Casablanca Chandigarh: A Report on Modernization

Introduction

Casablanca and Chandigarh are very different cities. The area which is today Casablanca was settled since antiquity by Berbers, Phoenicians, Romans and later Portuguese.

From 1910 the French took control, renovating and ­building the ancient city destined to become Morocco’s economic capital. Chandigarh is a completely new city, whose construction took place in the years following India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The ­historical conditions that marked the planning of the vast new urban extensions in the case of Casablanca, and the birth of a new capital in the case of Chandigarh, form the backdrop of our investigation. On the one hand, the French Protectorate Administration sought to convey a process of frenetic transformation in planning for a nation on the verge of becoming independent. This was accompanied by the commissioning of the talented and ex­ perienced planner Michel Écochard and by the selection of Casablanca, a town of some 40,000 inhabitants, to ­become the nation’s most prominent city. On the other hand, the need for a new Punjabi capital was a sign of the ­turmoil unleashed by Partition, the fraught process by which India and Pakistan became independent nations.

If the creation of Indian Punjab, bordering Pakistan and a cradle of the Sikh faith, demonstrated the new nation’s freedom from the yoke of colonial rule, giving the state Chandigarh as a new capital was an example of the political skill and resolve of ­independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose indispensable leadership surfaces repeatedly in the narrative of this book.

Thus, while Casablanca represents an extreme example of a colonial government attempting to use urban improvement as a tool to avoid permanent exclusion from the region, Chandigarh demonstrates the organizational and technical capacity of a ­renewed and independent India.

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1. Negotiating Modernism Casablanca and Chandigarh are today lively and dynamic modern cities. Although developed under very different political and economic circumstances, there are intriguing parallels between the two. Mostly planned in the early 1950s, the cities’ modern buildings and neighbourhoods have proven capable of sustaining several decades of changing living standards. While homes have been re­ furbished, dwellings extended and public structures transformed, the civic and communal qualities embedded in the original urban design have, for the most part, been maintained.

Our interest in Casablanca and Chandigarh first emerged when we noticed both cities’ inherent strength to act as perennial urban frameworks that could be nego­ tiated and re-negotiated by multiple generations of inhabitants. Visiting the cities regularly over the past years, we were amazed by their capacity to accommodate—more than six decades after their initial planning—changing housing aspirations, needs and practices with great ease.

Michel Écochard’s horizontal neighbourhoods have experienced an enormous vertical densification but continue to offer solid foundations for private and public life in Casablanca. In Chandigarh, a set of architectural controls, established by the time the second phase of urban expansion began, has enabled usage modifications to the original housing typologies while maintaining their capacity to contribute aesthetically and typologically to the collective urban realm. In contradistinction to the many modern neighbourhoods built in Europe in the years after World War II, in Casablanca and Chandigarh modern ­architecture and urbanism seem to have responded much better to changes in lifestyles and to the transformations of the social classes they intended to accommodate. ­Success can be measured in the inhabitants’ ability to implement active and positive adaptations in order to take full advantage of the potential within their urban structures.

This capacity for accommodation raised awareness about the importance of the cities’ everyday urban fabrics

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and the way these were conceived, planned and built.

But in the planning of Casablanca and Chandigarh, we also found a particular faculty of modern architecture and urbanism—too often forgotten in our canonical analyses— firmly embedded: a built-in capacity to constantly nego­ tiate the changing practices of modern life.

Another aspect worth noting lies in the fact that the modern buildings and neighbourhoods of these cities were not the work of single author, or artistic genius, though in the case of the Punjabi capital Le Corbusier’s imprint overshadowed that of any other contributor.

The more we studied the biographies of Casablanca and Chandigarh, the more we realized that these were collective œuvre that not only implied urban planners and architects, but also a large diversity of other actors including international agencies, politicians, sociologists, builders, citizens, brick layers, carpenters and many more. All of these actors, often in conflict with one another, entered a different set of negotiations that defined the processes involved in the planning, design and construction of the two cities. In other words, modern urbanism in Casablanca and Chandigarh is not a universal recipe that has been applied to these specific locations, but is rather the result of elaborate encounters, exchanges and cooperation between various transnational and local actors. The ways that these actors negotiated varying government policies, design approaches and construction methods into a complex built environment have defined the particular articulations of modern urbanism in Casablanca and Chandigarh.

