ABSTRACT
Since its founding at the Bretton Woods conference, the World Bank has been a pivotal actor in development. As the largest multilateral development organization in the world, its role in the development process has been the subject of much deliberation and debate. This book has examined how the Bank’s definition of the goals and methods of development have shifted over time and how those shifts have impacted the Bank’s urban lending agenda. This work has attempted to demonstrate that the periodization of the Bank’s development philosophy according to the geo-political context of the times is vital to explaining how and why the Bank embraced urban lending during the early 1970s as well as subsequent shifts in the Bank’s urban agenda.
