Chandigarh

Chandigarh was the brainchild of Nehru, who wanted a new capital for the Punjab, which had lost its original capital, Lahore, to Pakistan during partition. His direction was to build a city "unfettered by the traditions of the past".

The vision for the city started with site selection. The original architect liked this site for its proximity to the mountains (we should be able to see the foothills of the Himalayas from here), and the gentle slope that facilitated sewer and stormwater drainage.

The dimensions of the city, and even its layout, were designed with the human body in mind. The city organization includes a head (the government buildings), a heart (the city center), limbs (the industrial sector in the east, downwind from the rest of the city, and the institutional district in the west), and lungs (a central river and park). The city scale is also human(e), divided up into 800m x 1200m (250 acre) sectors, crossable on foot in 10 minutes. The districts are arranged in a Baroque style (requiring many landmarks, per Kevin Lynch's Image of the City). Each neighborhood is designed to be self-contained, each with its own school, neighborhood shopping district, and open space. City development as a whole was anticipated to occur in successively further downhill sectors as need arose, bounded east and west by two more rivers.

The desired pattern of development was held to for several decades, even handling the creation of another state, Haryana, and the assignment of its capital to Chandigarh. Chandigarh now hosts three capitals: Its own (its a Union State), Punjab's, and Haryana's. Currently there is pressure to transform industrial land to commercial, to transform mixed use residential-over-retail to multi-story commercial, and to increase residential densities, but the planners have managed to explain and defend the wisdom of Le Corbusier's design. The task of defending Chandigarh's original vision is made easier in part by the fact that the city's Chief Planner and Chief Architect are one and the same person, and also by the fact that she was trained by an architect who worked under Le Corbusier on the Chandigarh project, Mr. Roshan Malhotra. Mr. Malhotra is accompanying us on the Chandigarh portion of our trip.

Some of the details of the city design and development include:

• Le Corbusier had both zoning controls and architectural controls for the city,


• There is a seven-level hierarchy of streets,


• Housing for the poor is integrated into the design (how?),


• To encode the essential philosophies of his design, he created a 15 point edict that included rules such as "no development uphill from the lake",


• A Metro system may be coming soon, and once it is in place, some of the smaller neighborhood streets can be closed to auto traffic,


• Grade separation at intersections is coming soon too,


• The rail station was placed near the industrial district, but outside the plan area,


• There are now 117 sectors,


• Buildings in sectors face inwards toward the centers of their neighborhoods,


• Roads inside sectors meander, in order to keep auto speeds low,


• Trades used to be well distributed across sectors, but some sectors have gained reputations for being of high quality for certain goods (leading to a bit more traffic as people travel out-of-sector for the highest quality goods),


• Accommodations for storage and sales locations have been made for merchants that cannot afford a storefront,


• The tallest building is the Capital building at 10 stories, and most housing is 2-3 stories (but there is pressure to raise that level),


• Most buildings are exposed brick, lending an architectural identity to the city.

The meeting started to wrap up when staff reminded our host that she had a meeting with the High Court to go to. This is the second meeting that ended with the highest official's next stop being the courts.