Albert Mayer was an American architect, engineer, and urban planner. His particular interest was housing reform, and in the 1930s he joined Catherine K. Bauer, Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright in devising conceptual models of improved housing that would create a community. As a result of their activities, in 1937 the United States Housing Authority was formed. (1) He was appointed planning advisor to the government of Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1947 to study rural development in the region. In 1950 Mayer agreed on planning Chandigarh. When he first visited the site, he found it “very picturesque and was particularly impressed by the large number of mango groves, which he felt would add to the character of the new city.” (Kalia 1987: 33) Matthew Nowicki was recommended by Clarence Stein, who had declined Mayer’s offer to join him in the Chandigarh project. Together with Matthew Nowicki, Mayer was the planner of the first phase of the new Chandigarh town project. Nowicki was a Polish architect and a member of the team working on the UN headquarters in New York in 1947. Nowicki and Mayer designed Chandigarh in the shape of a leaf, with the concept of a residential neighborhood unit. After Matthew Nowicki died in 1950 in an airplane crash, Albert Mayer quit the Chandigarh project. The new team of architects and planners, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry, adapted parts of the old plan.
When the idea of Chandigarh was set up, Mayer was already known as a town planner in India “through his program for model villages,” which he proposed to the new Congress Party government of Nerhu. (Kalia 1987:32) Following independence, architectural planning procedures in India were a governmental issue. New planned cities were shaped by the idea of a new modern national identity surrounded by tools of so-called civilization, such as education, medicine, and law. With the new town of Chandigarh a new middle class was to be formed. But the planning was promoted with democratic equalization of its population rather than segregation.
Albert Mayer and Otto Koenigsberger both used the typology of the American neighborhood unit in their work in India. But neither ever refers directly to this concept as an American model. (Vidyarthi, 2010) The neighborhood unit was thus seen as a universal model, not specifically linked to local circumstances. The urban historian and theorist Sanjeev Vidyarthi points out that the neighborhood unit typology was used by Perry to bring the concept of neighborhood back into the U.S. metropolises through creating village-like estates. While Koenigsberger and Mayer used the concept to urbanize Indian settlements, they tried to “keep the best out of village life” while modernizing city life in India: “On the one hand, they imagined the neighborhood unit as an appropriate physical instrumentality for producing modern citizens who, for instance, would be secular and caste neutral in orientation. On the other hand, they imaginatively linked the neighborhood unit with a romantic vision of India’s historical villages in order to satisfy the nationalistic concerns of the indigenous elite.” (Vidyarthi 2010:90)
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(1) “The Housing Study Guild was founded in the summer of 1933 by Henry Wright, Lewis Mumford, and Albert Mayer to serve as a center for study and research in the technical, economic, and social problems of housing and community planning. It also served as a coordinating agency and clearing house for activities in these fields; as a library and reading room for published and unpublished material, the editing of current critical technical bulletins, abstract translations of significant foreign technical material, and the publication of special reports on foreign housing policy, legislation, and financing methods; and as a laboratory for the training of young men in the technique of housing, research and critical formulation.” In: http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ead/htmldocs/RMM03333.html

Sources:
Vidyarthi, Sanjeev (2010): "Reimagining the American neighborhood unit for India." In: Healey, Patsy / Upton, Robert (Eds.) (2010): Crossing Borders. International exchange and planning practices. New York: Routledge.
Kalia, Ravi (2000): Chandigarh the making of an Indian City. Delhi: Oxford University Press.