Contesting visions: The authorship of the Chandigarh plan
July 18, 2009 nihal 24 other publications
The literature on Chandigarh’s planning, celebrated principally because of the central involvement of Le Corbusier, is largely architect-centric, descriptive and positivist, with few critical evaluations. Despite exposing readers to the complexities involved in planning the city, as they talk about it, the scholars create and shape the Corbusier Plan as a unified and uncontested creation. Also missing in the discourse is the idea that people – including administrators, politicians and planners – are not passive recipients of external ideas; ideas do not get transmitted across cultural boundaries without mediation. The exclusive praising of Corbusier only reflects the poverty of the discourse and its narrators. This paper offers another narrative.
The literature on Chandigarh’s planning, celebrated principally because of the central involvement of Le Corbusier, is largely architect-centric, descriptive and positivist, w...
