New Homes to Raise a Nation: The United Nations, American Cooperativists, and the “Master Plan” to Renovate Haiti’s Capital City, Port-au-Prince

Between President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," both the US and the UN had demarcated a minimum standard of living that included a respectable home. In the 1970s, American, Haitian, and UN planners tried to uphold these standards in a "master plan" to renovate Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and resolve the city's impoverished residential sprawl. However, the ways and means to realize such a standard, i.e. urban renewal, with its "raze and rebuild" mentality, had already proven inadequate, evident in the decision to demolish the "modern" Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis in 1972. Haiti's "master planners," a multinational team that included Haitian artists and architects, American cooperativists, and Frenchmen and Turks employed by the UN, thus looked not to urban renewal to make a modern city with modern homes, but to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to the garden city movement and regionalism. They also turned to "anti-modernist" ideas in the United States, such as preservationism. The result was an extremely ambitious plan that mixed and matched pre-modernist, early-modernist, post-modernist, and uniquely Haitian ideas about urban space and the home to try to achieve the equally ambitious standards that the US and the UN associated with modernity.