Sustainability suggests the ability of a system to conserve itself vis-a-vis its longevity and thereby further its useful life for its future given the vagaries of the built and the natural environment. Just as the sustainability of a building / structure depends on the individual health of its components, on a much larger scale the sustainability index or value of a city would spring from the state of health of its parts. This essay focuses on the city of Chandigarh that was seeded as an offshoot of the City Beautiful and Garden City movements, and continues to be one of the most liveable cities in India. This essay looks at the sustainability initiatives that originally germinated the new capital of Punjab, following the Partition of 1947, and their current status.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Chandigarh was sited with careful regard to the geomorphic of its watercourses, a mountain backdrop that would control its northward sprawl, watersheds bordering its eastern and western boundaries and a gentle southward slope to keep it free from any threat of water logging. Amidst this was tweaked the sectoral grid of 64 square kilometres, 56 sectors of two standard dimensions (800x1200m and 800x400m) to ensure self-sufficiency and efficiency of the ‘neighborhood’ sectors. As the first Indian city to have a fully underground waterborne sewage disposal system, this modern Indian town was a forerunner to many in the country, besides its differentiation of living, working, care of body and spirit and above all a predetermined hierarchical circulation system (the 7Vs), which efficiently regulated intercity traffic right upto the dwelling. Keeping in view that Indian traffic was also non-motorized but rather horse and mule drawn, a slow carriageway alongside the fast traffic lanes was envisaged as early as when the first plans for Chandigarh were drawn by Le Corbusier and his team. We don’t realize this, but more than six decades down the line, with the growing car menace engulfing our cities today, these lanes are a boon to distribute traffic and ensure uninterrupted flows at peak hours.
What the city needs is to develop its loops for mass public modal split alternatives combining trams, buses and multi-utility vehicles to replace the car on the street. Odd-even number strategies are bound to fail in a growing economy like India where cars are cheaper than land and each consumer can afford another bigger car. The air-conditioned low floor buses commissioned under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) were well-intended, but lack of enforcement mechanisms and ineffective monitoring of routes did little to discourage cars from the streets.
On the contrary, the development of cycle tracks in the northern sectors has revived the cycle on Chandigarh’s streets.
For free flow of cyclists at major junctions, the creation of cycle underpasses at major streets needs to be exercised to encourage cyclists since the scale of the city is apt for bicycling.
GREEN COVER
Hailed by Khuswant Singh as a city of green hedges and grey beards, the green cover of Chandigarh credited to Dr. M.S. Randhawa, is one of the major pointers to the city’s sustainability. The streets are a riot of color in spring and the monsoons, a lensman’s delight and walkers’ paradise and so are the gardens interspersed along Leisure Valley: the lung space of the city. Envisaged by Le Corbusier to bring the ‘forest into the city’ the linear parkland serves many functions: a continuous greenbelt arrayed with gardens to serve neighborhoods, a rainwater runoff catchment for the sectors it traverses from north to south, a lung space for the city and a crucible for recreational, cultural and social interaction at the city level. To take care of the built / growing landscape, which would render less surface area for ground water recharge from monsoon rains, the laying of underground recharge wells was taken up in the Leisure Valley and these are functional and work well.
ECOLOGY
A city’s sustainability cannot be measured within itself alone; its symbiotic relationship with its hinterland shares an equal responsibility if not more. Two significant legislations inclined towards landscape ecology were made early on in Chandigarh. The first legislation promulgated by Le Corbusier in 1952 – the ‘Edict of Chandigarh’ – strove to preserve the city’s proximity with nature by prohibiting any development to the north of the city, leaving the hills ecologically and visually undisturbed. The second legislation was The Periphery Control Act. This act was similarly meant to maintain a clear rural urban dichotomy and prevent unregulated urban development within a radius of 16 kms of the greenbelt catering to agricultural and dairy needs around the city. Thus, the objectives of creating a city, which shared a sustainable relationship with its hydro and near hydro-edges were fulfilled by protecting the ecological integrity of Sukhna Lake, Protection & Conservation of Choes (seasonal rivulet), increasing the soft landscape and tree cover and prevention of runoff and soil erosion.
The peri-urban areas of Chandigarh were to provide vegetables, grain and poultry products, safeguard the city against sprawl and also mitigate the mushrooming of dormitory towns pressurizing Chandigarh’s infrastructure and were enclosed in a girdle called the 16-kilometer radius Periphery Control Act. The mushrooming of suburbs and dormitory colonies and the permissible reorganization of land use from agricultural to commercial spurred by highway or ribbon development has led to brownfield development in the otherwise green fields and granaries surrounding Chandigarh.
While the last few decades have witnessed a series of political, economic and socio-cultural forces that have redefined these originally conceived urban boundaries, this has simultaneously led to the creation of some ‘new’ internal edges and borders. Of these ‘edge’ interventions in Chandigarh, a significant manifestation is the retention of existing urban villages within the Corbusian city and their intrinsic interactions with the surrounding urbanity. In effect, while the Corbusian city continues to respect its ‘original’ sectoral grid, its system of 7Vs and its landscape plan of open spaces interspersed within the sectors, a distinct patina of change is now visible, with newer developments coming up while older edges redefine themselves.
