An experience of Chandigarh

Earlier in the year, as part of our scoping for the workshop in Raipur, we visited Chandigarh: Le Corbusier’s planned city, built from the 1950s.  Mostly the city feels as European as it does Indian, but in the south where the city expanded later, we came across this neighbourhood with an entirely different character.  A consistent module of narrow, 3-storey terraced houses, each customised by their owners; arranged around tight open spaces barely 20m x 30m.  Although organised rigidly on a grid, the scale of the streets, the buildings and the spaces seemed to us to work almost to perfection.  Key vernacular elements such as the threshold space between building and street is successfully integrated into a modern urban pattern.  Scale, rather than form is the key here.

An experimental 'rehabilitation colony' in Chandigarh

Now in Raipur, we discovered that this neighbourhood was a village re-housing scheme, developed through consultation with the residents.  For the workshop, we built two comparator massing models at 1:250.  The first model shows a large section of this neighbourhood, with a density of approximately 2,000 persons per hectare.   The second model shows a portion of the currently planned central ‘sectors’ in Naya Raipur, with an average density of 225 persons per hectare.  The road through the middle of the model is a secondary road – 60 metres wide, whilst the primary roads are 100m wide.  An entire block from the Chandigarh neighbourhood can fit in this road, with space either side for traffic.  These models have prompted intense debates within the teams: what is the minimum intensity for a city?  How can public transport, commerce and Indian life be supported in a city with such a suburban character?  The teams will present their work to an international Jury, including the Naya Raipur development agency on Friday.

Scale comparison models at 1:250 - Naya Raipur in the foreground 

and the neighbourhood in the photo from Chandigarh in the background