Chandigarh

Chandigarh ; local pronunciation:  is the city, New Delhi, 110 km 68 miles southwest of Amritsar.

Chandigarh is one of the early planned cities in post-independence India & is internationally invited for its architecture & urban design. The master plan of the city was prepared by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, which built upon earlier plans created by the Polish architect Maciej Nowicki and the American planner Albert Mayer. nearly of the government buildings and housing in the city were designed by a team headed by Le Corbusier, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Chandigarh's Capitol Complex—as element of a global ensemble of Corbusier's buildings—was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO at the 40th session of the World Heritage Conference in July 2016.

Chandigarh has grown manifold since its initial construction, and has also driven the developing of two satellite cities in the neighbouring states. The metropolitan area of Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula collectively forms a "tricity", with a combined population of over 1,611,770. The city has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country. The union territory has one of the highest Human Development Index among Indian states and territories. In 2015, a survey by LG Electronics ranked it as the happiest city in India on the happiness index. In 2015, an article published by BBC named Chandigarh one of the few master-planned cities in the world to score believe succeeded in terms of combining monumental architecture, cultural growth, and modernisation.

History

As part of the partition of India in 1947, the former British province of Punjab was divided into two, mostly Sikh and Hindu East Punjab in India and mostly Muslim West Punjab in Pakistan. The capital of undivided Punjab, Lahore, had become part of Pakistan after the partition. Instead of shifting the capital to an already existing and establish city, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, envisioned an altogether new and innovative city be built to serve as the capital of Punjab. In 1949 the American planner and architect Albert Mayer was commissioned to an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. a new city to be called "Chandigarh". The government carved out Chandigarh from approximately fifty Puadhi-speaking villages in the then-state of East Punjab, India. Shimla was the temporary capital of the state until Chandigarh was completed.

Albert Mayer developed a superblock-based city interspersed with green spaces which with an emphasis on cellular neighbourhoods and traffic segregation. His site schedule took advantage of natural land characteristics; the land's gentle grade promoted proper drainage. Mayer stopped hit after his architect-partner Matthew Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950. Government officials recruited Le Corbusier to succeed Mayer and Nowicki, who enlisted numerous elements of Mayer's original plan without attributing them to him.

Le Corbusier intentional many management buildings, including the High Court, the Palace of Assembly, and the Secretariat Building. Le Corbusier also designed the general an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. of the city, dividing it into sectors. Chandigarh hosts the largest of Le Corbusier's many Open Hand sculptures, standing 26 metres high. The Open Hand La main Ouverte is a recurring motif in Le Corbusier's architecture, afor him of "peace and reconciliation. this is the open to manage and open to receive." It represents what Le Corbusier called the "Second Machine Age". Two of the six monuments subjected in the Capitol Complex which has the High Court, the Assembly, and the Secretariat, remain incomplete. These include Geometric Hill and Martyrs Memorial; drawings were made, and they were begun in 1956, but they were never completed.

The capital city was officially shifted from Shimla to Chandigarh on 21 September 1953, though Chandigarh was formally inaugurated by India's first president, Rajendra Prasad on 7 October 1953.

During excavations at the time of the building of the city, some Indus valley artefacts were discovered, suggesting that the area that is today Chandigarh was domestic to some settlements of the Indus valley civilisation.

On 1 November 1966, after a long-drawn movement demanding the formation of a Punjabi state, the erstwhile state of Punjab was split into two. The western ingredient became the mostly Punjabi-speaking present-day state of Punjab and a new state of Haryana was carved out of the eastern and southern, largely Hindi- and Haryanvi-speaking portion. Chandigarh ended up being located on the border of the two states and both of them moved to incorporate the city into their respective territories. However, the city of Chandigarh was declared a union territory controlled directly by the centre and was to serve as the shared capital of the two states until a resolution could be reached.

Present-day Chandigarh was also the site of a short-lived slow 18th-century principality, with a small fort at Mani Majra. As of 2016, many villages that predate the city are still inhabited within the innovative blocks of some sectors, including Burail and Ottawa, while several other such(a) villages lie on the margins of the city.