After Partition left East Punjab without a capital, Jawaharlal Nehru envisioned a modern city symbolising India’s future. A committee chose a site near the Shivalik hills for its central location, water supply and natural drainage. Initial plans by Albert Mayer stalled after a fatal crash, paving the way for Le Corbusier to create Chandigarh, India’s first post-Independence planned city.
In 1947 when India was partitioned, Lahore, the former capital of undivided Punjab went to the side of modern-day Pakistan. This left the Indian side of Punjab, East Punjab, without any administrative centre. The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted and promised the people of Punjab a whole new capital, untainted by the trauma of the past and looking forward into the great, bright future that lay ahead. He also famously described the coming city as a place "unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future."
In 1948, the Punjab government set up a committee under Chief Engineer P. L. Varma to find a location. The committee looked at existing towns across the state but rejected them for reasons including geopolitical exposure and an inability to absorb the large number of refugees arriving after Partition. After much mulling and brainstorming, it eventually settled on a site roughly 240 kilometres north of Delhi, at the foothills of the Shivalik range, chosen for its central position in Punjab, its water supply, and land that sloped enough to drain naturally and avoid flooding.
The American firm Mayer, Whittlessey and Glass was commissioned in 1950 to prepare the first master plan. Albert Mayer, working with Polish-American architect Matthew Nowicki, drew up a fan-shaped layout built around curving roads and self-contained "superblocks." The plan never moved past the drawing board: Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950, and Mayer subsequently withdrew from the project, leaving Chandigarh without a chief architect.
In 1951, the project was finally handed to the legendary Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who led it until his death in 1965. He worked alongside his cousin Pierre Jeanneret as site architect, and with British husband-and-wife architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who spent around three years on the project before other commitments took them elsewhere. Le Corbusier kept Mayer's broad layout but reshaped it into a rectangular grid-iron pattern for reasons entailing economy, and renamed Mayer's "urban villages" as "sectors." An Indian team, including M. N. Sharma, an Indian architect and a heritage activist, worked under the senior architects; Sharma succeeded Jeanneret as Chief Architect in 1965, becoming the first Indian to hold the post.
Le Corbusier's plan split the city into sectors, each measuring roughly 800 by 1,200 metres and covering about 250 acres, similar in scale to a traditional Indian mohalla. Every sector was designed to be self-sufficient, with its own shops, schools and open space within walking distance, connected by a road hierarchy Le Corbusier labelled V1 through V8, from arterial roads down to cycle tracks. The city plan was conceived on the metaphor of a human body: the Capitol Complex as the head, the Sector 17 city centre as the heart, green belts as the lungs, and residential and academic zones as the limbs.
Sector 1, the Capitol Complex, houses the Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and the High Court, all designed by Le Corbusier and built in exposed concrete. The High Court has been in use since March 1956; the Secretariat, completed in 1953, is 254 metres long and 42 metres high and was built to house roughly 3,000 government employees. The Legislative Assembly's chamber takes the form of a hyperbolic concrete shell only 15 centimetres thick, with a base diameter of 39.6 metres, and seats 252 members. The Capitol Complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of a wider group of Le Corbusier's architectural works. At its centre stands the Open Hand, a rotating metal sculpture that became the city's official emblem.
Chandigarh's foundation stone was laid in 1952. The capital officially shifted from Shimla to Chandigarh on 21 September 1953, and the city was formally inaugurated by India's first President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, on 7 October 1953. Sectors 1 to 30 were built between 1951 and 1976, with sectors 31 to 57 following between the 1960s and 1985.
The city was originally planned to house around 500,000 people; more than a million now live there. In 1966, Punjab was reorganised and the states of Punjab and Haryana were carved apart, with Chandigarh made a Union Territory serving as the joint capital of both. Today, Chandigarh is regularly cited among India's cleanest and greenest cities, with over a third of its area under tree cover, parks and gardens, including the Zakir Hussain Rose Garden and the Rock Garden, a sculpture park built from industrial and household waste by self-taught artist Nek Chand beside Sukhna Lake, an artificial reservoir also part of the original city plan. Chandigarh remains the reference point for later planned developments in India, including Gandhinagar and Navi Mumbai.