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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh
The Lecture Contains:
Planners' belief in social processes and spatial form
Le Corbusier's ideas from the Garden City Movement and the Monumental tradition
Why was Chandigarh necessary?
Chandigarh as an embodiment of planning and a new industrial era
The design of Chandigarh
References

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh
The city plan embodies the gesture by which man takes possession of space, impressing on that space
the ordering of his mind and devising a comprehensible man-made world for himself and his creations.
(Norma Evenson 1966)
City planning is based on the idea that life will imitate design. At its very core lies the idea of
social engineering which assumes that planning itself could bring about larger social
transformation. Planners strongly believe that social processes and spatial forms are related. In
other words, planning is based on the idea that there are social consequences of built
environment.
In the earlier lectures we have discussed how urban planning was the outcome of urban crisis
generated by the industrial crisis of the early 19th century. Social reformers such as Robert Owen and
Ebenezer Howard were some of the first social reformers who had thought about new principles of
planning that they hoped would ameliorate the condition.

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh

Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) better known as Le Corbusier was one of the most visionary
architects of the twentieth century. Now, two broad approaches to city planning can be identified as:
regional planning approach which has its root in Howards Garden City. From this
perspective, the answer to congestion in the city was regional planning. Cities in this scheme
became subordinate to the region. These regional planning ideas began to flourish with Patrick
Geddes and reached North America in the 1920s via Lewis Mumford. Garden Citys proponent
Ebenezer Howard had spoken about low-rise homes; separation of commerce from residence but not
too far away from residences; plenty of open-spaces lush with greenery.

In contrast to this approach there is the monumental tradition of city planning. French
public servant and planner Baron Haussman was one proponent who had completely changed
Paris. Before the rebuilding, however intellectually stimulating the streets of Paris might have
been there were ample localities where streets were no more than fetid, dark corridors.
Haussman undertook large-scale demolition and made Paris hygienic, politically safe and
aesthetic. His ideas found expression in the world-wide City Beautiful Movement.

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh
Corbusier took elements from both these traditions. He was a charismatic and forceful personality, an
(a)ll powerful master planner who would demolish an entire existing city and replace it by a city of highrise towers in a park. (Peter Fitting)
Corbusier, as Charles Correa has pointed out, created a new visual language.
At the same time he took elements from both the Garden City Movement and the Monumental
tradition. The Garden City approach gave the plan its anti-urban bias. The neighbourhood
concept was applied because it was said that Indians were villagers at heart. The plan was supposed to
combine the best of city and country living.

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh
Why was Chandigarh necessary?
It has been pointed out that the city of Chandigarh was conceived amid the crisis and confusion
accompanying the birth of the nation.1 The state of Punjab was divided and Lahore, the former capital,
found itself in Pakistan. The decision was to start afresh with an entirely new city as Jawaharlal Nehru
explained free from existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions. Thus the standard was to build
a city unfettered by tradition. For Nehru and Le Corbusier the machine age held the promise of
liberating individuals and improving society. Nehru who had served as the mayor of Allahabad was only
too familiar with overcrowded Indian cities. According to Nehru:
We want to urbanize the village not take away the people from the villages to the towns. However well
we may deal with the towns, the problems of villages of India will remain for a long time and any social
standards that we seek to introduce will be judged ultimately not by what happened in Delhi but in the
villages of India.
The underlying dictum was: modernize your house and the rest would follow.

Figure 1: Jawahalal Nehru and Corbusier

1Norma

Evenson Chandigarh 1966

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh

Thus, Chandigarh was a symbolic as well as a practical necessity. No city could house a new
capital and rehabilitate the displaced persons from Pakistan. The underlying philosophy was grounded
in the new industrial civilization. There were straight lines of modernism and no domes or spires.
Corbusier had recognized that Hindu temples and Muslim architecture was very geometrical but what
they lacked was architecture for modern civilization. Technology was invoked with admiration for
emerging development of planes, cars, ships and trains.
A parliamentary committee sought a site for the capital and a relatively flat area bounded by two river
valleys some 5 miles apart in the foothills of the Himalayas was selected. These river valleys were dry
for most of the year, but a large dam was built to form a lake to retain water from the Himalayas in July
and August. Two men, P.L. Varma, the Chief Engineer of Punjab and P.N. Thaper a former member of
the British Indian Civil Service directed the Chandigarh project from the very beginning.
During the construction, several villages in the area were not integrated but instead were cleared and
demolished, while occasional groves and peepul trees were carefully retained. All in all, the building of
the city caused dislocation of about 9000 people for whom compensation was arranged and land set
aside for resettlement.

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh
The Design of Chandigarh

Chandigarh was supposed to be an administrative city with initially half million

extendable to one million.

The city was built on a grid pattern.

Axis was north-east and south-west direction, avoiding any sunshine from striking directly on the
buildings parallel to the road.

The rectangular squares or sectors intended for residential purposes were planned as selfcontained units with community services such as schools, a health centre, a club and a shopping
centre.

An interconnected system of green-spaces ran through the sectors superimposing a landscape

pattern over the gridiron system.

Chandigarh has the Capitol Complex (the Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court) and 240
acres of the city itself.2 The complex is considered to be unquestionably the most original and
powerful monumental composition in contemporary design.

The construction lasted several years but by the end of 1952 most government departments had
moved from the city of Simla to Chandigarh.

While housing was one and two storey high; the large capital buildings were multi-storey with a
horizontal direction.
Low-rise housed was proposed, unlike the Utopian Radiant City where high-rise buildings were
provided because of hot climate. Greenery was provided and artificial hills were made. Trees
were planed along the road.

2Latin

Capitolium, temple of Jupiter at Romea group of buildings in

which the functions of state government are carried out.

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Figure 2: Assembly Building

Figure 3: The Secretariat

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Module 6: Urban Planning and Design

Lecture 40: The Modern City in Post-Independent India: the case-study of Chandigarh

References

Fitting, Peter. 2002. Urban Planning/Utopian Dreaming: Le Corbusiers Chandigarh Today. In

Utopian Studies. Vol. 13 (1): pp. 69-93.

Evenson, Norma. 1966. Chandigarh. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Correa, Charles. 2010. A Place in the Shade. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Further Reading

Serenyi, Peter. 1983. Timeline but of Its Time: Le corbusiers Architecture in India. In
Perspecta, Vol. 20, pp. 91-118.

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