CHANDIGARH Urban Planning Concepts
CHANDIGARH was the first planned city after independence from British rule in 1947. It is the capital city of the states of Punjab and Haryana. The city is located at the picturesque junction of foothills of the Himalayas Mountain range and the Ganges plains. It houses a population of 1,054,600 inhabitants (2001) and is one of the richest cities of the nation. American architects Albert Mayer and Mathew Nowicki were the first architects to be appointed for the project. After the death of Nowicki in 1950, Le Corbusier was commissioned.
P L A N N I N G C O N C E P T
The city plan was conceived as post war ‘Garden City’ wherein vertical and high rise buildings were ruled out, keeping in view the living habits of the people. Le Corbusier conceived the master plan of Chandigarh as analogous to human body, with a clearly defined as,
- Head (the Capitol Complex, Sector 1),
- Heart (the City Centre Sector-17),
- Lungs (the leisure valley, innumerable open spaces and sector greens),
- Intellect (the cultural and educational institutions),
- Circulatory system (the network of roads, the 7Vs) and Viscera (the Industrial Area).
The primary module of city’s design is a Sector, a neighborhood unit of size 800 meters x 1200 meters.
Each SECTOR is a self-sufficient unit having shops, school, health centers and places of recreations and worship. The population of a sector varies between 3000 and 20000 depending upon the sizes of plots and the topography of the area.
DEMOGRAPHY
As of 2011 India census, Chandigarh had a population of ,055,450, making for a density of about 9,252 (7,900 in 2001) persons per square kilometer.
Males constitute 55% of the population and females 45%. The sex ratio is 818 females for every 1,000 males. The child sex ratio is 880 females per thousand males. Chandigarh has an effective literacy rate of 86.77% (based on population 7 years and above), higher than the national average; with male literacy of 90.81% and female literacy of 81.88%. 10.8% of the population is under 6 years of age. The population of Chandigarh forms 0.09 per cent of India in 2011.
There has been a substantial decline in the population growth rate in Chandigarh, with just 17.10% growth between 2001–2011. Since, 1951-1961 the rate has decreased from 394.13% to 17.10%. This is probably because of rapid urbanization and development in neighboring cities. The urban population constitutes as high as 97.25% of the total and the rural population makes up 2.75% as there are only a few villages within Chandigarh on its Western and South-Eastern border and the majority of people live in the heart of Chandigarh.
CRITICISMS
Criticisms are well established of the implementation of the postcolonial vision of Nehru and Le Corbusier, and of the critical emphasis on its influence. Claims have been made that the focus on Corbusier’s architect-centered discourse erases the plural authorship of the narrative of Chandigarh’s development, arguing that it was, in fact, a hybridity of values and of “contested maternities” of Western and indigenous Indian origin and cultural exchanges rather than an uncontested administrative enterprise. Such criticism is consistent with claims that decolonization in India has marked a shift from segregation based on race to segregation based on class, and that planned cities are truly “designed” ones which represent the values and interests of a westernized middle-class Indian elite which ignore the complexities of India’s diverse ethnic and cultural landscape and enabled neocolonial hierarchies such as the imposition of the Hindi language on non-conforming castes. Furthermore, the early over-saturation of the minimalist International Style on building design in Chandigarh has attracted criticisms of effecting a “democratic, self-effacing banality”, though this criticism is perhaps negligent of how this was necessary in galvanizing higher standards of urban living throughout the country.
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