Jaipur

Most cities are accidents of geography. Jaipur was an act of geometry. In 1727, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II—warrior, diplomat, and obsessive astronomer—abandoned his hilltop capital at Amber because it was running out of water and designed a replacement city from scratch on the plains below. Working with architect Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, he laid out India's first planned city on a nine-square grid derived from the Vastu Shastra, with wide avenues intersecting at right angles, markets placed at major intersections, and the palace positioned according to cosmological principles. Where most cities evolve like coral reefs—accreting organically over centuries—Jaipur was engineered like a honeycomb: mathematically precise, functionally optimised, built to a blueprint.

Jai Singh's other obsession left an even stranger mark. The Jantar Mantar observatory, completed around 1734, contains the world's largest stone sundial and instruments that could track celestial positions accurate to two seconds of arc—naked-eye astronomy pushed to its physical limits. The same king who designed a city on rational grid principles also built measurement tools that rival modern equipment. Jaipur was founded by a man who believed cities and celestial mechanics both obeyed discoverable laws.

The 'Pink City' identity came later—in 1876, Maharaja Ram Singh II ordered the old city painted terracotta pink to welcome the Prince of Wales. The colour stuck, became law, and now defines Jaipur's visual brand globally. That single cosmetic decision created a signalling system as effective as any costly signal in nature: the pink announces 'this is Jaipur' the way a peacock's tail announces genetic fitness—an expensive, non-fakeable display that distinguishes the city from every competitor in a crowded tourism market. UNESCO recognised it with World Heritage status in 2019.

Modern Jaipur runs on three economies layered like geological strata. The oldest is gem cutting and jewellery manufacture—Jaipur processes over 90% of the world's cut and polished emeralds, a concentration of specialised craft knowledge that has accumulated through guild networks over centuries, functioning like a mycorrhizal network where expertise transfers between firms through apprenticeship, subcontracting, and family connection. Above that sits textiles—block printing, hand-weaving, tie-dye—feeding both domestic and export markets. The newest layer is IT services and business process outsourcing, capitalising on Jaipur's proximity to New Delhi (268 kilometres) and lower operational costs.

With 3.1 million residents and Rajasthan's highest per-capita income, Jaipur demonstrates that planned cities can evolve. The grid that Jai Singh drew in 1727 still organises the old city's traffic flow. The observatory still measures the sky. And the pink still sells. What Jaipur proves is that niche construction at the urban scale—conscious design rather than evolutionary drift—creates path dependencies that shape a city for centuries. The grid, the observatory, and the pink are all still working.