Mainstreaming a regional planning discourse within the UN technical assistance programme: Ernest Weissmann and the post-war international collaboration

The article investigates the role of Ernest Weissmann in diffusing and institutionalizing a regional planning discourse within the United Nations technical assistance mechanism between 1950 and 1965. Heading a pioneering body within the United Nations Department of Social Affairs, Housing, Building and Planning Branch (HBP), as the article shows, gradually became a valuable vehicle for integrating Weissmann’s pre-war CIAM ideas on ‘human planning’ into the UN developmentalist post-war endeavour in Global Urban Governance. The process is followed through Branch’s publication Housing, Building and Planning, which casts light on the process of concatenation of ‘global experts’ and their missions in India (1954), Puerto Rico (1956), and Japan (1958). Finally, the research examines Weissmann’s bureaucratic efforts in establishing the United Nations Centre for Housing, Building and Planning in 1965 as an intellectual base for outsourcing technical knowledge for the newly established United Nations Development Program (UNDP). By situating Weissmann’s efforts within the broader reorganization of the UN’s development apparatus during the mid-century, the study highlights the role of bureaucratic agency in shaping mechanisms for the circulation of technical assistance and planning knowledge across national contexts.