2. A New World Order It is impossible to consider the two urban œuvres that are central in this book without taking into account the international tension of the world in which they came into being. The post-war world witnessed the winding down of many conflicts and saw the beginnings of two realities that would shape the coming decades: the process of decolonization and the Cold War. This new geopolitical

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constellation strongly influenced the cities’ planning and design strategies, which became obvious vectors for political expression and social ideas of the age.

2.1 Decolonization Within Europe’s overseas empires, India and Morocco were two of the numerous colonies that, from 1945 onward, progressively loosened their imperial ties. Methods ranged from fierce liberation struggles to elaborate processes of peaceful handover.1 Colonial regimes, territories and dependencies were transformed into indigenously based nation-states. As old empires were dismantled, alliances among young nations established themselves in parts of the world that for centuries had been considered peripheral by the West. In everyday practice, decolonization was a combination of practices played out in council rooms, acted out in street protests and fought over in mountains and deserts.

The effects of decolonization were tremendous.

For countries like India the newly gained independence prompted at least as many concerns as it did oppor­ tunities. The postcolonial task was Herculean: New governments inherited insufficient health and educational ­provisions, high unemployment, housing shortages and dilapidated urban neighbourhoods. For some new nations this task far exceeded available administrative, economic and technical capacities. In this situation, new types of dependence on industrialized nations—often their former colonizers—were hard to avoid.2 For the former ­colonial powers, decolonization was to be a lesson about loss, as access to raw materials and export markets dis­ appeared, and international status changed proportionally to the shrinking of territory.

2.2 Subjects “Talk Back” to Planners Beyond doubt the most significant step in the process of decolonization was the heightened responsiveness among colonial administrators and experts, including urban planners, to the voice of their colonial subjects.

The British Empire had long been experiencing waves of

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Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–1975 (London: ­Hodder Education, 2008).

2 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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civil ­disobedience, strikes and urban riots. In India in the 1920s, Gandhi promoted a boycott of British goods and imported cloth in favour of homespun cotton, thus attacking the core of the Empire’s exploitative relationship with his country’s textile industry. In 1930 he organized the Salt March, a campaign of tax resistance and non-­violent protest against the British salt monopoly. In the mid-1930s large-scale strikes took place in ports, sugar plantations and oil fields in Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad (British West Indies), but also in Northern ­Rhodesia, in Mombasa, in Dar el Salaam and in the Gold Coast, workers raised their voices. The French Empire saw the emergence of similar nationalist counter-voices in the 1930s, such as the Koutlat and Taifa organizations in the Protectorate of Morocco.3 The swell of these colonized voices “talking back” would affect and alter urban planning strategies. By the early 1940s the British Secretary of State for the Colonies linked the concept of “development,” a word sometimes used to describe investment in the colonies intended to produce a return to British interests, with the word “welfare.”4 This resulted in the drafting of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which introduced the use of the colonial nation’s budget—the taxes collected from British citizens—not for projects in the colonies ­intended to produce profits, but rather for furnishing ­municipal water supplies, building schools and providing low-cost housing to workers.

The French equivalent came in the form of the postwar Fonds d’Investissement et de Développement Économique et Social. This development fund was the result of the 1944 Brazzaville Conference, where meetings about the need to turn a new page and reformulate the principles of the French Empire were held between French colonial officials. There was high-minded talk ranging from urban planning “at the service of people,” to even loftier aspirations like “improvements in the conditions of indigenous peoples” and “a command and planned economy.” Equally noteworthy: The conference’s seasoned colonial officials, many with long experience in planning,

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John P. Halstead, Rebirth of a ­Nation. The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism, 1912– 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

4 Frederick Cooper, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: the Examples of British and French Africa,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, no. 10 (January 2004): 20.

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apparently spared themselves the task of explaining how these expensive reforms were to be achieved.5 The general strike in Senegal in January–February 1946 illustrated that a working class already existed and it was capable of acting. French officials assumed they could maintain control and authority if they devised a successful way of managing the presence of this working class. To avoid further proletarianization, providing decent housing conditions in the colonies became crucial.6 2.3 Cold War and Non-Alignment The process of decolonization took place at the outset of the Cold War, which divided the world into the Western Bloc, formed by the United States and the allies of NATO, and the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Both Blocs were driven by the effort to enlarge their respective spheres of ideo­ logical and political influence as well as their access to markets and natural resources. Above all, Odd Arne Westad argues, it was a competition over two concepts of modernity, one socialist, one capitalist, both claiming universal validity.7 Since the newly decolonized nations did not belong to either of the two Blocs, their existence ­constituted a strategic and ideological vacuum.

