The city beautiful Chandigarh originated in 1950 in the foothills of Shivalik ranges. Geographically city is situated in Northern part of India and ideally located between it’s parent states i.e. Punjab and Haryana. Chandigarh largely owes to the late Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru who initiated this ambitious project with the famous lines, “Let this be a new town symbolic of the freedom of India. Unfettered by the traditions of the past……..an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.” With this optimistic note the Project Chandigarh started and is still one of the most significant urban project of the post war period arise in this part of the world.
Chandigarh, actually was conceived in the period of crisis and turbulence, when the nation was suffering the partition and post independence confusions and the earlier capital of the joint Punjab, Lahore gone to Pakistan after partition in 1947 then the need of a new capital arose. Finally a committee was appointed by the Punjab Government in 1948 under the chairmanship of chief architect Mr. P.L. Verma for the construction of this capital city, committee carefully examined all the factors of building a high caliber city with necessary potential such as military vulnerability, drinking water, climatic conditions etc. Finally the site chosen was in the shape of the Farms and two seasonal rivers with a population of about 9000 scattered in 24 villages. After selecting the site a master plan of the city was prepared by an American firm (Mayor, Whittleslay, Glass & Nowicki) but the sudden demise of Nowicki Chandigarh project got it’s first set back as the team resisted to work further on the project. Then again the committee was sent abroad to select the team for the completion of the project. In 1951, the committee appointed the greatest architect of our time Le Corbusier, who was prolific in his contribution to urban design theory since 1920. But not until this time being given the opportunity for the successful realization of his ideas working with Le Corbuseir on the design on city were British architects Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, & Pierre Jeanneret. The new appointed team worked on the master plan under the leadership of great French architect Le Corbusier. The team decided to build city in two phases.
First phase covering 9000 acres of land in the shape 29 distinct sectors. On the whole city was designed to rehabilitate population of five lac in 15,000 acres of land in 46 number of sectors. Each consists of 800 X 1200 meters of land. The city designer emphasized upon various factors while designing the city such as pollution, tourism, traffic etc. Although initially the city roads were distinguished in seven categories naming V’s i.e. V1, V2, V3, V4, V5, V6, V7. Taking care of environmental factors the city was designed in the manner in which railway station & High ways didn’t intercepted with the city environment..