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SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
Chandigarh’s initial settlers still recall how difficult it was to bring people into the modern city way back in 1952. There were practically no takers for the houses, the shops and even the commercial establishments in the City Centre. Le Corbusier had to tweak his original scheme for the City Centre as in the original one there were to be no investors. The reasons for the development (and even success) of this city were the initiatives of the government to develop housing and infrastructure, which pulled people towards it. A bulk of the housing stock is Government Housing, built by the government and leased to an official (from a peon to a minister) who would pay a paltry sum from his salary as monthly rent and occupy the same unit until he retired from government service. Hence the only early inhabitants were government officials. There were no private buyers of plots in the city.
However, as the town densified, government officials bought plots and slowly an influx of other investors began. Today, it’s a 360-degree situation; the city has exceedingly high land values, is the most wanted address for private and public enterprises and the most liveable city in India. Residents attribute this to Chandigarh being a city of high class educational, medical and social infrastructure.
The residents take pride in their city and enjoy its green spaces, gardens and public life. Its compact size and the scale of the city make it easy to negotiate.
However, market forces and politics also play their role. The emergence of specialized shopping within neighborhoods has made the sector less self-sufficient and thereby a digression from the original concept of the city. On a larger scale the political decision to trifurcate Punjab in 1966 saw Chandigarh become the capital for Haryana and Punjab while also being a Union Territory.
This, accelerated by the loss of the periphery and with it the peri-urban hinterland, led to the development of dormitory and shanty towns on the outskirts of the modern city. This has created immense pressure on the city’s infrastructure and led to its deterioration.
INTELLECTUAL SUSTAINABILITY
The concept of ‘intellectual sustainability’ has manifested in the development of Chandigarh Region Innovation and Knowledge Cluster (CRIKC) which calls for resource and manpower sharing of institutions’ of higher learning in the ‘tri-city’ (Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula). The genesis of CRIKC lies in the ‘Narayan Murthy Report’ April 2012, commissioned by the Planning Commission on corporate participation in ‘higher education’ as well as the ‘Knowledge Commission Report’ of the Government of India. Further, the idea of having alliances between institutions of higher education and research, in and around a given city, also finds reference in the 12th Plan Document of the Government of India (GOI). The idea of having knowledge hubs is also inclusive of the ‘Meta-University’ concept, being advocated by Ministry of Human Resources Development, GOI in its RUSA (Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan) document.
Furthermore, the Science, Technology and Innovative (STI) 2013 policy of the GOI also refers to clusters/hubs as tools for innovations. The Sam Pitroda report has also underlined the development of excellence in educational and research institutions facilitating innovation and knowledge clusters. Chandigarh is a pioneer in this concept of intellectual sustainability that seeks to share and transmit resources and manpower in the tri-city. The key institutions are Punjab University, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Central Scientific Instruments Organization (CSIR-CSIO), Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID), PEC University of Technology, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment (SASE), National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER, Mohali) and others to make it 20 partnering institutions. CRIKC would encourage interdisciplinary research, off campus exchange of PhD and post-doctoral research scholars, as well as seamless access to the laboratory facilities of participating institutions. Creation of Research Based Sub-Clusters (Medical, Industrial, Nano-technology, Physical Sciences, Chemical Sciences, etc.) is another CRIKC mandate.
POSSIBILITIES AND PROSPECTS
Every city has a ‘to do’ wish list to make it more sustainable/liveable. Chandigarh comes close to being such an example, an attribute of its 64 square kilometer grid. Its urban geography and geomorphic are standalone factors, which make it an example of sustainable urbanism, but as always there is room for more improvements now:
•Ensure bicycle tracks and their continuity, increase inclusivity and keep out exclusivity. The socialist agenda with which the city was realized needs to be reiterated by way of debate and dialogue.
•Enforcement of regulations and transparent governance is the need of the hour.
• Intellectual sustainability: formation of a Meta university.
•Although we emphasize the urgent need for skill development, there is little done at the level where real skill development can be achieved.
Trained manpower in the form of plumbers, carpenters, electricians is hard to find. On the other hand, one hears that there is a scarcity of jobs. Why not empower polytechnics and ITIs (Industrial Training Institutes) to offer summer schools and certificate courses which give rating to the skills acquired.
In this manner, a whole segment of society that cannot afford professional college education would be trained and empowered to aid the service industry as skilled manpower. Chandigarh already has two polytechnics, one ITI and an Indo-Swiss training institute, which can be remodeled to work in this direction.
Chandigarh can offer a lesson or two to the country’s emerging towns as well as existing ones. The limited size and scale of the city and its movement network are important pointers in this direction. Having been established at the city’s initial stages these have remained constant and provide the framework for the city’s infill development. Chandigarh’s hierarchical movement distributes traffic at seven scales from intercity to intra city. Its inward-looking sectors, which can be penetrated at only predetermined points, lend an identifiable image to the town. This is further accentuated by the low rise cubic built forms in local brick, stone and concrete. Secondly, the intrinsic relationship between the grid city and its hydro and litho edges – the waterways and the mountains – are the key to its sustainable urbanism. The city’s other natural and manmade features like the Leisure Valley, the creation of the Sukhna Lake, the carefully laid out tree plantation network, the storm and waste water disposal system, are markers towards its sustainable urbanism.
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