The Eastern and Western Blocs started competing heavily for influence. With economic, cultural and tech­ nical means they tried to discourage specific countries and whole regions from falling into the orbit of the opposite Bloc, claiming that they had a moral duty to support young nations by promoting their respective lifestyles and their related political ideologies. The Third World became the playing field of the intense foreign policy agendas of both East and West during the Cold War. At the 1955 Bandung Conference, a large number of newly independent nations, along with many seeking that status, proclaimed their desire to remain independent of the ideologies of both East and West and suggested instead a new Afro-Asian solidarity. In 1961 this would eventually lead to the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade. Leaders of five nations, including

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Ibid., 23.

Ibid., 25.

7 Westad, The Global Cold War. Also see Vikramāditya Prakāsh, “Epilogue: Third World Modernism, or Just Modernism: towards a cosmopolitan reading of modernism,” Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, ed.

Duanfang Lu (London and New York, Routledge, 2011), 255-270.

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I­ ndia’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, claimed that the nations of the developing world should follow a path of modernization that was different from that of the Eastern and Western Blocs. They held that it was possible to develop their societies while remaining independent from the two Blocs. Modernity, for much of the decolonizing world, was defined as non-alignment.

3. Modernization, Development and Urban Planning 3.1 Modernization Liberation struggles, as well as decolonization, brought a heightened awareness of the colonizer’s responsibility to address the symbolic, material and welfare needs of the local people. This had not been a common concern for most colonial regimes. As urban planner Michel Écochard recalled: “When I arrived in Morocco … one only worked for the colons … during almost 35 years they had forgotten about the Moroccans.”8 The result of this neglect was insufficient educational and health-care institutions, housing shortages and overcrowded cities.

Policy-makers from both Eastern and Western Blocs held that further modernization was the response to these challenges. They believed in the existence of a linear path from tradition to modernity that every society could, and should, take. In order to become modern, one would have to discard tradition and embrace rational, objective—that is to say ideology-free—norms and values. Modernization was believed to bring change and progress, and above all solve the existing problems of Third World cities and rural areas. According to Cold War logic, the decolonizing world was to become the competitive arena between the capitalist and socialist models of modernization.

3.2 Development Decolonization gave the concept of development new meaning, linking it to the ideal of sovereignty, the possibility of converting subjects into citizens and the pursuit of economic development for social justice. To further the

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8

Michel Écochard, “L’urbanisme dans les pays en voie de développement,” Centre de formation des experts de la cooperation technique internationale, fifth session (November 1959–February 1960).

Author’s translation.

process of modernization, already-modern nations had a duty to help backward societies reach a level of development from which modernization could begin. Consequently, economic and technical aid played a central role in the modernization scheme, making foreign involvement in the Third World appear altruistic or philanthropic. From the latter half of the 1940s, the United Nations (UN), the United States government and philanthropic non-governmental organizations like the Ford Foundation (acting “as a nonofficial extension of U.S. policy”) began to invest huge amounts of money in Third World countries to ­encourage economic growth and thus jump-start their ­modernization.9 A new world order was in the making. From 1945 new states joined the UN as the colonial empires crumbled, swelling UN ranks. The extension of political sovereignty to millions of non-Europeans ushered in a new era of development. “Development-aid” politics, as it came to be called, promised to help those in need and establish Western norms of modernity in “backward” parts of the world.

In many cases, “deep cultural biases … conditioned U.S. attitudes toward non-Western societies and leaders— attitudes that abounded with dismissive stereotypes regarding the presumably effete, emotional, unstable, and, above all, inferior nature of Third World peoples.”10 Thus, one had to win “hearts and minds” for the cause of modernity. This became one of the central goals of American foreign policy—and was carried out via cultural exchanges, films, exhibitions and sports events.

The need or desire for modernization, along with the assumption that every developing nation wanted to become a Western-style nation-state, was never truly questioned. The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, a fervent supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), criticized this attitude: “There is a tendency to take for granted that the type of civilization seen in the USA today—which is indeed the fullest development yet seen of a particular social and technological trend—represents the future for all societies that have not yet reached the USA level.

