Chandigarh is a Badly Planned City
Chandigarh's planning myth needs to be busted.
You visit Los Angeles1 as a tourist. On landing at the airport, the first thing you need to do is rent a car. Without a car, getting around is impossible or gets expensive with all the Ubers you would need to call.
Amazon offers you a job in Seattle. It decides that the best use of workers’ time is to have them commute to office everyday. Seattle is too expensive to start a family so you buy a house in Everett — one of the suburbs. Unfortunately, you now have an hour long commute to the office.
Bengaluru, India used to be known as the City of Lakes. Now it is facing a water shortage. It used to be surrounded by forests. After India’s tech industry started growing, Bengaluru started expanding outwards and now it’s lost the vast majority of its forest cover. Now, Bengaluru experiences horrendous traffic and intense summers.
Calgary, Canada has about 1.6 million residents. You decide it is a good mid-sized city to put down roots. On arriving, you discover that there’s an affordable housing crisis. Calgary has spread out so much that the cost of building all the civic infrastructure is disproportionate to the tax revenue generated.
Brazil moved its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia—why? Mostly to develop the interior and build a shiny new modern city from scratch. And hey, if you’re starting fresh, why not design a place that gives residents everything they want? Conveniently, planners decided that what residents really wanted was a city that looked stunning in aerial photos. The result? Brasilia’s vast open spaces and grand buildings might impress from a distance, but on the ground, they make the city feel cold and uninviting. There’s none of the buzzing street life you’d expect in a major city. Since homes and businesses are kept far apart, people have to drive everywhere, leading to traffic jams. Plus, the layout isn’t exactly a recipe for bumping into neighbors and building a sense of community.
A basic principle unites all the city planning failures above. In optimizing for aesthetic viewability2 and suburban sprawl, other organic aspects of city design were thrown under the bus. All these cities are built according to the Plan — which has been drawn up in some government office — which ignores all current use.
The planner sees himself as a technical genius and believes that urban design can be solved like a mathematical equation. If you think about it, it is kind of embarrassing that random nobodies can think up arrangements of cities that are better than most of the ones that we live in. Keep in mind that most of these cities have been designed by urban planners who have studied urban design for decades.
Chandigarh is unique in the sense that it suffers from the failure modes of all the above cities. Traffic jams are common, affordable housing is nonexistent, urban sprawl is increasing commute times and the environment around the city is rapidly degrading. Most of these problems are common to Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Delhi. But these are Tier 1 cities and while Chandigarh serves as the capital for two states, it can’t be called a top tier city.
Why is Chandigarh, a relatively small city, with a fraction of other Indian metropolises struggling so much? For all its famed planning, it has failed to anticipate its citizens’ need. While the problem might be its unique Indian context, other Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities don’t struggle as much. It could be that Indian bureaucrats are poor city managers, but why does Chandigarh struggle more than say Indore or Jaipur, or literally any other Indian city?
Seeing like a State
This is a good segue to introduce a new framework to analyse Chandigarh. James C. Scott is his seminal book “Seeing like a State” examines various failure patterns of government schemes and initiatives. He calls his framework Legibility.
Essentially, the state needs legibility for transparency into its population. For example, the state wants to know who owns what lands, how much it is worth, how it’s utilized and how much can it be taxed. It would like its schemes to reach its desired targets rather than haphazardly distribute benefits. Without the desire for legibility, there can’t be censuses, social security or any other modern benefits of the state that we take for granted.
The flip side is that this desire for legibility can be often be a recipe for failure. Scott calls the ideology behind this failure “authoritarian high modernism”. How does this fail in practice? Here are the steps:
Take up an intractable problem, like the need for a better state capital.
Discard existing realities like the interaction between residents, the conveniences that have cropped in the city, people’s usage patterns or industry locations.
Arrogantly assume that you can do better, and that the population just needs a better solution that they would immediately appreciate and begin using.
Design a Plan that looks beautiful on paper and would be aesthetic when viewed from a helicopter.
The design should reflect the self confidence of scientific and technical progress, the mastery of nature and the rational design of social order. It should designed such that society would be one step closer towards a utopian ideal.
Finally, get an authoritarian to impose this design. Because there will be social pushback to this brazen reordering, only an authoritarian can override such protests.
This is high modernism at its intellectual peak. High modernism is the idea that with enough charts, rulers, and self-confidence, experts can redesign society from scratch. It worships order, efficiency, and geometric symmetry—because if a city looks good from a helicopter, surely it must function well on the ground. In practice, it often results in grand, over-engineered schemes that crumble the moment messy, unpredictable humans refuse to behave like obedient little squares on a planner’s grid.
