O brave new world...

Sorry for my disappearance.  I've spent the last week in northern India.

For class, we were studying in and about the city of Chandigarh.  It's a city completely planned and designed by Le Courbusier--a rather influential, and controversial, modernist thinker and architect--to serve as the new capital city of a partitioned state of Punjab.  It was a really intriguing case study, as students of urban design, to see how a city that was completely envisioned and designed by one radical thinker works.

The answer?  It's complicated.

A lot does work.  Corbu (as he's known locally) designed the city as a set of sectors--somewhat self-sufficient units, full of parks and greenery, local schools and markets, and surrounded by, but not crossed by, major roads.  We found that people live pretty true to design.  They use their sector for a lot of their daily needs, and use the wide, orderly connecting avenues to drive across the city for other needs.

The attitude of the city is somewhat unusual, however.  The city was consciously designed to be a break from the chaos of other Indian cities, and, in many ways it has achieved this.  You feel worlds away from the traffic and noise and bustle of Delhi driving around Chandigarh.  But, without the bustle, it's hard to tell what gives the city character.  Sixty years after its creation, the city still seems something of a relic, a preserved piece of enlightened design, without the real energy that I expect from a city.



The title of this post of course refers to Aldous Huxley's 1932, semi-dystopian science fiction novel of a society living in fully planned bliss.  It was hard not to think of this modernist future driving around Chandigarh's planned Sectors.  Walking around the actual, lived neighborhoods, however, I saw how the sterile vision has been reinterpreted by residents and workers in the city, in the typical Indian 'barber shops' (a tall chair and a mirror nailed to a tree), in the bicycle carts of sugar cane from which kids buy fresh-squeezed cane juice, and in a house we were invited into, built to the strict modernist design regulations, but inside filled with 19th century European paintings and antiques.

More change seems likely in Chandigarh's future.  The city was designed as an isolated 'garden city' for 500,000 residents, because it was thought that it would serve no role other than as a capital city.  But, as all of India is moving to the cities, Chandigarh is experiencing some of the most rapid growth, and projections show least 2 million residents within 5 years, many of them poorer than the designed housing, and the rapidly inflating property values, can accommodate.