Chandigarh

Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh from scratch in the 1950s, making it the only major Indian city planned by a single architect—and one of the few cities anywhere built on a modernist theory of how humans should live. The Swiss-French architect imposed a grid system, separated vehicle and pedestrian traffic, organized the city into self-contained sectors, and crowned it with monumental government buildings in raw concrete. The result is a city that works exactly as planned, which is both its strength and its limitation.

Chandigarh serves as the shared capital of two Indian states—Punjab and Haryana—while being governed as a Union Territory directly by the central government. This triple identity creates a bureaucratic metabolism unlike any other Indian city: three governments, three budgets, three sets of demands on one piece of planned infrastructure. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary after Punjab's partition in 1966 but has persisted for decades, proving that temporary political arrangements in India tend to become permanent.

Economically, Chandigarh consistently ranks among India's highest per-capita income cities. The IT sector has grown significantly, with Infosys, TCS, and other tech firms establishing campuses in the adjacent satellite cities of Mohali and Panchkula. Educational institutions—including Panjab University and the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education—anchor a knowledge economy. Property values rank among the highest outside India's metros.

Chandigarh's planned perfection creates a paradox: the city works beautifully within its designed boundaries but cannot grow beyond them without breaking the plan. Population pressure pushes development into unplanned peripheries that violate every principle Le Corbusier encoded. The result is a planned core surrounded by organic chaos—a biological metaphor for what happens when rigid design meets demographic reality.