Chandigarh

The parliament building, a typically modernist building in this new city

     Chandigarh is sort of astounding. An entire city built out of nothing to house hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from the brutal post partition wars between Pakistan and India of the 1940s and 1950s. It was ambitious, designed from scratch by a team of American architects at the behest of Nehru (India's first PM) to symbolise India's promising future. One of the architects died in the early fifties and Le Carbussier, the famous Swiss-French visionary, took charge from this point and the emergent metropolis took shape. Wide gridlike streets mixed with modernist apartment buildings and vast adminstrative and educational complexes. In many ways it was and is outrageously successful - today it stands as the richest and cleanest city in India. And while the central shopping district is reminiscent of the concrete travesty which makes up Stevenage's town centre (if you don't know Stevenage count yourself lucky - watch the film Boston Kickout) the gardens are magnificent.

The Nev Chand Rock Garden

  The Rock Garden is a bizarre subterranean universe of figurines made by a single man, Nev Chand, from 1957. He started the project in his own time, creating strange little characters out of bulldozed scrap from villages cleared to make way from the city. A civil servant stumbled across his menagerie in the forest and realised its worth, and the city planners gave Chand his own plump piece of real estate and workers to create a dedicated exhibition. It is really quite something.
  There is also a vast rose garden which stretches for a whole city block, and another half dozen parks and green spaces which vary in design, and the air is one of self satisfaction and contentment.
  Yet for all its Gallic modernist majesty the challenges here are large. The well designed and wealthy nature of the city has made it an understandable magnet for economic migrants, and Le Corbussier's target of 500,000 residents has doubled, thousands spilling over into shanty towns and slums on the city's periphery. Dealing with this is one of the great questions for the city's advancement. There is a distinct sense that the city is a pretence well beyond the reality of India, a bubble inflated which shows the sharp relief between those inside and those without this mid twentieth century fantasy. But then it is true without ambition there is no advancement.

This plan shows the grid structure of the city