In James Scott's influential and oft-quoted Seeing Like a State, the city of Chandigarh makes a brief cameo to support his point that the experience of living in a master-planned capital (like Brasilia) is basically miserable. Scott's condemnation of Le Corbusier, the "high modernist" architect whose rigid, perfectionist, and absurdly ordered designs exemplify the monstrosity of state vision, here comes to its logical end: after all, Le Corbusier himself designed Chandigarh, the only city to have been actually built according to his plans. Scott shows how the wide avenues and plazas, as well as the imposing government buildings, contrast with and replace the busy Indian street and bazaar. Chandigarh seems to fit neatly into a general theory of the "messiness" of everyday life being mercilessly subdued by modernism's blind uniformity. Scott's critique is essentially an experiential one: the city feels unfriendly, austere, segregating; the plazas are empty because people cannot, and do not wish, to congregate in such spaces. One imagines a drab, concrete life whose minute details are governed by the unforgiving design.In a recent Outlook piece, politician M.S. Gill paints a different picture altogether. He views Nehru's enterprise as a bold, revolutionary one, conceived in the ruins of a divided Punjab with a view to a better future. The plan worked; indeed, it is unplanned growth that poses a problem: "The new necklace of the builders squeezes and strangles Corbu’s ambitious dream. Entry from any side into the town is an adventure. The green belt, specifically kept between Chandigarh and Mani Majra, has gone..." In Gill's view, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh (as well as Lutyens' Delhi) are admirable because of the services they provide to residents. The experience of living in this kind of city is clearly preferable to the chaos of Delhi today, a "collection of crowded colonies, hungry for plots with narrow roads, no parks and ancient monuments hemmed in by houses," where "children have no place to play and the new rich find that while they can build marble palaces, their BMWs rot in narrow lanes." The residents of Chandigarh tend to agree that it's an oasis among Indian cities:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262010
So if Scott's point was that Chandigarh is not a workable model of urban planning because people don't like living there, it would seem that he stands contradicted.
Part of the problem consists of two different modes of inequality at work. Chandigarh is clearly not for everybody: only a few can live "on the grid," and restrictive zoning laws ensure further population growth and commercial development can occur only outside the city. The exclusionary character inherent in the design is qualitatively different from the more "natural" ghettoizations of Delhi and Bombay that Gill is referring to. But the end result is similar: if Chandigarh works in ensuring a clean, pleasant urban experience for some, it does not make it a scalable or transferable model of planning that can solve India's current problems. Chandigarh is certainly an interesting experiment and an emblem of its time, but is its promise merely nostalgic? Can it teach us anything about the limits of providing services to residents that can be used by other rapidly developing cities with "modernizing" aspirations (i.e. Bangalore, Hyderabad)?
If any readers have themselves experienced Chandigarh, by either living or visiting there, do share your thoughts.
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3 comments:
I am living in Chandigarh for about 3 years now. I often pass through that very place from where James Scott took the picture of a deserted plaza which features in his book "Seeing like a state", when I visit Sector-17 which now is a very busy and lively market place unlike anything in those early days.
Today, adjacent to Chandigarh,two satellite townships, Panchkula & Mohali have been created in the image of Chandigarh to reduce the growing population pressure on the city. Unlike in rest of India, the residents (of which the elite sections of Army, Bureaucracy, Politics, Business and Judiciary form a sizable chunk) take great pride in the city.
So on today's evidence it can be argued that Nehru and Corbusier have achieved what they set out to do i.e. create a city that transcended "India as it existed and to present to Chandigarh citizens-largely administrators-with an image of their own future.”
If anybody today ventured to objectively judge Chandigarh on the basis of its capacity to inspire a new way of life in India, they probably would conclude that this post-modernist thesis; comprehensive planning for human settlement as exemplified by Chandigarh has “failed its residents” or that Nehru, Pratap Singh Khairon or Corbusier are merely high modernists with a flawed utopian vision got it all wrong.
But, you are correct in that the city is structured to exclude even the not-so-rich who continue to live on the periphery and contribute to its vibrancy. So in the end I fully agree that Chandigarh is certainly a unique city, but not a particularly socially inclusive model of urban growth.
Hey Mircea,
I think you'd enjoy James Holston's books on Brasilia and São Paulo. The Modernist City, about Brasilia, is more obviously connected to Chandigarh and the types of observations that you and Madhu Sarin make; but Insurgent Citizenship will probably interest you even more, if you're getting into this sort of thing.
Ironically, the new, hip model for urban design is Lagos, which is probably five times less fun to live in than Chandigarh. Check out this awesome New Yorker article.
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