Interview With Dr. Bish Sanyal - Part II
By Deden Rukmana
Part II
[DR] Let’s continue your story after you get hired at MIT.
[BS] I joined MIT in 1984. In my first year I taught two courses, one on evaluation of housing projects and policies in developing countries, and the other on planning institutions, which covered the strengths and weaknesses of institutions both at the top, like national planning commissions, but also at the bottom where non-governmental organizations were active.
In 1985, for the first time, I attended ACSP’s annual conference. Mike Teitz who was the ACSP president that year mentioned in his presidential address that he was very concerned whether North American planning programs were addressing the intellectual needs of international students. Teitz highlighted the increasing enrollment of international students in US planning programs even though most programs did not have faculty with research expertise in developing countries. I realized that what is relevant planning education for international students in US planning programs was an emerging issue. This was confirmed as I began to meet planning academics from developing countries who were a very small group in US universities. We would always get together at the annual conference of ACSP and exchange notes about how marginal we were in US planning programs. I remember many such conversations with Tridib Banerjee, Gill-Chin Lim, Salah El-Shakhs, Hemalata Dandekar, Himi Jammal and others.
[DR] Tridib Banerjee of USC? So USC at that time did not have an international planning program?
[BS] No planning program, except for MIT and UCLA, had formal program concentrations in international development at that time. Tridib was the sole international planner/designer at USC; so was Hemalata Dandekar at University of Michigan, Gill-Chin Lim at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and at SUNY Buffalo, there was Himi Jammal who cared deeply about international development. We saw each other once every year at ACSP and gradually a sense of solidarity among us emerged that even though we had much to contribute to US planning programs, our potential was not fully appreciated by mainstream North American planning academics. I must acknowledge, however, that, personally, I did not feel intellectually isolated at MIT because, as I mentioned earlier, MIT had six full time faculty, all born in the US, who taught international planning related courses. What concerned me at that moment was that there was not much intellectual exchange between the newly formed international development group at MIT and the rest of the department which had some outstanding scholars and practitioners who focused on North American urban issues. I was aware of the publications by the domestic scholars, in part because of my education at UCLA which cultivated in me a comparative approach to understanding urban problems. So, in 1988, at the ACSP conference I had organized a panel on Comparative approaches to planning education and laid out my vision of how the problems faced by developed and developing countries could not be understood well unless one understood the many connections between the two sets of countries. Thomas Blair, an editor for Plenum Press, was in the audience. He talked to me after the panel and urged me to turn the panel’s presentations into an edited volume. Blair thought I was on to something fresh, and predicted that an edited volume on the topic would sell well. After I returned to MIT I requested the department to give me some funds to have a meeting of the panelists along with a few other academics who worked on developing countries to present commissioned papers on the topic of global planning education. Note that I used the term global, not developed or developing counties! The edited volume, Breaking the Boundaries: A One-World Approach to Planning Education (1990) was the result of that meeting. It started the momentum towards the formal construction of a new epistemic community of planning academics who cared deeply about international development planning.
[DR] So will you say that was one of the milestones of international development planning?
[BS] I think so, but others may feel differently. While I was editing the volume, Gill Lim was also writing a book on that same topic. Hooshang Amirahmadi at Rutgers was another person who was researching the same topic at that time. Collectively, we created an intellectual momentum which was beginning to gain strength each year. And this was visible in the increasing number of panels on the topic at ACSP conferences each year. Around this time I wrote a paper for the Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER). The title of my paper was: Poor Countries Students in Rich Countries universities: The possibilities for planning education in an interconnected world. This paper was selected for the Chester Rapkin award; and that further consolidated the scholarly legitimacy for research on the topic area. Soon after, Himi Jammal took the initiative to organize a meeting at SUNY, Buffalo and invited many planning faculty who were writing and teaching about international planning. Himi was an institutionalist at heart and wanted to formalize our somewhat decentralized efforts by proposing to ACSP that the organization should acknowledge us as a new “interest group” to be called the Global Planning Educators Interest group (GPEIG). That was around 1997-98. Tridib Banerjee and Ruth Yabes (Arizona State) offered to serve as the joint chairs of GPEIG. As GPEIG started managing the increasing number of panels on global planning at ACSP’s annual conference, a new stream of young scholars, born both in the US and abroad, joined the group. Gill Lim made the wonderfully generous gesture to pay for our annual group dinner at the ACSP conference. This too helped to consolidate the expanding group, and we were finally accepted as a major “interest group” within ACSP.
[DR] Can you reflect whether the argument you had proposed in your article and the edited volume is still relevant, now?
[BS] Even though it was a very different historical moment when I wrote the article and edited the volume, I stand by the central idea which I had proposed then. My article was based on the argument that we live in one world, not three worlds, as terms like “Third World” suggest. Our destinies are inter-connected in so many ways, through financial flows, labor migration, environmental pollution, technological innovations, and so on. And, we really need to think about how to live peacefully in that one world. That notion is even more relevant now. What is different and sad is that it's developed countries that are now closing their borders. Initially, it was developing countries who were hesitant to open themselves up to external influences and market competition, but now the table has turned: Developed countries, like the US, are now looking inward and implementing all kinds of policies to restrict the free flow of goods, people and ideas across the world.