We’ll see in a bit how this applies to Chandigarh. What are some other concrete examples of Scott’s idea in practice? To name a few:
China’s Great Leap Forward. The state mandated the collectivization of agriculture and introduced policies such as backyard steel furnaces. The state’s reliance on falsified data and grandiose plans led to catastrophic famine, killing tens of millions
China’s One Child Policy. Implemented to reduce the population burden, it ended up burdening the current generation. It ignored regional and cultural differences, and introduced unintended consequences.
The Hukou System which registered households. The state sought to fix people in place by categorizing them as either agricultural or non-agricultural workers. This rigid system, meant to control migration and taxation, often failed, as people found ways to evade it through informal networks, bribery, or migration beyond the state's reach.
India’s very own Demonetization. Ostensibly put in place to get rid of black money, the government de-legitimized higher currency notes. It ended up having extreme adverse effects, some of which remained for years.
China’s infamous social credit system. I think it should probably be the poster child for legibility. The state wants such extreme visibility into the population that it is willing to reduce all of human behaviour to a score.
The British introducing the first caste survey in India which froze an arguably fluid system3.
A hidden thread among all these examples is that these require a prostate civil society. India and China have authoritarian states and civil society is often weak when the state really wants to get something done. Compared to the West where individual rights and liberties are stronger and better protected by courts, India and China are more prone to failures of legibility.
An important point here is that this type of failure is ideologically agnostic. Both liberal/conservative and left/right ideologies can be seduced by it. It only requires faith in technology and hubris that it can be done better.
During the Partition of India in 1947, Punjab was divided, and its capital, Lahore, was awarded to Pakistan. Lord Cyril Radcliffe4 considered awarding Lahore to India but changed course, realizing that Pakistan would be left without a major city. With Punjab now lacking a capital, India needed a new administrative and cultural hub—leading to the creation of Chandigarh.
Jawaharlal Nehru entrusted Le Corbusier with the task of building another state capital for Punjab. The architect in charge, Matthew Nowicki had died and Le Corbusier was invited to design and finish the construction. Nehru fell prey to high modernism as well. In a speech, Nehru said5
We cannot keep pace with the modern world unless we adopt the latest techniques. We cannot keep pace with the modern world unless we utilize the sources of power that are available to the modern world… the essential and most revolutionary factor in modern life is not a particular ideology, but technological advance. Countries of the West may have been colonial powers. They may have done injury to us. But the fact is that they have built a great civilization in the last 200 or 400 years.
Interestingly, Le Corbusier was asked to move to India and he responded that “Your capital can be built right here; we, at 35 Rue de Sevres6, are perfectly capable of finding the solution to the problem.”7
It fits in perfectly with James Scott’s idea of legibility. Le Corbusier had the arrogance to assume that he didn’t need to visit India to design Chandigarh. He could do it in his office in Paris and as long as it looked good on paper with nice aesthetics, the people of Chandigarh would get used to it. In any case, Le Corbusier agreed to spend 8 weeks a year in Chandigarh8.
Le Corbusier was obsessed with rectilinear axes — two lines cutting each other at right angles. In the above image, you can see that the streets are criss-crossing each other at perfect angles.
Le Corbusier designed a number of buildings in Chandigarh, the most famous of those being the Open Hand monument. The other building of particular important is the Chandigarh High Court building. I put in the two images above to compare their visual aesthetic.
If I were to show a photo of these buildings to someone that hadn’t been to Chandigarh, would they guess that these buildings were in fact in India? Unfortunately, the soldier in the front in one of the images, gives away the plot. But other than that, what connection do the features of these buildings have with Indian culture? They look aesthetic and are cubical structures, both of which Le Corbusier favoured.
Compare that to the US Supreme Court building. It has features designed to reflect its heritage and roots coming from Roman, Greek and Christian influences. Similarly, the US Capitol building has been designed to be maximally informative about the US as a country, its history, its culture and its ideology.
This is a feature in Le Corbusier’s design. The image above shows another of his design’s: The Sanskar Kendra in Ahmedabad. Ironically, for a museum named Sanskar Kendra, the building is devoid of anything that resembles its connection to Gujarat’s culture.
Each of Chandigarh’s sector is supposed to be a self contained sub-city with schools, shopping centres and residences. Zoning was planned accordingly. There wasn’t any mixed-use zoning, which combines both residential and commercial buildings. Sectors were also supposed to be low density. Expectedly, Chandigarh has a lot of bungalows or low density buildings. Several large bungalows in low density sectors are occupied by government offices.
This exacerbates housing crisis. Urbanists across the world have come to the conclusion that the best way to design a city is to have mixed-use zoning combining both high density residential and commercial buildings.
Japan is a good example of such planning. I have attached an image that shows how the bottom floors of buildings usually have commercial offices and the top floors have residences. This is successful mixed-use zoning on display. It keeps a lot of people in the same place and one unit of infrastructure can serve more people.
