Between 1955 and 1965, the Rockefeller Foundation responded to the urban crises created by the pre- and post-war housing shortage and heavy-handed urban renewa lstrategies by sponsoring urban design research projects by Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, E. A.Gutkind, Ian McHarg, Christopher Tunnard, Ian Nairn, Edmund Bacon, Christopher Alexander and others. Drawing on documents from the Rockefeller Foundation Archives,this paper considers the state of urban design theory after World War II and outlines the major sponsored research projects. The work of Jane Jacobs, who was closely involved with the Foundation’s urban design research programme, is examined in greater detail, while the early research of Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch, which becameThe Image of the City(1960), will be considered in a subsequent paper.