Chandigarh: Punjab

Chandigarh , also called The City Beautiful, is a city in India that serves as the capital of two states: Punjab and Haryana. However, the city does not belong to either state. Rather, the city is administered by the federal government and hence classified as a union territory. Chandigarh was due to transfer to Punjab alone in 1986, accompanied by the creation of a new capital for Haryana, but the transfer has been delayed while agreement is sought on the districts of Punjab that should be transferred to Haryana in exchange.

The City Beautiful tops the list of Indian States(Provinces) and Union Territories with Human Development Index of 0.674.

Brief History

After the partition of South Asia into the two states of India and Pakistan in 1947, Indian Punjab needed a new capital city to replace Lahore, that was now in Pakistan. After several plans to make additions to existing cities were found to be unfeasible for various reasons, the decision to construct a new city was taken.

Of all the new town schemes in independent India, the Chandigarh project quickly assumed prime significance, because of the city’s strategic location as well as Nehru’s personal interest. Commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, to reflect the new nation’s modern, progressive outlook. Nehru famously proclaimed Chandigarh to be “unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future.”

Several buildings in Chandigarh were designed by the Swiss-born French architect and planner, Le Corbusier in the 1950s. Le Corbusier was in fact the second architect of the city, after the initial master plan was prepared by the American architect-planner Albert Mayer who was working with the Polish-born architect Matthew Nowicki. It was only after Nowicki’s untimely death in 1950 that Le Corbusier was pulled into the project.

Plan and Architecture

Taking over from Albert Mayer, Le Corbusier produced a plan for Chandigarh that conformed to the modern city planning principles of CIAM, in terms of division of urban functions, an anthropomorphic plan form, and a hierarchy of road and pedestrian networks.

This vision of Chandigarh, contained in the innumerable conceptual maps on the drawing board together with notes and sketches had to be translated into brick and mortar. Le Corbusier retained many of the seminal ideas of Mayer and Nowicki, like the basic framework of the master plan and its components: the Capitol, City Centre, besides the University, Industrial area, and linear parkland.

Even the neighbourhood unit was retained as the basic module of planning. However, the curving outline of Mayer and Nowicki was reorganised into a mesh of rectangles, and the buildings were characterised by an ‘honesty of materials’. Exposed brick and boulder stone masonry in its rough form produced unfinished concrete surfaces, in geometrical structures. This became the architecture form characteristic of Chandigarh, set amidst landscaped gardens and parks.

The intial plan had two phases: the first for a population of 150,000 and the second taking the total population to 500,000. Le Corbusier divided the city into units called ’sectors’, each representing a theoretically self-sufficient entity with space for living, working and leisure. The sectors were linked to each other by a road and path network developed along the line of the 7 Vs, or a hierarchy of seven types of circulation patterns. At the highest point in this network was the V1, the highways connecting the city to others, and at the lowest were the V7s, the streets leading to individual houses. Later a V8 was added: cycle and pedestrian paths.

The city plan is laid down in a grid pattern. Divided into identical looking sectors, each sector measures 800m x 1200m. The sectors were to act as self-sufficient neighborhoods, each with its own market, places of worship, schools and colleges - all within 10 minutes walking distance from within the sector. The original two phases of the plan delineated sectors from 1 to 47, with the exception of 13.

The city was to be surrounded by a 16 kilometer wide greenbelt that was to ensure that no development could take place in the immediate vicinity of the town, thus checking suburbs and urban sprawl.