Chandigarh: A planned city

Abstract

A planned city presupposes the existence of an authority or an organisation sufficiently effective to secure the site, marshal1 resources for its growth, and exercise continued control until the city reaches a viable size. After that, the maintenance of a planned city is also on a regulated basis. Different from an ‘organic city’, which has developed and grown without benefit of centralised planning, a planned city is attractive as a policy tool precisely because it provides the creator with the opportunity to restructure society in accordance with his or her understanding of society. At its core, therefore, the creation of a new city is a moral and social act to improve the urban condition. Its origins are in social reform and its objectives are to restructure urban form and life to achieve more balanced growth among nature, technology, and economic and social classes. In Chandigarh, India, these objectives were defined by architect-planner Le Corbusier and endorsed by Prime Minister Nehru. The two men shared a common vision of building a city that would serve as the model for the nation, if not for the world, in city planning. That these objectives have not been fully accomplished in Chandigarh can be attributed to the absence of local authority, to a lack of understanding of the local culture and values on the part of the planners, and to the subsequent history of the region. In the development of Chandigarh, authorit~~ relations, lines of accountability, and decision-making structures never became clear and, with the subsequent bifurcation of the Punjab in 1966, have become even more blurred. When it became clear to the planners of Chandigarh that the Capital Project Office had limited political autonomy. and when faced with the challenge of building an innovative community with superior services and facilities within the confines of a tradition-bound, rural, and financially conservative system of government, they learned to appeal to the Office of the Prime Minister for implementation of their goals. When P.N. Thapar, for example, was temporarily removed from the Chandigarh project in 1951, Maxwell Fry complained to Prime Minister Nehru that there was “no unity of administrative control” remaining, which promptly brought back Thapar to Chandigarh.’ This practice intensified the involvement of the central government in Chandigarh, thereby further eroding local involvement and authority. Because power distribution structure changes with time, and because in Chandigarh no provision was made to facilitate orderly and adaptive changes in power structure, much of the legislatioI1 passed to ensure planned growth of the city has remained ineffective. Recent behaviour-modification and learning research suggests that positive reinforcement from the environment, rather than punishment, is a more powerful determinant of behaviour. This has led to the conclusion that new town designs that provide positive reinforcement for desired behaviour rather than punitive controls are more successful.’ The question of authority is