Chandigarh and the Contemporary Utopia

In Spring 2011, Professor Peggy Deamer of the Yale School of Architecture offered an Advanced Studio on “Chandigarh and the Contemporary Utopia”, with colleagues Professor Alex Felson and Chris Starkey.

This studio was generated by Professor Deamer’s interest in architectural utopias, a theme that formed the subject of one of her undergraduate seminars.  Struck in particular by Chandigarh – one of the few built utopias – she wanted to investigate its lessons for her third-year design students, for whom this was a culminating studio course.

Conceived as a “social utopia,” Chandigarh is unique in presenting the student of architecture with a built artefact that not only demonstrates an architect’s vision for modern living and government, but also, more importantly, makes concrete the vision of the governmental leader, Nehru.  All of the ingredients that did and do make this “utopia” contemporary, complex, and global are part of this vision: post-colonial identity; national, regional and ethnic strife; monumental demands in the face of remoteness, limited resources and unskilled labor. It is hard to know which is more extraordinary:  the audacity of the vision or its having been actualized.

At the same time, the 45 years since its completion have allowed architects, historians, and cultural critics to contemplate what has succeeded over time and what hasn’t, and what of its success or failure is based on historical contingency and how much on the architectural ideology.  Certainly, Le Corbusier’s urban planning, of which this is a prime example, has become a symbol of all that was wrong with the Modern Movement: the hubris of master planning, especially by a Westerner in a non-Western area; the coldness of the forms; a city designed for cars and not pedestrian, human-scaled life. Chandigarh both suffers from this general dismissal and demonstrates a success that many find difficult to explain or ignore completely.

Likewise, in the 63 years since its inception, much has changed in the world, in India, and Chandigarh, and the issues that a utopian vision would tackle today have mutated.  Global warming, pollution and resource depletion have become a global crisis; issues of security are now paramount and change the definition of what constitutes a “public”; India, with its IT industry, has repositioned itself in the global market and Chandigarh, wanting in, struggles to reconcile its governmental raison d’etre with its entrepreneurial ambitions; the Capital now serves not just the region of Punjab, but of Haryana as well; and real estate pressure pushes heavily on this city of above-average income and literacy.

For pedagogical purposes, Chandigarh was both an example of utopian design and also a site.  Students had to analyze the pressures on the city and develop a response that needed to grasp the complexity of the economic, social and political situation of Chandigarh while, in the utopian fashion, not be limited by all the realities that would make implementation of this vision impossible. In other words, the responses were meant to be speculative, but informed.  As an alternative to a developer-driven approach to design, the students were asked to make decisions for Chandigarh that are based on what one wishes might happen, not what one fears might happen. 

Students were allowed to develop their own site and program, depending on their analysis of the crucial condition for the ongoing viability of a city, although for all of them the issues of sustainability – for the environment, for resource and waste management, and for labor practices – were foregrounded.  Likewise, the specific and existing real estate development plans for the north of Chandigarh – Tata’s “Camelot” project for 53 acres of luxury high-rise apartments – was taken as a template for existing “desires” that needed to be redirected (or not) at any level of thinking.

The work of the students fell into 3 major categories:  those that concentrated on managing growth on the periphery of Chandigarh; those that worked on revisiting the organization of the sectors; and those that concentrated on rethinking the design of the Capital, the symbol and enactment of utopianism.  One student that looked at the periphery tried to link the speculative development at the north-west edge of Chandigarh to the original (and more sustainable) water catchment distribution and link the economic advantages of development with new approaches to water distribution, resources and pleasure.  Another saw development on the periphery as needing to take into account the dual need to house those that build a development and those that will live there after, including both the wealthy and those that serve them.  Another developed an IT park that provided education and housing for the local underprivileged inhabitants of Chandigarh, trying to link global Indian IT development to local benefits.

One pair of students working in the sector, feeling that growth should be maintained within the original footprint of Chandigarh, sought ways to densify housing within the unused spaces of the sectors as well as in bridge-buildings connecting the much-too-disconnected sectors. Another devoted a sector that is on axis with the Capital and dominated by informal development to a proposed Expo that would ask various high tech industries to model and build state of the art sustainable live-work housing, allowing a transition from the informal to the still-affordable (because donated) planned.

A group of students working on the Capital concentrated on redesigning the Capital to accommodate the reality of its dual state administrative needs, a redesign that linked issues of security with a new, Northern public edge connecting the Capital to Sukhna Lake.  Another proposed a new, separate Capital complex for Haryana that, unlike the existing Capital which forms a barrier dividing inside and outside and repels a connection with Chandigarh residents, would allow a porous boundary between inhabitants and government workers.

The discussions that came up on the reviews of these projects inevitably centered on whether these projects  - or the city of Chandigarh itself – were truly utopian. Likewise, the issue of whether students with such brief knowledge of the situation could truly grasp the depth of problems was brought up. Both are fair challenges.  But regardless of the success or failure of these projects on these score, the students were deeply challenged and stimulated by the lessons that Chandigarh offered and were forced to think in ways both unfamiliar and, hopefully, socially expansive.