'Chandigarh is the worst design': Sanjeev Sanyal on what is wrong with India's urban planning

Chandigarh is not a model city but one of the worst urban designs in the world, says economist Sanjeev Sanyal, who has called for a complete rethink of how Indian cities are built and managed. "We have an intellectual failure when it comes to cities," Sanyal said, adding, "We have been captured by this idea that Le Corbusier was a great urban designer. Chandigarh is not some sort of a great urban design plan. It is possibly in many ways the worst possible design."

Sanyal said that Indian urban planning has failed to understand that real urbanism is about managing density, not dispersing it. "Urbanism is about concentration and managing that concentration," he said in a podcast conversation with Monika Halan for Groww. "You cannot create public transport systems in a dispersed environment. It only works when you concentrate it."

He pointed to the Le Corbusier-designed Chandigarh as a case study in dysfunction. "It is effectively a subsidy scheme for civil servants and mostly retired civil servants, not even today’s civil servants. You are using up too much land to keep too few people," he said. "In most of the world, Corbusier is considered a fascist. Almost everything he's built in the world is dysfunctional."

Citing Paris, Hong Kong, and Singapore as examples of high-density success, Sanyal argued that cities should evolve continuously, not be locked into rigid master plans. "Dispersal is not urbanism," he said. "Managing congestion is urbanism."

Turning to Mumbai, he highlighted how infrastructure expansion in recent years is finally catching up with its needs. "Mumbai has so far functioned on two highways and two train lines built in the late 19th century. Now we are finally building out the metro system, the coastal road, a new airport. This could have been done years ago," he said.

He criticised India's obsession with master plans as a relic of centralised thinking. "We have a waterfall view of what master planning is. That some wise person will imagine a city, and if it all goes belly up, they'll say the implementation was bad," Sanyal said. "Cities are complex adaptive systems. You have to allow continuous change."

Using Delhi's Central Vista revamp as an example, Sanyal said adaptive reuse and modernisation must not be held hostage by nostalgia. "We needed a new Parliament. Huge opposition. What will happen to the ghost of Lutyens?" he said sarcastically. "Look at Shastri Bhavan. Why is anybody objecting to it being pulled down? There should be national celebration."

He described his own experience working in North Block: "I had one of the best rooms in North Block. My life was good. But my subordinates sat in horrible cubby holes. There were rats, monkeys, all kinds of things. It doesn't function as a modern building at all."

Sanyal said cities like Delhi must break free from the rigidity of historical design ideals and allow adaptive reuse. "Great cities move forward. Instead, what have we done in Chandigarh? We've converted Le Corbusier's flawed plan into heritage. Now you cannot evolve it further."