., especially to help their faculty continue to receive training fellowships. Wirioatmodjo (1963) wrote: “We would like to be under the patronage of someone not only with authority in architectural and university circles, but with knowledge about the situation of and a warm heart for our school in Bandung. Such a person, dear Professor Tyrwhitt, we thought you to be exactly and without reserve.”

When Meyerson left Harvard in 1963, he entrusted the significant investment he had made in the Bandung project to Tyrwhitt, who, along with Doebele, replaced him as UN Senior Advisors. Political turmoil prevented the return of Harvard faculty to ITB at that time. Tyrwhitt attempted to build up a “new continuity” with Australian UNTA resident advisors, and stayed informed through her network of SPRRD alumni in the region and quasi-insider status at UN headquarters. But in January 1965, Indonesia withdrew from the UN. In September, a bloody revolt against Sukarno’s government drove all foreign agencies out of the country.

Meanwhile, a new regime was also being put in place at the UN. A Center for Housing, Building and Planning was established in 1965, with Weissman as founding director; he retired in 1967. Tyrwhitt was also phasing into retirement from Harvard and wanted to focus on international development consulting. When she received support from the Ford Foundation in 1967 to advise on the establishment of a new planning program in Singapore, Tyrwhitt took advantage of the opportunity to visit Bandung, where she was pleased to find the ITB planning program thriving. More than half of the 13 graduates of the program were working in the regional planning field, including four with the Ministry of Public Works. Members of the first graduating class founded the Indonesian Planners Association in April 1971, electing Kus Hadinoto as chair.

In order to forge a connection between the new program in Singapore and the existing programs in Bandung and the Philippines, Tyrwhitt advised that Singapore focus on urban design, to complement the emphasis on regional planning in Bandung and on administration in the Philippines. Bandung, however, was not interested in such coordination, probably due to ongoing domestic unrest—one obstacle in establishing a new regional entity in an area where the priority for new nations was to strengthen their own institutions. The Bandung program’s continuing success, though, testified to the dedication of the Indonesian faculty and the resilience of the institution that Tyrwhitt and the rest of the UN/Harvard team helped to build.

Conclusion

Anglo-American exchange in the 1920s and 30s fostered the consensus that emerged on the conception of planning pioneered by Geddes, which inspired Rowse’s prewar School of Planning. Tyrwhitt developed a synthesis of Geddessian bioregionalism and the tenets of European modernism during the wartime context. The correspondence and postwar completion courses that Tyrwhitt ran through SPRRD ensured the wide diffusion of this set of ideas. But it was Tyrwhitt’s participation in the postwar renewal of transnational exchange that stimulated the further evolution of this Geddessian line of modern planning thought, as Tyrwhitt helped develop new planning programs in a variety of cultural and institutional settings in Europe, North America and Asia. Focusing on her role in the establishment of the school of Regional and City Planning in Indonesia, this chapter illuminates how Tyrwhitt exerted her influence through creative engagement with educational and research institutions, professional associations, and international development agencies. It shows that she not only played an important role in building the tightly knit transnational community of those concerned with planning education that formed under the auspices of the UN, but also was instrumental in shaping the shared body of ideas that emerged from that community. The internationalization of planning education was one important outcome of the transnational life she led, one of her many contributions to planning theory, pedagogy, and practice.