Critical Analysis of Landscape Design For Chandigarh Chandigarh's History and it's Urban Landscape Issues PDF

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH Critical Analysis of Landscape Design For Chandigarh Chandigarh’s History and it’s Urban Landscape Issues! SNEHA SINGH! PA201013 MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE CEPT UNIVERSITY SEMINAR GUIDES- PROF. SANDIP PATIL PROF. DEEPA MAHESHW...

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Critical Analysis of Landscape Design For Chandigarh Chandigarh's History and it's Urban Landscape Issues Sneha Singh

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

Critical Analysis of Landscape Design For Chandigarh Chandigarh’s History and it’s Urban Landscape Issues!

SNEHA SINGH! PA201013 MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE CEPT UNIVERSITY SEMINAR GUIDESPROF. SANDIP PATIL PROF. DEEPA MAHESHWARI

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction: Chandigarh Then 1.1. Landscape at a city planning level ………….…………………………………………………….7

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Chapter 2: The Virgin site 2.1. Chandigarh Original Landscape…………………………………………………………….……..10 2.2. Landscape Character of the original Site .……………………………………………………..…12 2.3. The conception of the plan……………………………………………………………………..… 13 2.4. Mathew Novicki and the Leaf……………………………………………………………..……… 14 2.5. Arrival of the Master piece……………………………………………………………..…………..16

Chapter 3: Sun, Space, Verdure and the Citizen: The Postulate of landscape planning in Chandigarh 3.1 Concept of Chandigarh’s Landscape Design……………………………………..……………….23 3.2 Components of City’s Landscape design……………………………………….……….…………23

Chapter 4: Chandigarh: Now 4.1 The Green City Today……………………………………………………………………………… 30 4.2 Hierarchy of open spaces…………………………………………………………………………… 30 4.3 The Park Areas……………………………………………………………………………….……….. 35 4.4 The Water……………………………………………………………………………………….…… 35 4.5 The Plantation heritage and related issues……………………………………………………… 37 4.6 Diverse open spaces in Chandigarh and green belts along the main avenue……………….. 37 4.7 Recommendations of the expert heritage committee on open spaces/green areas……….. 38 4.8 Pressures on green heritage of Chandigarh………..……………………………………………. 39 4.9 Problems faced by open spaces in Chandigarh……………………………………………………39 4.10 Master plan proposal for open spaces………………………..………………………………… 40

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Chapter 5:Implications 5.1Critical Appraisal………………………………………………………….,………………… 41

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LIST OF FIGURES Master Plan for chandigarh- 1950……………………………………………………………………………………..I Original Plan placed on the Inclined plain……………………………………………………………………………II Albert Mayer’s First plan…………………………………………………………………………………………….…III The ‘leaf Plan” for Chandigarh by Mathew Novicki…………………………………………………………………IV The ‘leaf Plan” for Chandigarh by Mathew Novicki…………………………………………………………………V Le Corbusier’s Study sketches for Chandigarh………………………………………………………………..……VI Part Plan,Chandigarh, Modular II, Evenson Norma, Chandigarh, 1966…………………………………………VII Le Corbusier’s Study sketch,Chandigarh, Modular II, Evenson Norma, Chandigarh, 1966…………….……VIII Le Corbusier’s Study sketch,Chandigarh, Modular II, Evenson Norma, Chandigarh, 1966……………..……IX Plan of Capitol Complex with Rajendra Park at left and Capitol Complex at right,Chandigarh, Modular II, Norma Evenson, Chandigarh, 1966………………………………………………..……………….….X Sector plan,Modular II, Evenson Norma, Chandigarh, 1966………………………………….……………….…XI The Capitol Complex ,Modular II, Evenson Norma, Chandigarh, 1966……………………………….………..XII Final Plan of Capitol Complex Showing revisions made as of December 1956 , Modular II, Evenson Norma, Chandigarh, 1966……………………………………………………………..……XIII Hydrology of Chandigarh……………………………………………………….…………………………….……..XIV Hydrology, Figure ground of Chandigarh……………………………………………………………………..…..XV

