Interview With Dr. Bish Sanyal, winner of the inaugural Outstanding Contribution to GPEIG Award - Part I
By Dr. Deden Rukmana, Alabama A&M University
The award for Outstanding Professional contribution and Service to GPEIG was launched in 2016 to recognize an individual/faculty member whose exceptional scholarship, practice, service, and leadership has had a lasting and positive impact on GPEIG's mission and strengthened the organization.
Bishwapriya Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS)/ Humphrey Fellows Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was selected, unanimously, as the first recipient of the award by the committee, based on the nominations received from the members of GPEIG.
The following interview with Professor Bish Sanyal (BS) was conducted by Professor Deden Rukmana (DR) on March 22-23, 2017 at MIT campus. DR came to the interview with a number of questions proposed by GPEIG members. This interview was edited for clarity.
Part I
[DR] Good evening Bish. Thank you for your time. We have three sets of questions. The first set is about your journey, the second set is about international development planning, and the third set is about your scholarship and works. So let me start with our congratulations to you for being selected as the Inaugural Award winner. The award committee received a number of nominations and unanimously selected you. This interview is also part of the award selection. Can you reflect on your journey through this achievement?
[BS] First of all, thank you, Deden, for travelling all the way to Boston. It's really an honor for me to receive this award. As I mentioned in my award acceptance speech, a number of people had worked very hard to create GPEIG. I want to acknowledge their contribution; because this kind of organizational innovation does not happen because of any one individual. You need a group of like-minded people; and what a wonderful group of people we had at that moment when GPEIG was created. How I came to belong to that group begins the story of my intellectual journey.
[DR] Actually I’d like to go a little further back. I’d like you to start with your journey as an architect in India, and why you chose to do a master's degree in urban planning.
[BS] I wanted to be an architect because I loved aesthetics of human settlements, and could draw well. After I received my architecture degree from a prestigious Indian university I worked for my father for two years. My father was a civil engineer and owned a large construction firm which built bridges. Needless to say, as an architect I didn't know much about how to build bridges. My father assured me that if I supervised a bridge building project, I would learn by closely observing the construction process.
As a project supervisor, I was assigned to a site close to Kolkata where a new bridge had to be built to connect Howrah, a town next to Kolkata, to the hinterland. As I spent much time in the construction site, I was struck by the plight of construction workers, how vulnerable they are. As the supervisor, I used to pay the daily workers at the end of the day There were days when it rained and, hence, the daily workers could not work and were not paid! At night, workers would come knocking at my door in the site office requesting if I could lend them an advance payment for a day’s wage because they had no money! I was shaken that many workers didn't have savings for even one day! I began to question whether designing beautiful buildings and bridges was the right thing for me to worry about. From my childhood I liked art and was drawn to aesthetics. Growing up in a household of civil engineers –both my father and elder brother were civil engineers—I thought architectural design could be a vocation that would strengthen our family business. The experience of witnessing abject poverty, first hand, made me question my priority. There were way too many poor people around me at the construction site to avoid asking myself that question daily. Something had to be done for them. So, I began to think about economic development even though I was never drawn to economics.
It so happens that after two years of work at my fathers’ construction firm, there was a huge labor unrest in Kolkata. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had come to power in the state of West Bengal. Our house, like those of many other business owners, were surrounded by laborers who would not let anyone leave their house for weeks! All construction work was stopped, and there was no negotiation. Months passed by. One evening my father advised me that I was wasting my time in Kolkata and should go abroad to do an advanced degree in either Architecture or Business Management.
It was March or April and, hence, very late to apply for admission to graduate programs abroad. I was excited to travel abroad, particularly to the US, but was not sure to which program I should apply. No one told me about international development planning as an option. I thought it was safe to apply to a Master’s program in architecture. The head of the Ford Foundation office in Kolkata, a polish architect, was a friend of my dad and I had interned at his office. He advised me to apply to the University of Kansas because he knew a faculty member there. Even though I was late in applying, the University of Kansas offered me admission but without any funding. I remember that in my application statement I had written that I wanted to design better public gardens in Kolkata! I thought if Kolkata had better public gardens, the poor families who lived in slums could at least have a decent place to enjoy with their families. Also, I had always liked landscape architecture even though my university in India did not offer a specialization in landscape architecture. The University of Kansas had a specialization in urban design which looked attractive because the images of urban design which were in the school’s catalog looked beautiful an appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities.
Soon after I enrolled in the Architecture program at KU, the department started a brand-new program in urban planning. Tom Galloway, a planner, was the first chair of the newly created program and offered a course which addressed issues of equity and social justice in North American cities. I enrolled in that course because at the back of my mind I was still processing what I had witnessed in the building construction sites in Kolkata. At the end of the course, Tom called me to his office one day and told me that I was more of a planner than an architect, and encouraged me to shift from architecture to urban planning. I thought that since I already had a bachelors’ degree in architecture it may be good to expand my portfolio of skills to include a new element, like urban planning, even though I knew very little then about the differences between architecture, urban design and city planning!! I told Tom that I would apply but was not sure what to write in my statement of interest. Like a father to a son, Tom helped me to write a decent statement, drawing on my experiences on the construction site, and I was admitted to the planning program.