Even those who look beyond the present scene in the USA

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Gary R. Hess, “Waging the Cold War in the Third World: The Foundations and the Challenges of Development,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed.

Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 319–339.

Other development agencies were established alongside the UN such as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which was formed in 1945 and developed together with sister organizations into the World Bank Group. See: Akira Iriye, Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

10 Robert J. McMahon, “Introduction: The Challenge of the Third World,” in Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945, ed. Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 1–14.

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tend to believe that it is at least a necessary stage in the evolution of societies, and that the countries that today are called underdeveloped must pass through a stage in which their society and urban scene will resemble that of the USA today. This view is surely far too simplistic.”11 By the mid-1950s the Soviet Union entered into the international development arena. Third World interest in the Soviet path to modernity was strong, fostered by the generosity with which the USSR offered credit, tools and experts; the willingness of those experts to engage face-to-face with local citizens; and Soviet anti-colonial rhetoric.12 Perspectives on development were, however, not the exclusive domain of countries or organizations from the Western or Eastern Bloc. The Global South developed its own perspectives on development. In India, for instance, the Indian National Congress formed a National Planning Committee in 1938, under the leadership of Nehru, to examine the current conditions in the nation and devise plans for the country’s development. In the last years of the Second World War, several particularly significant plans were generated domestically, most notably the Bombay Plan and the People’s Plan. The Bombay Plan, for one, stressed the development of large-scale industry.

After independence Nehru noted that national development required consideration of the built environment: “We are on the eve of big developmental changes in India.

Industries are growing up. Community Projects and ­National Extension Schemes are attacking the static village. In considering these developments we must always keep in view housing.”13 3.3 Planning the Urban: Casablanca and Chandigarh National planning for modernization was considered the correct and hopeful way for emerging and young nations to make progress and improve the welfare of their peoples.

Urban planning was inevitably a part of comprehensive national planning. For many urban planners this implied that they started to work within a transnational world in which urban planning and geopolitical concerns were increasingly paired. Transnational development aid became, in various

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Nathan J. Citino, “Non-Alignment as Modernity: U.S.-Egyptian Relations in the Context of Arab Development Debates” (paper presented at the European Institute at Columbia University, New York, 13 February 2009), http://hdl.handle. net/10022/AC:P:9605 (accessed 10 February 2014).

12 See: Maxim Matusevich, Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007); Maxim Matusevich, No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian-Soviet Relations, 1960–1991 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003); C ­ onstantin Katsakioris, “Soviet Lessons for Arab Modernization: Soviet Educational Aid to Arab Countries after 1956,” Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (2010): 85–106.

13 Jawaharlal Nehru, opening statement, in International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing, New Delhi, 20th January to 5th March, 1954: Exhibition Souvenir (New Delhi: Ministry of Works, Housing and Supply, Government of India, 1954), 7.

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ways and under various conditions, the new paradigm for urban planners and architects. They were sent on missions, offered expert advice to governments and designed new buildings, neighbourhoods and cities.

Different programs would support this new transnational form of urban planning. The United States, for instance, launched the 1947 Marshall Plan mainly to assist Europe’s economic recovery, but in several instances it extended development aid to the continent’s overseas territories as well. Some European-administered nations, like the Protectorate of Morocco, became eligible for funds.14 The US argued for this aid in this 1950 Statement on North Africa: “Our policy has been to encourage the French on all appropriate occasions to put forward a program of political, economic and social reforms which would lessen the resentment of the natives toward France and would assure their gradual evolution toward self-government.

We believe, however, that the strength of France depends in no small measure on the peaceful and voluntary integration of Morocco into the French Union, and that France is the country best suited to have international respon­ sibility for Morocco. We have therefore avoided putting pressure on France by giving aid and comfort to the ­natives directly, although we maintain open contact with them and consider their friendship and good will very important.”15 In 1947, the availability of $1.1 billion under the ­Marshall Plan helped persuade French Resident General Eirik Labonne to invite French architect and urban planner Michel Écochard to revise the existing urban planning approach for Morocco, naming him the director of the Service de l’urbanisme and endowing him with “virtually dictatorial powers and … a generous budget.”16 With an acclaimed team of French architects and planners at his disposal, Écochard was instructed to study the urban structure of Morocco and the problems of ­informal housing settlements—the so-called bidonvilles.