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

ABSTRACT Chandigarh has the rare accolade of being one of the few cities in the world with planned landscape. Its Master Plan, ‘a unique work of art’, laid the foundation of what is now popularly called a city beautiful. Between the orderly chequered-mesh of the grid-iron road layout encompassing the sectors, lies a structured patterns of linear green belts and city parks. But sadly, the so-said ‘greenery’ on the master plan is largely misleading. In reality, many of the ‘green belts’ are ‘brown or dry belts’ in summer or cladded with piles of garbage, slums or unauthorised squatter settlements.

!So, the big question which arises is what actually went wrong in just half a century after the

inception of the city? Was the master plan or concept faulty in terms of landscape planning or are the changing socio-economic and political forces currently ruling the city to be blamed? More importantly, the issue is not just only confined to city turning from green and clean to brown and shabby. Other important urban and landscape issues of the city include management of water bodies, water run-off etc. With increased urban population and re-densified built forms in general, Chandigarh will also come under more and more severe environmental stresses. What expectations and strategies do we need to evolve for meeting this challenge?

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION! SEMINAR 2- SNEHA SINGH

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1.1 LANDSCAPE AT THE CITY PLANNING LEVEL

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1. “The materials of the city planing are: Sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and in that hierarchy.” 2. “City is the highest expression of man’s own self acquired powers of organisation and control over his environment and very essence of urban appearances lies in the fact.” -Le Corbusier(Marg Vol. 5 No.1 1961)

!It is evident throughout history that comprehensive urban planning has usually involved a

veering extent of geometric ordering, and yet, urban growth always incorporates more organic patterns. This might be due to topography or environmental issues or simply be the result of process of gradual accretion of the city’s palimpsest. Almost all cities, new or old, have gained their present silhouette of long and complex pattern through years of planning and growth wrapped with a series of adjustments and makeover through time, impositions and alterations. Thus, it is a simple truism to say that a city is never static. And neither is the landscape.

!In the saga of the city’s growth and adjustments through time, the Industrial Revolution

marks an important event. For, after the Industrial Revolution, the image of the city changed drastically from being the reflection of power and province to the womb of industry and economy which as a result attracted a lot of migration. The economic and anonymous industrial city resulted in uncontrolled growth of the city’s population and consequently horrifying urban scenarios; London in the 19th century being the most iconic example of such scenarios. This led to several attempts to disperse and decentralise the population from the cities, the most cogent of these being the Garden City Movement. British New towns through Mark I to Mark IV are a comprehensive chronicle of these attempts.

!Industrial urban reality is then marked by the search and yearning of an ideal city, and at

times projected on a clear tabula-rasa, that is the city’s form and plan has no historical baggage. 19th Century is marked by utopia(s), although the idealist authors of the perfect city range through history—from Plato to Sir Thomas More (who coined the term Utopia) to Robert Owen and Ebenezer Howard. And although today in reality most city planning is concerned with the almost insolvable problems of maintaining the urban fabric in its present imperfectly functioning state, invariably every planner has in her/his mind the image of slum-less, smogless, crime-free metropolis bordered by unpolluted waterways, abounding in parks and playgrounds, free of traffic problems and populated by a democratic citizenship consistently engaged in productive and creative work, wholesome family life and the cultural exchange. In short, there is always an operative utopia that often stems from our struggle with industrialisation and lately with postindustrial reality. And it is with this iconic utopian aspiration and image that the planner engages not with the creation of new urban patterns, but with adjusting and adapting the old. This is where Chandigarh comes into play. Chandigarh is both idea and reality—tabula rasa, aspiration and a key operative image for planners today. It’s germinating ideals lies primarily with the European Industrial city, and a yearning to go back to an imagined life in the past in harmony with Nature and the environment. Even in today’s planners’ operative utopia, these ideals shine thorough. And they were clearly there at the inception. M. S. Randhwa, the landscape architect of Chandigarh clearly notes this:

