ABSTRACT
The language of newfound social mission belies a longer particularly in intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations (UN). UN administrators and itinerant advisers worked under the mantle of human rights broadly conceived, embracing "community development" and connecting their self-proclaimed expertise with home grown efforts to improve the everyday lives of ordinary folk. UN workers struggled to make sense of very different cultural and material contexts, and they often failed to understand the local logics underpinning what they perceived as a uniform global housing crisis. Local populations, meanwhile, hardly possessed the weapons to realize their vision of property rights or community life in the face of overwhelming modernization campaigns. Slum clearance efforts in the Philippines illustrate the ways in which architects' and planners' "social engagement" became a form of international political relations. In 1966, UN Physical Planning and Housing Adviser Morris Juppenlatz attempted to organize a Central Institute for the Training and Relocation of Urban Squatters, or CITRUS, in the Philippines.