He was asked to devise a new approach for the planning and development of Morrocan cities. This method would

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A. Waterston, Planning in Morocco: Organization and Implementation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), 7.

15 United States Department of State, Foreign relations of the United States, 1950, The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, ed. Fredrick ­A andahl and William Z. Slany, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/ cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?id=FRUS. FRUS1950v05 (accessed 25 July 2013).

16 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 225.

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differ from all previous approaches in that it took much greater care in accounting for the needs of the local population. Écochard would develop an urban planning approach that closely examined and incorporated private and communal dwelling practices of the nation’s indigenous populations. Casablanca would become the prime test site for this new approach.

In India it was not the colonizer but the formerly colonized that took the initiative for a new development program. The main driving force of decolonization, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party, invited American urban planner and activist Albert Mayer to provide development aid. Mayer, who as a US Army engineer served in India during World War II, became very interested in Indian culture and had remained in the country. In 1945 he was invited to meet Jawaharlal Nehru, recently released from political incarceration, to discuss the impending social, political and economic problems that India was likely to face following her independence.17 Drawing from his experience in the United States, he proposed that Nehru consider the creation of model villages as a means of tackling these issues. Mayer designed a pilot development project in rural Etawah. An integral component of Mayer’s planning ­approach was what he came to call “inner democratization.”

Breaking down India’s “old, conservative and authoritarian” system, Mayer and Nehru endeavoured to develop an ­approach of urban planning in which decision-making was shared by every Etawah project worker and inhabitant of the community.18 They encouraged the use of village-wide meetings and discussions where all were welcome to voice their concerns and views. This bypass of traditional power bases that had for so long been a central organizing force of daily life grafted a new, democratic vein onto the Indian political imagination. In various ways this ­budding notion of a progressive and democratic society— neither imitation of the West nor return to tradition, but an entirely Indian modernity—would come to inform the urban planning of Chandigarh.19 The atmosphere in post-­ independence India remained highly charged. The partition of India in 1947 and the resulting birth of ­Pakistan

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Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 80.

18 Albert Mayer, Pilot Project India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1959), 87–131.

19 In the living quarters of the city of Chandigarh called superblocks, Mayer made a conscious effort to include an intermixture of plot sizes and incomes. In creating the city in such a way, Mayer hoped that the built environment would create a community of “satisfactory inter­ relationships, and satisfactory individual lives and moments; a framework which will take account of groups in their corporate activity, whether in industry, in school, in political meetings, in buses, at home; and of the individual’s need for serenity, for aloofness sometimes, for facing himself.” Albert Mayer, “Report on Master Plan of the New Punjab Capital,” quoted in Ikuno Naka, “The Village and the City: Imagining and Building Post-Independence India” (Honors Thesis Collection, Wellesley ­College, 2012), 13.

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­ rovoked mass migrations, violence, famine and an oblitp eration of many local identities. At the same time, however, it prodded India’s political parties and the country’s ­sophisticated intelligentsia into expressing their new commitment to freedom and democracy through, among other things, architecture. The birth of Chandigarh, Indian Punjab’s new capital designed by Le Corbusier and his team—­Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B. Drew and E. Maxwell Fry— became the banner for a richer definition of the nation and its political aspirations.

4. A Janus-Faced Ambition In this book we document the intriguing saga of two cities that were part of this complex and multi-layered post-­ Second World War era. In a world marked by decolonization and Cold War politics, Casablanca and Chandigarh appear simultaneously as exponents of and countercurrents to modernization and development perspectives. Against this background our ambition in this book becomes ­Janus-faced: we want to contribute to an alternative his­ toriographic perspective on post-war urbanism, and to add to reflection on the impact transnational practice had on the roles, methods and instruments of designers and planners.

The three chapters follow these trajectories, mapping the historical processes intertwined with the agents of these processes and the emerging actors. The chapters are organized thematically, originating from a historic encounter that offers a rationale for the flow of the book’s contents. Opening with a view into the Non-Aligned ­Movement’s 1961 conference in Belgrade, the first ­chapter introduces the political context of independence movements and the emergence of alternative powers.

The second chapter provides an in-depth examination of the planning and building of Casablanca and Chandigarh.