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Corbusier sums up the whole ideals of town planning thus: “The sun, space and verdure are the ancient influences which have fashioned our body and our spirit. Isolated from their natural environment, all organisms perish, some slowly and some quickly, and man is no exception to this general rule. Our towns have snatched men from essential conditions, molested them, starved them,falsified them, embittered them,crushed them, even sterilised them, the third generation to live in great cities tends to sterility. Fashioned throughout millennia by the conditions of the nature, man cannot with impunity disrupt the natural order. Shut up in masonry walls and conditioned to the smell of petrol fumes, men in large towns lead a cramped and unhappy life, deprived of essential joys of life-Sun, Space and Verdure. Unless the conditions of nature are re-established in man’s life, he cannot be healthy in body and spirit.” -(M. S. Randhawa, Flowering Trees)

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

Chandigarh was all about restoring harmony of urbanism with an all encompassing nature. And so, in this parable, in search of the sun, space and verdure, man drifts from the ancient town and establishes himself in the garden suburbia. But ironically, even the so called garden towns also develop and expand, reducing the outskirts of the towns to miserable shabbiness. Nature melts under the invasion of roads and houses. Horizontal garden towns in the grip of tentacles of the ancient city are ultimately re-absorbed and the promised seclusion becomes a crowded settlement. This is because inherent in this parable are two contradictory impulses: For Nature, Man is not Dominant For City, he has control over his environment.

!So in contemporary times what should be the issue underlying the planning of a city?

Should it be harmonious with nature? and if yes, how? Through the lens of Chandigarh, this study looks at the role of natural factors at the city planning level: as to how formative can the natural factors be to the city? Do they dictate the design and offer some clues to do so? Does it set limitations or is it totally irrelevant? Does harmony establish between man and nature at the conception of the city, always remain same? Do all the parts of planning for the cause of harmony always stay effective? if not, then why not?

!There are three planned cities in India, which in the context of their own time, represent the

highest achievements in architecture for the people in India.The first of these was Fatehpur Sikri, the realisation of the vision of the one of the greatest emperors of all time. Akbar, the third Mughal, but failed because natural factors were not taken into consideration. The Second great planned city, Jaipur of Sawai Jai Singh, could not have been built without the example of Fatehpur Sikri, though it is much bigger in proportions and marks an advance on its prototype. Built in the 18th century, it already shifts the emphasis from pomp, glory and power to the needs of the market. The conception of the third great planned city, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, was a bigger challenge than the previous two experiments. One of the first, and still one of the most significant urban projects of the postwar period arose in India in 1950 with the establishment of Chandigarh, the new capital city of the province of Punjab. It is only in Chandigarh and through Chandigarh, can we manage to raise the question of Landscape and Nature in terms of contemporary urbanism. In other words, the lens of Chandigarh is perhaps the only possible way to study and raise these questions in India.

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

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CHAPTER 2:CHANDIGARH THE VIRGIN SITE

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

2.1 CHANDIGARH: ORIGINAL LANDSCAPE After India-Pakistan partition, a huge mass of population moved to Indian Punjab.This movement was so large that within one month, the state was flooded with lakhs of homeless refugees from West Pakistan. While the refugees settled in the rural areas were settled in evacuee villages under the land settlement scheme, homes had also to be found of for the urban refugees. Some of the existing towns of the Indian Punjab were expanded by buildings so called the model town, a type of garden suburbia, to accommodate the refugees who could not find the accommodation in the houses left behind by the Muslim evacuees. Few lakhs of them still were left homeless and shelterless. Even state government failed to posses a centralised location. This led to a search for a new site for the capital, and thus Chandigarh was born. Chandigarh was basically designed for a population of five lakhs spread over a 114 sq. km site. The site chosen for the city had certain inherent landscape feature, which were fully retained as well as integrated into the master plan. The site was selected by a committee headed by P.L Varma, Chief Engineer. The site comprised of the panoramic range of the Shivalik Hills; the gently sloping land form from the North-east to the South-West( enabling good surface drainage); Seasonal rivulets on its north-western and south-eastern flanks; and an eroded valley with a small nallah running through its heart. Although, after the acquisition of the site, the first problem was the resettlement of the villagers from the villages which have been acquired. P.N Thapar, the Administrative head of the capital scheme, back then, resolved the problem of resettlement of the people from the site of chandigarh, with great tact and sympathy, and found new homes for them in the villages in the periphery of the new city.

