ABSTRACT
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has long played a major role in advancing modernist concepts of housing, community planning, and neighbourhood design. MoMA’s planning-related exhibitions exemplify the cultural climate of urban development in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, as automobiles and white ight created extensive suburbs and left inner cities to decay. They open a window onto the tensions in US planning as architects, planners and other professionals tried to navigate a course between European interventionism and Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire and establish it as a model for global planning. In the absence of European-style governmental and public action, leaders in the eld of housing used MoMA exhibitions to call on and educate the general public to stimulate a political base that would help improve American housing and neighbourhood design.