The narrative develops by means of three investigative tools firmly tied to the experience in loco: the exploration and surveying of the territory; large-scale planning

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and governance over its management; and the design of the civic fabric. The chapter ultimately lends value to ­planning tools such as the CIAM Grid, thus cementing the 1953 CIAM 9 conference in Aix-en-Provence as its point of reference. The third chapter reflects on the transnational aspects of modern planning in non-Western ­regions; these are introduced by the UN international conference on technical assistance and housing hosted by the Indian government in New Delhi in 1954. A series of actors’ portraits punctuate the narrative scenario of the book. These short entries highlight these actors’ direct involvement in the changes of planning practices after the Second World War and in the internationalization of the profession. They are written from the perspective of the current debate on modernization in the process of decolonization.

Additional literature and sources appear in a list of further reading, whose organization follows the same structure as the three chapters of the book. Our previous research and writings form the backbone of this publication.

The book opens with two photographic portfolios, one conceived by Yto Barrada for Casablanca and the other

by Takashi Homma for Chandigarh. Each in their own way, these photographers offer a critical interpretation on the evolution and functioning of the two cities. Yto Barrada’s pictures are full of the appropriations and transformations that inhabitants have made in the urban space of Casablanca. Her photographs narrate the many interventions, symbols and signs that they have left, ­without ever bringing the inhabitants themselves into the spotlight. In the case of Takashi Homma, citizens of Chandigarh play the main role. Against the backdrop of what could be an informal city anywhere in the world, his photographs celebrate the modern city without indulging its monumental aspects. They illustrate how the ­private and collective built structures of Chandigarh continue to function as a powerful base for everyday life and invite a rich palette of appropriations reinforcing the “Indian-ness” of the contemporary city.

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4.1 Alternative Histories The book’s prime objective is to place itself within a broader historic environment, seeking to reassess the impact of colonialism and decolonization on various ­cultural practices, an academic pursuit known in recent years as “postcolonial studies.” Postcolonial studies came later to the Francophone world than to the Anglophone, probably because of the trauma associated with much of French decolonization.20 Gérard Noiriel has used the phrase “collective amnesia” to denote the suspicious absence of issues such as colonial immigration from French historiography.21 Similarly, “colonial amnesia” has been used pointedly to describe the public and historiographic low profile of colonial history in France.22 Kristin Ross speaks of “keeping … two stories apart” (that of modern France and that of colonialism) as the “forgetting one of the stories or for relegating it to a different time frame.”23 Recently postcolonial theory and history have risen to prominence in the academy, together exploring the diversity and complexity of the Francophone world during and after the colonial period. A narrative once deemed margin­ally relevant and somehow isolated from French history is coming to be perceived as intrinsic to and insepa­ rable from it. In late 1990s French scholars started rethink­ ing the impact of colonial history. A good example is the pivotal study edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and ­Sandrine Lemaire, La fracture postcoloniale : La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial.24 Drawing on a diverse range of cultural, social and political practices, such as literary and theoretical publications, film, print media and exhibits, these investigations deal with issues of migra­ tion, exile, racism, hybridity, alterity, globalization and the way in which all of these impact the making, unmaking and remaking of the decolonized and postcolonial world.

Scholarship on colonial North Africa in the fields of architecture and urbanism has equally increased.25 The Indian scholarly research in the field has been directly influenced by the postcolonial discourse produced by the seminal works of theorists who published in English, either in United States or in India. While the contributions

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It is important to notice that Francophone anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Édouard Glissant, together with post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida, have influenced postcolonial theorists including Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young. For this historiographical trend, see Alice L. Conklin and Julia Clancy-Smith, “Introduction: Writing Colonial Histories,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (2004): 497–505, as well as the other articles in this special issue.

21 Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

22 See: Anne Donadey, “Between Amnesia and Anamnesis: Re-Membering the Fractures of Colonial History,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23 (Winter 1999): 111–116. Also see Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell ­University Press, 2006), especially “Forgetting French Algeria,” 101–135, and Benoit de L’Estoile, “L’oubli de l’héritage colonial,” Le débat, no. 147 (November– December 2007): 91–99.

23 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 8–9.

24 See: Pascal Blanchard et al., La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’ héritage colonial (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2005) and Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009). Other examples are Olivier G. Le Cour, Coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l’état colonial (Paris: A. Fayard, 2006) and Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traites négrières : éssai d’histoire globale (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).