Soon after I joined the planning program, the department started a lecture series with external speakers. One speaker was Professor John Friedmann who had just started a new planning program at UCLA. As a development planner John had become very critical of mainstream planning and gave a lecture which really moved me. Here was a planner who knew developing countries, was deeply aware of widespread poverty in these countries, and was proposing a new type of planning – he called it Transactive Planning—which seemed interesting to me. So, I met him after his talk and he suggested that I apply to UCLA for doctoral studies. I applied, and was fortunate to be admitted to one of the most exciting planning programs at that time.
[DR] So John Friedman inspired you?
[BS] Yes, and I was his advisee for two years, and read most his writings for the doctoral qualifying exam in Planning Theory. At the end of the two years at UCLA I was offered a very interesting job at the World Bank, thanks to one of John’s students who was then working at the newly created urban and regional economics division at the World Bank. The new division was looking for someone to head the evaluation of a very large slum upgrading project in Lusaka, Zambia. I had never been to Africa, and was also drawn by the prestige of working for the World Bank; so I asked John if I should accept the offer even though I was not even half way through my doctoral program. John advised me that this could be a very important learning experience for me and that I should use the opportunity to think of a dissertation topic on African cities.
[DR] So you worked with the World Bank in Lusaka, Zambia for three years?
[BS] Yes. It was challenging because I hadn't completed my Ph.D. From the very first day I arrived in Lusaka, I got immersed in the construction and evaluation of the large housing scheme which was based on John Turner’s critique of old housing policies. As the head of the evaluation unit, I had a dozen or so Zambian interviewers who collected data on various aspects of the project. My boss at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington D. C was Susana Mendaro, John’s student. She assured me that I could use the interviewers to collect data for my dissertation. The topic of my dissertation emerged from my evaluation of the various aspects of the project. For example, one problem the project was facing was that poor families who had received loans from the World Bank were not repaying the loans. There were two contending explanations why the project beneficiaries defaulted. One was that the project had been badly designed by the World Bank and had not taken into account that real income of the poor would decline because of the structural adjustment programs the nation had to implement. The opposite position was that the project had been well designed but the local project managers-- all Zambians—had failed to implement the cost recovery mechanism. So, my first assignment was to assess the validity of these two contending explanations. In the process of evaluation, I found out, as I conducted household surveys, that project participants’ income did decline since the project had started but that was not the only reason for high default. More interestingly, I learnt that many families were bridging the monetary gap between what they needed and what they earned by growing food in the city. This was intriguing because according to conventional development theory cities are for industries while rural areas are for cultivation. So, with Friedmann’s guidance I began to explore what kind of an alternative development theory could be constructed to acknowledge poor people’s need for urban cultivation and assist them to get access to land.
After my three-year contract with the World Bank, I returned to UCLA to complete my dissertation. As I was thinking of returning to the World Bank, a faculty position on international development planning at MIT was announced. I was lucky because MIT had just started a new program on international development planning. Even though MIT and UCLA had planning programs with very different ideological emphasis I was offered the position of an assistant professor, primarily because of my published research for the World Bank.
[DR] Let me interrupt here. So, when you were a student of John Friedmann, you were trained in international planning?
[BS] Yes, very much so. Urban and regional planning for newly industrializing nations was a major program concentration at UCLA. In addition to Friedmann there were three or four other outstanding faculty whose research focused on developing countries. Friedmann really liked my dissertation about urban cultivation because he was very critical of conventional modernization theories. For him my dissertation demonstrated the failure of modernization theory which advocated that high priced urban land should be used for locating industries, not for growing food.
[DR] So let me expand that question. So, if I ask you who are the founders of international planning education in the U.S? Maybe John Friedmann is one of them?
[BS] Yes, definitely. Prior to Friedmann there were Rexford Tugwell who had worked in Puerto Rico, and Harvey Perloff who had been hired by Rexford Tugwell when a new planning program was started at the University of Chicago. That program was the first to offer courses on international development planning. It produced outstanding scholars, such as Andre Gunder Frank, Janet Abu-Lughod and John Friedmann. They were part of a new group of North American scholars who studied “Third World development” during the 1950s when the US was trying to help newly decolonized nations to industrialize and democratize.
Friedmann was a student of Perloff at the University of Chicago, and had written a dissertation on the Tennessee Valley Authority. His first academic appointment was at MIT which was advising the Venezuelan government to create a new regional planning system. Surprisingly, Friedmann was not granted tenure at MIT, and he accepted an assignment to serve as an urban advisor with the Ford Foundation in Chile. When Perloff became the founding Dean of the new school of Architecture and Planning at UCLA, he hired Friedmann to be the first Director of the Planning program. Friedmann, who by then had become disillusioned with conventional planning, took the bold step to create “an alternative school” in international development planning at UCLA.
[DR] So when you finished study at UCLA, MIT had just opened a new international planning program?
[BS] Yes, but before I joined MIT there were a number of international planning scholars already here. Lloyd Rodwin was the most prominent scholar at MIT at that time. But there were others: Ralph Gakenheimer, a transportation planner; Lisa Peattie, an urban anthropologist; Karen Polenske, a regional economist; Alan Strout, a development economist; Bill Wheaton, an urban economist and so on. All of them had grown up in the US but had research experience in developing countries. Yet, there was no formal area of specialization called international development planning. It was Gary Hack, the department head in the early 1980s, who created the new specialization called international development. He hired Judith Tendler, a senior scholar, and myself, a freshly minted PhD, to create a formal program concentration on international development planning.