At a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, the Allied powers designed the postwar international monetary order, pegging currencies to a gold-backed US dollar and founding the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the future World Bank. The IMF was to stabilise exchange rates and the World Bank to finance reconstruction and, later, development projects across the global South. The fixed-rate system held until the early 1970s, but the institutions endured and became central to global development lending. Their loans funded dams, highways, housing and urban infrastructure in many countries.
It created the IMF and World Bank, whose lending and conditions have shaped urban infrastructure, housing and development policy across much of the world for three generations.
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