The Early 1970s

The framing of the objectives of aid to cities in the period 1970–2000 needs to be considered in historical terms. By the late 1960s, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the continuing global political competition of the Cold War, there was growing recognition that economic growth by itself was not providing the needed improvements in standards of living of many ex-colonial and newly independent nations of Africa and Asia. The so-called “revolution of rising expectations” in these new states had led to increasing expressions of discontent and growing political struggles for the rewards of independence. If some countries erupted into open political and armed conflicts, for example in the Congo in the early 1960s or in Indochina from the late 1940s onward, the governments of other new states consciously sought to keep the lid on political expression through one-party states with varying levels of repression and control. The challenge of “creating political order”, Aristide Zolberg’s apt description at the time, ¹ dominated the political agenda in many countries.