A new chapter is emerging in the field of postcolonial studies: Kamal Salhi, ed., Francophone Post-­ Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays (London: Arnold, 2003).

25 Among the most prominent studies, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: 20

are innumerable, it is striking that those which have broken ground and formulated a critical viewpoint both ­politically and culturally recognized the intellectual values embedded in Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946). It is ­undeniable that, once freed from incarceration and determined to pursue the vision and political actions that could change the destiny of the millenary “Mother India,” ­Nehru’s question “The discovery of India—what have I discovered?” which opens the “Epilogue” is all but rhetorical.

Through more than five hundred pages Nehru’s analysis of India remained lucid and profound enough to establish nationalism as the political watershed for modern India, and the foundation of his political ideology. Looking at the main figures of post-Britain modern Indian history and to the core question of Gandhi’s critique of civil society vis-à-vis Nehru’s position situating nationalism within state ideology, scholars such as Partha ­Chatterjee,26 earlier, and Gyan Prakash,27 in more recent years, have positioned their thinking along a continuum of Nehru’s idea of a ­national state. This fosters more in-depth understanding of some of the historical and cultural peculiarities of ­Indian nationhood that influence our understanding of how industrialization/modernization, science and education became the basis for a new society and its politics.

Chatterjee’s 1986 book, which validates political ­revolution within the discontinuities encountered in the affirmation of a nationalist thought, is rooted in the recognition of a non-linear history, not unlike Göran Therborn’s reading of entangled modernities as interactions.28 In this way, the transformations in planning and building Indian society after 1947 define fledgling architecture as a pivotal process. The construction of Chandigarh represented the most convincing example, far from being unique, of a moment of arrival in the encountering of cultural independence and internationalism.29 This book aims to foster fresh discussions on modern urbanism as rooted in multiple locations in the Global South and North, and to develop visions of modernism that engage local particularity with the universal—and in the process decentre that universal. Today there is a growing

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Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb, Casablanca: Mythes et figures d’une aventure urbaine (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2003); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nezar ­AlSayyad, ed., Forms of Dominance on the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992); Nezar AlSayyad, Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism (London: Routledge, 2001); Stacy E. Holden, “When It Pays to Be Medieval: Historic Preservation as a Colonial Policy in the Medina of Fez, 1912-1932,” The Journal of the Historical Society 6, no. 2 (June 2006): 297–316; and Brian ­McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

26 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Tokyo: Zed Books, 1986).

27 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

28 Göran Therborn, “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 3 (2003): ­293–305. Also see Carl Niekerk, ­“Rethinking a Problematic Con­ stellation: Postcolonialism and its Germanic Contexts (Pramoedya Ananta Toer/Multatuli),” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23, no. 1–2 (2003): 58-69.

29 The myth of Chandigarh as the œuvre of the solo architect, namely Le Corbusier, has encountered more longevity than one might expect considering the reframing of Indian modern history. A few titles of recent published books provide evidence of this long-lasting historiographic cage: Rémi Papillault, Chandigarh et Le Corbusier : creation d’une ville en Inde

interest in modern architecture and cities from the Global South. Yet the discourse on modernism continues, to a large extent, to locate avant-garde developments in Europe and North America from which they “spread” to the rest of the world. Because modernism has been perceived as a quintessentially European and North-American movement, all other expressions have tended to be dismissed as “derivative” or “mimicry”—a syndrome that Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “being relegated to the waiting room of history.”30 Such asymmetries have found their way into the canons of architectural and urban history, which ascribe universal value to Euro-American modernism. This viewpoint has been codified and packaged into a general theory of modern urbanism and printed in textbooks, essays and articles. While the triumphalist discourse of modernism has undergone critical scrutiny in recent years, modern urbanism in the Global South remains stuck in the discourses of centre and periphery, of the original model and the copy or of modernity and tradition.

By developing an approach that validates the dis­ tinctive modern urbanism and urbanity of the Global South, this book endeavors to decentre this dominant theme.

We intend to contribute to a new geography of the modern city attentive to the entangled multiplicities—or inherent mutual appraisal and trans-border interaction—of modern urbanism.

