Chandigarh outskirts: urban framework, identity and social utopia. An approach from the perspective of visual arts.

Abstract

The nature of urban framework is often significant about key aspects of a city’s social, historical or cultural character. The peripheral areas of a city can give us a glimpse of this nature as something in permanent construction or mutation. Interestingly enough, urban peripheries are drawing considerable attention in fields such as social studies, architecture and urban planning or visual arts. Chandigarh city, in India, provides us a case of study certainly interesting. Conceived by Le Cobusier and his team at the middle XXth century, it exemplifies the tension between planned city and non planned urban development. It exemplifies as well some key contemporary controversies about cultural identity, considered from perspectives such as social studies and urban planning. Chandigarh has also been the focus of interesting discussions from the postcolonial perspective: welcomed by many as an urban project with a strong social aim, others consider Le Corbusier experiment as an example of self-imposed foreign modernity. In this paper we will summarize a research conducted with a group of students and professors in the local university, in which visual arts were used to convey reflections about the significance and transformations of the Chandigarh periphery, in the Green Belt area. We will ground this project on the previous experience of many artists that have focused their work on city peripheries. The research will provide evidences in order to evaluate the significance and scope that the project had for the participants.