Chandigarh, India’s City of Tomorrow

By k-fai steele | March 18, 2009 on ARTBLOG

Chandigarh Legislative Assembly from the roof of the Secretariat building. Designed by Le Corbusier, 1953-59.

We arrived in Chandigarh two days ago. This means we’ve been traveling officially for 11 days in India- my and my boyfriend’s first time, our friend’s second time, and we have another 4 weeks ahead of us. I’d been looking forward to seeing Chandigarh, a masterpiece in architectural and urban planning by Le Corbusier, for awhile now, but I can’t really explain how extraordinary it is without first explaining our experience so far in other cities in India.

Our flight was fourteen hours long, and it was eighty-two degrees when we walked out of the airport. We were immediately surrounded by men asking where we were going, grabbing for our bags, pushing us towards three-wheeled motorized cabs. It was dusty, dirty, it smelled like urine. In the car ride to our hotel, we noticed that the lanes on the road seemed to act as suggestions; where there were supposed to be three lanes of traffic, there were five or six, with cars creeping up and slipping in front of each other, inches from bumpers, and no one was honking.

There are cows everywhere in Delhi, and stray dogs. It is unbelievably crowded, like the Times Square subway at rush hour all the time. It smells like urine because there are dozens of walk-up urinals for men (you spot men standing in that unmistakable position often from a distance). The roads that aren’t made for high-speed traffic are dirt, many of which are very uneven, so they are very dusty and narrow, and cars and motor scooters are rolling down them, honking at you to get out of the way as you trip to avoid the dollops of cow droppings. Every few minutes a man spots you as a westerner, comes up and latches onto you, asking where you’re going, if you need a hotel, if you want to buy something, if you need a taxi, but his intention is to make money off of you. You’ll have the best food and tea (chai- for about ten cents) you’ll ever consume from a stall on the street while scooters belch exhaust in your face.

The average Delhi street

It wasn’t until we got to Chandigarh (in Punjab state) that we felt 1) we had gotten off the “beaten path” because we saw only two other Westerners there, and 2) overcome both jet lag and round one of “traveler’s illness” and a 24-hour flu. I had also been bit by a dog, which didn’t break the skin but left a magnificent lump on my wrist.

Most Indian-Americans are from Punjab, so its type of food and music is best-known to Americans. It is the richest state in India, and Chandigarh has the highest per capita income in the country (99,262 rupees, or 1,985 USD). The average in the united states is 20,000 USD). Chandigarh also has the highest literacy rate in India, 89.1%; the rest of the country is 64.8%). It has one of the lowest crime rates in India, and a large number of IT companies such as Dell, Quark, and Infosys have opened offices in the city.

Typical Chandigarh Street

Chandigarh was a project taken on by Le Corbusier in 1951, after the original architects Matthew Nowicki and Albert Mayer (of Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass of New York) ended the project following Nowicki’s death in a plane crash. The city was planned as the new capital of Punjab, following Partition in 1947 (when India was divided by the British into India and Pakistan - Hindu and Muslim). It was a city for the generations to come - a very optimistic 1950s industry-fueled venture as stated by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru, “an expression of the nation’s faith in the future”. This new capital of a bloody state (Partition resulted in about 500,000 deaths in Punjab alone) was to be “a place where arithmetic and geometry would replace the oxen, cows and goats driven by peasants.” It was planned to be different from other cities like the crowded, dusty Delhi we had been in days before. It was an experiment in whether or not organization and cleanliness could make for happier Indian citizens.

City Museum, Chandigarh.

The City Museum in Chandigarh documents the city’s planning through newspaper articles, photographs, and architectural drawings. It’s housed in an impressive, Le Corbusier-ian complex that’s solid, imposing, concrete, and reminiscent of municipal buildings from the 1970s in the US. There’s a small creek that runs inside the complex with rags and other detritus in it where we spotted a good number of wild marijuana plants.

Chandigarh City Layout, City Museum.

Mayer and Nowicki’s original plans comprised of a series of fan-shaped blocks, “superblocks” (Le Corbusier would later call them “sectors”).  Each would be self-sufficient, with its own school, church, markets, and green parks. The “superblocks” would suit a country where “many city-dwellers are still villagers at heart,” according to Mayer.

Each sector is divided by very wide boulevards which open onto rotaries, and never seem to have gridlocked traffic in them. The red lights have 100-second countdowns on them, and scrolling messages that read messages like “turning off your motor at a light will save you fuel and money” and “educate your child.”  The streets and restaurants are clean - smoking has been banned there, as well as plastic bags.  Sculptures of people are forbidden there, “the city is planned to breathe the new sublimated spirit of art” as stated in the Edict of Chandigarh, a manifesto for the city.

Public sculpture, Chandigarh.

Another public sculpture

In 1951, Le Corbusier was appointed to the Chandigarh project along with his team of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Beverly Dew. He kept Mayer and Nowicki’s core idea of city blocks, but aligned them to a rigid grid, with each “sector” measuring 2600 by 3900 feet (the average block in Manhattan is 264 by 900 feet).

Le Corbusier planned for the city layout of Chandigarh to correlate to the human body, with the Capital Complex (government buildings) at the northernmost part, the City Center, with pedestrian-only piazza at the heart, the Leisure Valley and Gardens at the “lungs” of the city, cultural and educational institutions at the “limbs”, and “7 different types of roads, ranging from pedestrian to high-speed traffic as “arteries” and “veins”.

High Court, Chandigarh. Designed by Le Corbusier.

Everything in the city seems to have been touched by Le Corbusier, from his Capital Complex masterpiece, to the 3-story residential houses, to the tapestries in the High Court and the manhole covers (a casted map of the city). A notable place in the city not designed by Le Corbusier is the Fantasy Rock Garden. Built on an old dumping ground for urban and industrial waste, it is a seemingly endless maze made entirely of recycled materials including electrical sockets, broken plates, rebar and concrete. It stands in sharp refreshing contrast to Chandigarh’s oppressive Modernism- an organic, fantastical landscape.

Fantasy Rock Garden, Chandigarh.

Interior of Post Office (abandoned floor)

One problem that we read about in modern Chandigarh was the poverty, and the segment of the population referred to as “jhuggis”. They’re squatters who create homes and communities out of found materials, for lack of a better word they are slumdwellers. A newspaper article in the City Museum read, “their self-sufficiency and inventiveness is outside the law and the insanitary and haphazard conditions are in stark contrast to the planned character of the city as well as detrimental to their own well-being.” We saw the jhuggis around the city occasionally- very dirty children, they looked like characters out of a Dickens novel who’d beg and tug at our clothes. The city has tried several methods to stop the spread of these jhuggi slums. One way was low-cost housing, another was in situ resettlement, where the city would mark out plinth areas, allowing jhuggis restricted space to create their own homes. Both methods so far have failed, leaving these people in incredibly dense slums where necessities such as clean water, sewer systems, and electricity are grossly inadequate.

A massive jhuggi settlement we saw from a bus by the
outskirts of the city. The smell coming out of it was
awful (sewage, garbage).

I cannot emphasize enough how different Chandigarh is from other Indian cities, due simply to its city planning and architectural style. Le Corbusier’s planning is a success- there is less overcrowding and traffic, and the people seem to be very proud of the city they’re from, bordering on arrogance. We saw more women on bicycles and scooters there than anywhere else (usually they’re riding side-saddle behind the man) and we actually saw young Indian couples holding hands in the Gardens. There are also no cows on the street here. I liked the city a lot, perhaps because the culture was still quite Indian, but less intense, with its own interesting blend of old India with the new India it aspires to become.