!“The town is no longer a senseless pile of stone and masonry, but becomes a park, if man

and nature are harmonised. Avenues of trees, sometimes three to five rows thick, provide green walls, and grouping of trees in the form of rectangles, squares and circles create green rooms.”

!These are the ideals of town planning as propounded by Corbusier and it is necessary to

understand them if one would like to appreciate the basic concepts which underlie town planning in Chandigarh. In a country with the hot summers, multi-storeyed residential flats, are a positive discomfort unless they are air- conditioned. Hence, in Chandigarh, the ideal of the vertical garden city has been partially accepted , in the sense that residential buildings are double- storeyed, while the office- buildings are multistoreyed. Thus, Chandigarh represents a compromise between the ideals of vertical and the horizontal garden cities. Also, Chandigarh makes a very evident statement itself by its own persona that landscape for a city can’t be confined to the organic growth and as Corbusier states of bond between sky, space and trees; steel and cement also bond in between in the part of a huge system called city. For an ideal city Landscape and Architecture are no different entities. it all has to work as a body and both landscape and architecture; in the whole system, are organs.

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

Fig.1 Master plan for chandigarh- 1950 Source- Norma Evenson, Chandigarh,university of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1966. Plate 19

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

2.2 LANDSCAPE CHARACTER OF THE ORIGINAL SITE

!For Chandigarh, The site was chosen from aerial investigation, was in the sub- mountainous

area of the Ambala district about 240km north of New Delhi, the national capital. The site was a placid landscape of sprawling croplands of wheat, Sugarcane and Groundnuts, dotted with clumps of native trees and mud hamlets. The construction of the new city significantly altered the harmonious relationship which originally existed between man and nature. The agrarian landscape gave way to a cityscape of building blocks, metalled roads, electric poles, water towers and the ubiquitous automobile. The landscape of the original site before the city was built had the following characteristics: 1. Located at the foothills of the Shivalik and Kasauli range at a height of 390m above sea level, the site has agricultural fields and 26 villages. 2. It had considerable slope from north-east to south-west, which made natural surface drainage possible. 3. Two Seasonal rivulets, patiali-ki- rao on the north-west, and sukhna choe on the southeast delineated the west and east boundaries of the site respectively and carried the bulk of “runoff” of rainwater during the monsoon from the shivalik foothills. Beyond the rivulets, rose the profile of Shivaliks, offsets of the Himalayas, which were to provide the backdrop. 4. Through the heart of the city ran ( and runs) a barsaati nallah ( monsoonal brook). Amidst the vast stretches of crop-fields, the city was punctuated by groves of Mangifera indica( Mango) along with Acacia arabica ( kikar), Pheonix dactylifera( Khajoor), Butea frondosa (dhak), Dalbergia Sisoo ( Sheesham) and Prunus cornuta trees ( jamoa). The most majestic of the existing trees were, however, were full grown Ficus religiosa and Ficus bengalensis which had adorned different parts of the original chandigarh site. Earth mounds, rainwater ravines, depressions and ponds of the 26 villages along with crop-fields, trees and mud hamlets has created a tapestry of biomorphic and geometric forms welding together the natural and manmade elements into an organic whole.

Fig.2 Original Plan placed on the Inclined plain source-www.chandigarhurbanlab.com

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CRITICAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FOR CHANDIGARH

2.3 THE CONCEPTION OF PLAN- ALBERT MAYER AND THE FIRST PLAN From the early weeks of January 1950, Albert Mayer was hired to work on the plan of the...