How to be Rural reframes conventional accounts of Third World urbanization by directing attention to the entangled phenomenon of ruralization, or the modernization of the countryside. By analyzing the planning and design of villages, agricultural campuses, and capital cities sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations, and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, this project critically examines how US planners sought to curb urban migration in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania in the 1960s–70s. The reorganization of rural-urban relations entailed the physical transformation of fields, bodies, and the built environment, as well as a conceptual shift—the eradication of colonial precepts that associated modernity and social mobility exclusively with the city. By situating American expertise in a relational network that capitalized on Southern expertise, and included a range of African institutions and actors, this work recenters Africa in a global network of knowledge-production on rural modernity.

Ayala Levin is an associate professor of architectural history in the department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a board member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. Levin’s work explores architecture and urban planning in postcolonial African states with a focus on the production of architectural knowledge as part of north-south and south-south exchange. She is the author of Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022); and coeditor of Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022); as well as the Journal of Architecture special issue on the Modern Village (2018).