Stockholm 060301 Report written by Anna Pang, for Hawermans Stipendiefond Anna Pang Mobil: 0739-410024 a99_apg@arch.kth.

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CHANDIGARH
Chandigarh was created as an act of will. It started from zero and it places itself in the line of modernist utopian city planning projects. The idea of the city, a capital for the newly formed state of Punjab was conceived in 1947 immediately after the independence and partition of India. Besides creating a centre for governance and rehabilitating refugees from West Pakistan the new capital was also intended to recreate the rich cultural legacy of Lahore, Punjabs historic capital now awarded to Pakistan. As expressed by President Nehru in 1950, Chandigarh was to establish a vision of the future unaffected by traditions of the past. From aerial surveys the site for the new city, at the Shivalik Range of the Himalayas, was selected in 1948. The vision was a capital that would serve as a model in city planning for the new nation. It would be the first Indian city where water, drainage and electricity would be available to even the poorest poor. There has been a lot of writing about the monuments and the civic buildings of the city but just like other modernist city the basic component of the urban form was a concept for living, the neighbourhood unit, the sector. THE GENERAL CITY The project of developing a master plan for the city was fist given to the American planner Albert Mayer and his associate Matthew Nowicki. Nowickis sudden death in august 1950 led to the commission being handed over to Le Corbusier and his design team consisting of Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. The agreement with the new team had included an acceptance of the Mayer Plan. This became true to a limited extent. The basic framework of the city with the capital, the city, university, industrial areas and linear parklands were kept unaltered. The concept of the neighbourhood unit as the structuring urban element was also kept but changed in its physical appearance. Mayers Plan suggested a fan shaped city with meandering roads

Drawings by Maxwell Fry showing the location of Chandigarh and its layout.

Drawings showing Mayers master plan and neighbourhood unit on top and Le Corbusiers plan and Sector below.

Drawings showing the realisation of the first phase of Chandigarh from 1951-66. Source: Documenting Chandigarh

and neighbourhood units,superblocks, of varying size. Le Corbusier and his team replaced it with a geometric matrix of generic neighbourhood units,sectors and roads. The new city plan represented a general city that could, like a roman military settlement, be placed on any flat piece of land. Le Corbusier claimed thatthe first phase of existence is to occupy space and the new plan allowed for such an infinite expansion. However, the city was planned to house a number of 150 000 inhabitants in its first phase, realized between 1951-66, and 500 000 in its final stage.

Drawing showing the 30 sectors of Chandigarh. Source: Documenting Chandigarh

Drawings showing sector 22 with its shopping district running across the sector. Source: Documenting Chandigarh

THE SECTOR In its first phase Chandigarh was organized in 30sectors. The sector was conceived as an autonomous unit including housing as well as all service needed for everyday life: schools, artisans, shops, leisure. This concept of the neighbourhood unit is originally Anglosaxian but was adopted in many early modernist city projects. An example is the superquadra of Brasilia, Brazil (1956-59) where the neighbourhood unit was used as the structuring urban element. However, housing was the main concern for the architects of the sectors. The programme for Government Housing allowed for a speedy construction of a range of houses for different categories of the Punjab Government officials. The Government housing programme also became a way to colonize the territory of the city, distributed all over. Housing became the predominant element of the citys built mass and came to have a much larger impact on the city than the much slower private constructions. The initial programme for government housing covered a range of thirteen types, with the largest House Type 1, designated for the Chief Minister of the State and the smallest type 13 for officials drawing less than Rs50 per month. At the initiative of Jane Drew another category, Type 14, was developed, a house for sweepers, watermen and other low-paid workers unaccounted for earlier. The inhabitants were organized in the sectors according to existing social structures with the highest paid official and the largest houses near the capital. The greater the distance of a sector from the capitol, the higher its density. Densities

Picture showing shopping/public area of sector 22. Source: Anna Pang

Picture showing greenbelt of sector 22 running along the axis of the sector. Source: Anna Pang

came to vary between 7persons/acre to 100persons/acre. Critics such as Kevin Lynch and Christopher Alexander have critized the concept of the neighbourhood unit to be isolationist and segregating. They point at the aspect of self-sufficiency as an element of exclusion. I would argue that in the case of Chandigarh the sectors are neither self-sufficient nor hierarchical but allows for a set of different urban relations and connections. Shopping is the key to these connections. Shopping was conceived as the nucleus of the social life of the sectors. Shopping was usually arranged in a linear configuration along roads that interconnected the sectors to allow for social interaction. A growing population, increased demands for commercial space and changing trends in shopping have subjected these shopping zones to major functional and physical alteration.

House type 4 by Jane Drew. Source: Anna Pang

MODERNIST DECAY The restricted budget was the most compelling constraint that was to influence the architecture of Chandigarh and its sectors. Locally made brick was the chief material for construction. Boulders and pebbles from the areas were used in random patterns for creating a rich variety in surface patterns. Window sizes were kept to a minimum to keep down costs. The buildings were mostly constructed with low-tech machinery: lorries, an occasional concrete mixer and some band saws for rough carpentry. Maxwell Fry was later to comment that the city indeed was a ..frontier undertaking carried out with men, women, children, donkeys and camels in place of high overheads and loads of equipment.1 Cheap materials have led to a rapid decay of the buildings.

Picture from construction. Source: Documenting Chandigarh

The main problem for the city today is however how it should grow in relation to maintaining its low-density characteristic. The city has at the present 750 000 inhabitants within its bound area, with another 3,5million persons inhabiting various pockets in the areas immediately Documenting Chandigarh, Kiran Joshi, Mapin Publishing, 1999, Ahmedabad, India, page. 31
1

Picture from informal settlement outside of Chandigarh Source: Anna Pang

surrounding the city. With the present growth trends, it is estimated that by the year 2020, the population of the urban complex will be more than 20 million. The 1000 acres of urban land currently available for urban development just about meet the current shortage of housingnotwithstanding the need to rehabilitate the informal settlements.2 To many, The First Phase of Chandigarh with its areas of extremely low-density structures seems to be the most attractive area to develop. But it is also here that the image of the city rests. How could the Modernist heritage meet the needs of present day Chandigarh without falling into conservationist methods?

Documenting Chandigarh, Kiran Joshi, Mapin Publishing, 1999, Ahmedabad, India, page.