Urban Development: The Importance of Public Administration 465
Volume 35, Number 4, Winter 2010
Olympics, despite persistent insecurity and poverty (The Economist, June 12,
2010, pp. 42-43).
Yet, despite all these “failure stories,” there have been significant “success
stories.” When these are properly analyzed, the importance of public
administration has to be acknowledged:
1. Site and Service Projects. The Bank has been particularly
unhappy with its experience doing sites and services projects, failing to
recognize that its problems result primarily, not from defective political
hardware (the approach itself), but from political software weaknesses. This is
clear from a review of El Salvador's FUNDASAL, which may be considered
as the Bank's most outstanding urban "success story" during the period (l977-
83) that I edited the Bank's newsletter, !"#$%&’()$*+,#!"(I visited this
project in l978 to see for myself the reasons for its success.) It was also one of
its first attempts to finance low-cost housing projects on a large scale (Deneke
and Silva l982).