ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the Chandigarh master plan and in particular its artificial lake in term of the hydrology of the site. At the very foothills of the grand Himalayan mountains, Chandigarh in fact sits on a deep erosion field built up through the millennia by the local hydrology—a process that is challenged by the construction of a dam across one of those rivers to make Sukhna Lake. The chapter focuses in particular on the city’s understated and underdeveloped “green belts” and its “Leisure Valley” —that can be read both as sites of recreation for the residents, as also as emergency drainage channels in the event of catastrophic flooding—as evidence of the plan’s understated graphic entanglement with erosion field character of the site that is ultimately destined, and designed, to “fail.” The chapter concludes with the suggestion that making place for a long durée imagination of the city as an ecological ruin, with no obvious design solution out of that problem, may be its more instructive legacy, an alternative reading of preservation and modernism inspired in part by the cultural ecologist Donna Haraway’s conception of “staying with the trouble.”