I must acknowledge that there was an interruption in my scholarship on development planning after the publication of the book and the prize-winning paper. In 1994 I was asked by the senior faculty in my department to be the department head! This was totally unplanned. And, at first I was not willing to take on this huge responsibility to head the largest planning program in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. How did it happen? Phillip Clay, who was the department head before me, was asked by MIT’s then president to became MIT’s chancellor. The senior faculty in my department and our new dean, William Mitchell, requested me to become the department head even though I had just received tenure and was still an associate professor. My wife, Diane Davis, was teaching at the New School for Social Research then, so we had to commute between Boston and New York. What’s more: we were expecting our first child after 13 years of marriage. I do not know why I accepted this huge administrative responsibility but, believe me, I never planned for it. I had no specific agenda of what I would try to accomplish as a department head. In hindsight, I think that was the reason for my success, and I was the first department head to serve eight years, for two terms!! All along, I had to construct an agenda of action by talking to all my colleagues because I had none of my own to push for. The only good aspect of my new responsibility was that as the department head I had resources and generous discretionary funds which I used to bring back to MIT, more than once, my international colleagues from GPEIG for periodic meetings which helped to strengthen the group, particularly after Gill Lim’s sudden and premature death.
[DR] I read in your website that you are heading an effort to create the curriculum for the first private university of urban and regional planning in India. Can you tell us more about this initiative?
[00:12:44] Yes. This started five years back. The Rockefeller Foundation approached MIT to create the curriculum for a new university in India, called The Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS). Larry Vale, who followed me as the department head, and I served as the Co PIs for this project. The timing was good and I liked working on this project because it is about a new Indian university. I have always tried to remain engaged with India because otherwise I get totally absorbed, intellectually, with the US. So, I agreed to take on the new responsibility, particularly because the Rockefeller Foundation provided ample resources for us to hire a good team of doctoral students and also commission two dozen or so faculty from other planning programs in top ranking US planning schools to create brand new courses. We also met twice at Bellagio in Italy to brainstorm how to create a new planning program for India. In total, the project created 75 new courses for IIHS which planned to hire young faculty to teach these courses.
[DR] Will you please say a few words about the book you are currently working on with the tentative title, Hidden Successes?
[BS] Yes, it's based on an international competition I had organized with financial support from IFMR, a financial and research institution in India. The objective was to counteract the dominant ideology that India had totally failed to address the many urban problems the country was facing after 60 years of independence, and that this was largely because of a rent seeking bureaucracy and too much state control of the economy. I argued that actually there are many examples of successes which are often overlooked even by bureaucrats themselves. So I organized an international competition seeking case studies of planned success where government agencies had played positive roles. I considered this an important task at a time when government was under severe attack from both the right and the left of the ideological spectrum. It has taken an unusually long time to edit this volume because many case studies which were presented had not been rigorously researched, and I had to seek new cases from experts who had not participated in the competition. In any event,the central theme of the book remains relevant today, and the international development group in our planning program at MIT strongly believes that there needs to be continuing emphasis on this topic.
[DR] Let me return to the question of who influenced your intellectual trajectory. You mentioned a lecture by John Friedmann when you were a master’s student at University of Kansas and then became his student at UCLA. I can see that he influenced your thinking. How was he as a mentor, and what has been your relationship with him since you came to MIT?
[BS] That is an interesting question because John Friedmann is someone I immensely respect. We celebrated his 90th birthday at the ACSP conference in Portland with a book written by his students. Each one of us wrote about how John had significantly influenced our thinking. In general, John was interested to construct an alternative to conventional ideas of modernization. He was interested in grassroots development, and did not like government. He thought government-led planning was conservative, bureaucratic, and mainstream. He believed that social movements were a form of alternative planning from below.
When I joined MIT as a junior faculty, I got involved in the evaluation of many bottom-up development projects which had been funded by the Ford Foundation for 10 years around the world. Judith Tendler, my colleague, and I studied these projects and found that, in the main, these projects had very limited impact. A few exceptional projects were relatively successful because of linkages with planning institutions at the top! Drawing on these projects I wrote an article titled, The Myth of Development from Below. John thought it was a criticism of his ideas. Our disagreement became clear at a conference at Columbia University. But I was not criticizing John’s ideas. I was building on them to move our understanding of development a step forward which was highly appreciated by my colleagues at MIT. One reason my senior colleagues supported me is because my research demonstrated the need for governmental intervention at a time when government was being discredited by both neo classical economists as well as scholars, like John, who advocated for development from below.
[00:20:17] Let me give another example of our intellectual disagreement. John and Clyde Weaver had co-authored a book titled, Territory and Function, which they used in teaching a course on regional planning when I was a doctoral student at UCLA. This book is about territorial identities and “life spaces” from being wiped out by expanding market forces which John called “economic spaces”. For John, regional cultures were to be preserved against any intrusion from outside. In my book on planning cultures, I argued that the notion of “culture” as a static entity was conservative, and I preferred to understand how politics influenced planning cultures. I also observed how territoriality was somewhat exclusionary as it barred migration and questioned whether culture is static. I found that all planning cultures the book analyzed had evolved, sometime for the better but at other times for the worst, because of political struggles over contentious issues, such as migration of new people to old areas with established territorial identities. To me territorial identity is a sentiment which hurts our thinking about the world as one place. You may remember that was the topic of my first edited volume on ‘One-world Approach to Planning’.
Aside from such intellectual disagreements I must say that John had a huge influence on my teaching style. When I was a student at UCLA John would invite his students to his house to read poetry, short stories, play musical instruments, and have very interesting conversations about all sorts of issues. How many advisors do that? John believed in a holistic approach to education, not merely publishing articles and books to move up the career ladder. Also, I am grateful that I met Diane, my wife since 1981, at a class offered by John. Diane was a student of urban sociology at UCLA and both of us were enrolled in a two-semester long course on regional approaches to national development which John taught. By the time that course ended Diane and I were dating but then I left for Africa on the World Bank assignment! When I returned to UCLA to complete my PhD, Diane left for Mexico on a Fulbright Fellowship to collect data for her doctoral dissertation! We got married soon after she returned from Mexico and spent two more years at UCLA before we moved to Boston when I was hired by MIT. John was a member of Diane’s doctoral exam committee but had no clue that we were dating at that time!!