Compare that with Chandigarh’s Sector 17 that was supposed to be its city centre. Le Corbusier designed it to be a classical Indian “chowk” that could be a meeting place of different activities. The scale of the Sector 17 plaza is so wide that there are vast stretches of concrete with few lone figures here and there. Hawkers have been ostensibly banned from this, so it only reduces activity. (Un?)Fortunately, because government regulations are often suggestions in India, one often sees hawkers in the Sector 17 plaza9.
What happens when Chandigarh attracts more residents than it was designed for? Where do labor colonies, street vendors, and other working-class people find a place to live? Slums are bound to emerge on the outskirts of the planned city—and that’s exactly what has happened.
Before anyone says that this is due to India’s massive population growth, I would like to point out that there were people living in scattered hutments as long as 195910. A whole generation of children has grown up in these areas.
How should a city be?
Jane Jacobs wrote a book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” as a critic against modernist urban planners like Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier experiences the city from a helicopter, while she experiences the city as a pedestrian and a resident.
She says that there’s no correspondence between a geometric, aesthetic looking city and one that effectively meets daily needs. Complex systems11 do not display regularity, they have their own order12. Because mixed-use zoning — like stores mixed with apartments — create visual confusion, they’re often discarded by these planners. Planners often take the path of least resistance because it is easier to plan for single use zones. The more the number of zones, the more the variables.
Jacobs considers a city’s evolution akin to a language’s evolution. Just as it is the joint creation of millions of speakers, a city is always being reinvented and influenced by its inhabitants. Some popular speakers may have pronounced effects on a language similar to how the State can have an undue influence on the city, but ultimately the people are what make both, the city and the language. This openness and plasticity allows cities to serves purposes that aren’t even thought of.
In Jacob’s view, the case against Chandigarh is a simple one: It places a static grid over the profusion on unknowable possibilities.
Because cities are inherently environmentally destructive, urban sprawl maximizes that destruction over a larger amount of space. Seattle and many other cities are facing farmland loss due to urban sprawl. While inevitable, you would want to constrict this environmental destruction to as small of an area as possible.
Taking all of this into account, Noahpinion has great posts on urbanism and cities and rather than rehash his points, I am just going to link to all of them.
The first one talks about how US cities of the future could look. He talks about how cities could develop once people start living there rather than uproot everything and start anew.
The second one talks about how Japan manages urbanism and zoning. It has many implications for Indian cities especially since India is as dense as Japan.
The third one talks about urbanism from Taipei’s perspective. Similar to how Japan’s urbanism works, this is another Asian example.
How do you build a good downtown? The best way is something called “shop-top” development, where you have shops on the ground floor and apartments on the top. Extremely common in a lot of Indian cities. However, I think an American perspective on this might be informative.
Jane Jacobs and Noahpinion, both make good cases for diversity and mixed-use planning. James C. Scott makes another good one13:
Like the diverse forest, a richly differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options and public spaces is virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically, the diversity of its commercial “bets” (everything from funeral parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable.
An important point here is also infrastructure. Infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain. It is important for it to serve as many people as possible. With high density development, the amount of population served by a single unit of infrastructure — roads, trains, fire stations — increases. The cost of infrastructure is amortized over a higher amount of people.
Lower middle income countries like India need to maximize this metric to optimize both infrastructure built and number of people served with this infrastructure.
Or any other American city, other than NYC and maybe Boston.
Some architects — like Le Corbusier — who designed Chandigarh, optimized a city for how good it looked while flying from a helicopter above.
I’ll expand on this in a later post but for more on this, I would like to point to Nicholas Dirks' Castes of Mind.
Yes, the one after whom the Radcliffe Line is named. Fun fact: Radcliffe had never been to India before drawing the Partition line.
Jawaharlal Nehru, Speeches, Vol 3, page 23.
In Paris.
“Essays on Le Corbusier”, page 420, The politics of the Open Hand
Ibid.
Another reason why laws imposed top down that will be broken are useless. In this case, it only emboldens society to break more laws since it has already broken one law. It increases opportunities for bribes. The fees that the state would have charged from the hawkers for a license will instead line an individual policeman’s pockets.
Chandigarh as a place to live in, Madhu Sarin, page 391.
Sanjeev Sanyal writes a lot about complexity theory and I highly recommend following him to learn more about it.
Complex systems often display a large delta in output for a small delta in input. That is what makes complex systems interesting and hard to predict.
Seeing like a State, James C. Scott, Page 138
You wrote the piece I was about to write, but you did it much better than I could have.
I was in Chandigarh this weekend and was planning to write something exactly like this. I was just going to revisit Seeing Like A Stage. It's so uncanny; you stole words out of my keyboard.
Loved this piece. Thanks for writing it!
Thank you for an excellent explanation on why our cities are so difficult to improve upon