The Struggle to Contain: History of Deruralization in Chandigarh

• In Event: New Urban-Rural Relations and Resilience in Asian City-Regions: Multidisciplinary and Multi-scalar Perspectives

Abstract

While it has emerged as one of the richest and most livable cities of India, Chandigarh, over its short 60 year history, has consistently struggled with its approach to deruralization, i.e. its policies and practices on how to 'urbanize' the existing agro-rural ecologies of the area. Beginning with the modernist-Nehruvian vision of the 1950s, to the latest investment oriented master-planning of Jurong Consultants of Singapore, Chandigarh's deruralization strategies have worked their way through a taxonomy of erasure, displacement, modernization, containment, rehabilitation, ethno-preservation and sheer neglect. While outlining a history of these deruralization approaches, this paper will suggest that deruralization, more than urbanization, may be the most important issue in Chandigarh today, as in most of the cities of contemporary India.

Author

• Vikramaditya Prakash, University of Washington