The book forges an amended concept of the avantgarde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were already a trans­ national phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory traditions and practices developed by a variety of cultures around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and South America. It suggests that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only when conceptualized beyond the limitations of a Euro-­American focus.

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(Toulouse: Poïesis-AERA, 2011); Bärbel Högner, with contributions

by Clemens Kroll, Arthur Rüegg, Arno Lederer and a conversation with M. N. Sharma, Chandigarh: living with Le Corbusier (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2010); and Hasan-­ Uddin Khan with Julian Beinart and Charles Correa, eds., Le Corbusier Chandigarh and the Modern City: Insights into the Iconic City Sixty Years Later (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2009).

30 Dipesh Chakrabarty quoted in Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” with responses by Alistair Wright, ­Rebecca M. Brown, Saloni Mathur and Ajay Sinha, The Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–574.

4.2 Innovative Roles, Instruments and Approaches How Casablanca and Chandigarh, along with other locations in the Global South, have contributed to expertise in modern urban planning and architecture remains a point of discussion. Many scholars claim to regret that urban planners and architects in the early years of independence did not go beyond existing approaches and formulas.

In 1977 Anthony King noted that planning approaches for the colonial and postcolonial world were still clearly a process of “exporting” by the West, rather than a new process of “importing” by local actors in response to specific national needs.31 In 1998 Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait furthered the notion of a dual process of diffusion in ­Urbanism: Imported or Exported?.32 They recognized that even though (neo-) colonialism prevailed in the attitude of urban planners, local actors offered moderate negotiations that led to a different set of urban outcomes.

In a set of recent articles Stephen Ward illuminates that the possibility of these negotiations depended strongly on the “power relationship” between countries ranging from “authoritarian” approaches in which external dominance remained complete, to more “contested” variants in which there was noticeable indigenous negotiation.33 In this book we suggest that the experiences of ­Casablanca and Chandigarh, embedded in the decolonizing and Cold War world, engendered urban planning and architectural design knowledge in its own right. We believe that the many experiences in the Global South must be read on their own terms, as exponents of a period of transnational social and spatial experimentation. By borrowing, imitating and modifying approaches, perspectives among the members of this transnational community generated a planning and design expertise with its own particular characteristics.34 We hold that the encounter with different contexts in the Global South altered the thinking and practice of modern urbanism and architecture during the post-war period. Modern urban and architectural projects have acted as “contact zones”: “spaces in which transculturation takes place—where two different cultures meet and

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King published his 1977 reflections as Anthony D. King, “Exporting Planning: The Colonial and NeoColonial Experience,” in Gordon E. Cherry, Shaping an Urban World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

32 The results of the 1998 seminar were published in Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait, Urbanism: Imported or Exported? (Chichester, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003).

33 Stephen V. Ward, “Transnational Planners in a Post-colonial World,” in Patsy Healey and Robert Upton, Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 47–72.

34 Stephen V. Ward, “The international diffusion of planning: A review and a Canadian case study,” International Planning Studies 4 (1999): 53–77.

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i­nform each other, often in highly asymmetrical ways.”35 This encounter has in our opinion not created a mere mimicry of Western modernism but innovation of its precepts, forces and features. Modern urban approaches in the various regions of the South are not inadequate copies or adoptions, mere translations or distortions, of de­ velopments in the North, but have their own internal logic and may be considered unique and creative definitions of the modern: They are “alternative modernisms”36 with a strong indigenous basis.37 These alternative modernisms can be looked upon as key drivers of what the sociologists Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash have called the “reflexivity of modernity”: the capacity of modernity to modernize its own foundations.38 Therefore, this book confirms that the encounter with the Global South drastically altered the thinking and ­practice of modern urbanism during the post-war period.

It has been noted by several historians, among them Göran Therborn, that the processes of entanglements are never linear; rather they are the products of selective ­reception operating within complexities and networks of exchange. Indeed, we argue that the pivotal encounter with the Global South, as well as its reflexive capacity, has not only influenced the very centre of post-war modernist architectural culture but also offers important ­lessons for contemporary transnational architectural and urban practice.

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Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40.

36

Michel Hanchard in Dilip P. Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

See also: Michael Hanchard, “AfroModernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” in Monica Juneja and Franziska Koch, “Multi-Centred Modernisms–Reconfiguring Asian Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Transcultural Studies, no. 1 (2010): 38–41.

37 Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2005).

38 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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