ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the World Bank's urban program as a subsystem of one of the current international systems of aid, and, in particular, the Bank's evolving experiments in program planning, institutional learning, and the training of national bureaucracies. It reviews briefly what the Bank has done with regard to urban development, and to a lesser extent, regional development, and what the Bank thinks might be learned from these efforts. The chapter looks at what the cities think, as well as some of the problems that loom ahead in trying to carry out the programs on a significant scale. In the existing international aid systems, most developing countries can get assistance for urban and regional development in two ways. In effect, the Bank is now functioning under the auspices of the more developed countries as one of several international planning and educational agencies for the bureaucracies of the poorer nations of the world.
