ABSTRACT
For a brief period in the World Bank’s history, the urban programs of the 1970s focused primarily on poverty alleviation through direct investment in basic infrastructure and housing for low-income residents. The purpose of these projects was to provide low-cost improvements for the urban poor that could be replicated on a larger scale. According to the Bank’s own evaluations, cited in the previous chapter, the programs met their objectives, despite some operational problems. However, in the early 1980s, the Bank began to argue that, although these projects brought certain benefits to the Third World urban poor, they failed to address the complex array of problems confronting the city as a whole. Thus, the Bank began to argue that a shift away from projects and toward a focus on policy was necessary, and that the financial and institutional structures of cities needed to be strengthened instead. Housing assistance, for example, began to move away from shelter projects toward the reform of housing finance policies and the restructuring or dismantling of public housing agencies (Renaud 1983; Richardson 1987b). The Bank began to devote a much larger share of its urban lending portfolio to municipal development projects that sought to “build capacity” and enact financial reforms within municipal governments. By the 1990s, the Bank’s urban lending ambitiously took on the challenges of municipal policy, institutional change, and market reform in Third World cities (World Bank 1991b).
