This paper examines the contribution of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905-1983), a British town planner, editor and educator, to the creation of a model Village Center at the International Exhibition of Low-Cost Housing in New Delhi in early 1954. Tyrwhitt did this work as a United Nations technical assistance advisor to the Indian Government. As the first woman to serve in that capacity, she also organized a concurrent U.N. seminar on housing and community improvement in Asia and the Far East.

The study illuminates how Tyrwhitt introduced her synthesis of the ideas of Patrick Geddes and modernist planning ideals (as modeled in the layout, design and functioning of the Village Center) into CIAM discourse and then U.N. community-development pracice. As a member of the MARS group - the British chapter of CIAM (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) - Tyrwhitt helped define the theme for CIAM's Eighth Congress. This was of the CORE of the city, as "the element which makes a communi of people, whether large or small, a real community (and not an aggregate of people) and the type of physical center which could best express and be the expression of, its nature in village, town, or city."

In the spring of 1951 Tyrwhitt came up with the concept of the "urban constellation," a further development of Geddes's ideas in conjunction with the idea of the CORE, to describe the dynamic relationship - "order within disorder" or "disorder within order" - of cities, villages and towns organized around "a vital city center." At the same time, she was commissioned towrite an editorial for the U.N.'s Housing and Town Planning Bulletin on the need to integrate community services with large-scale housing schemes - signaling the converging interests of CIAM and the U.N. on the role of civic centers. Tyrwhitt also played a major role in the editing of the CIAM 8 companion book, Heart of the City: Towards the Humanization of Urban Life.

The Exhibition in Delhi in 1954 was conceptualized as a model village that would dramatize improved housing conditions and related community-development actions in the context of daily village life. Tyrwhitt adapted her notion of the CORE - used by CIAM predominantly in reference to Western cities - to improve the living conditions of rural villages in India. Her approach was to integrate rural housing policy and the political and economic revival of village life, "based primarily upon the restorationf responsibility to the village panchayat - a restorationf the self-reliance and pride that made the Indian village of earlier times the real home of thought and culture in India" (Ekistics 1985). The creation of the Village Center amid a group of experimental houses - "to show that the two are inseparable" - exemplified this integrated approach.