Ford’s network: the American-Yugoslav project and the circulation of urban planning expertise in the Cold War

Abstract

The article focuses on the American-Yugoslav Project in Regional and Urban Planning Studies (AYP) to explore the Ford Foundation’s role in the international circulation of urban planning expertise during the Cold War. In operation in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1966–1976, AYP was a foundation-funded collaboration between Ljubljana’s Urban Planning Institute of SR Slovenia and a succession of American universities: Cornell, Wayne State, and Johns Hopkins. Its goal was to bring the American regional planning expertise to Yugoslavia and Europe. Using the lens of network-building, the article highlights the geopolitical motivations of Ford’s presence in socialist Yugoslavia before tracing the professional trajectories of AYP’s founding members, American geographer Jack C. Fisher and the Slovenian architect Vladimir Braco Mušič. It then analyzes the project as an exemplary ‘networking instrument’ that connected numerous urban planners across Europe, in turn facilitating the transfer of American cybernetic techniques to Yugoslavia.