Development Media: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Marshall McLuhan, and the Model Village Exhibition, c. 1954

Image: Photograph of model village and low-cost housing exhibition during the 1954 United Nations Seminar on Housing and Community Improvement, 1954

Abstract

The chapter interrogates the “model village” exhibition that Jaqueline Tyrwhitt put together in New Delhi to showcase the UN’s vision of development. The exhibition was part of the 1954 United Nations Seminar on Housing and Community Improvement that the UN Technical Assistance Administration (TAA) co-organized with the Indian government. The exhibition and seminar, I argue, made space for international organizations within newly formed decolonized national grounds, but also established the “village” as the new interiority to entangle the rural with the administrative centers of world governance. Model villages allowed international institutions to reach territories and communities external to their institutional centers, bypassing national governments and connecting directly with local populations. In doing so, the exhibition turned the village into the site of expertise transfer, carried out by local systems of distribution, and more often than not perpetuating rather than resolving structural asymmetries.