ABSTRACT
One of the main themes of this volume is the transfer of planning ideas from one country to another, and the questions of what happens to the ideas in the course of this transfer, with what results. Interesting as these stories are in themselves, each a unique tale from the past, what I miss from most of the accounts is what anthropologists call a thick description of the process of the transfer itself.1 I would like to fill this gap with a story from my own practice when, in the latter part of the 1960s, I worked for the Ford Foundation in Chile, in charge of a large-scale, multiyear technical assistance program to the national government concerned with regional development planning and a variety of other issues regarding housing, urban policy, and social programming. Although unable to adopt the anthropologist’s method of “thick description,” I hope at least to evoke some of the things that happened when an overseas technical mission worked in close collaboration with a reform-minded, democratic government on a range of planning issues.2
