Mayank Ojha

11.S940
20 September 2015

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Heterotopic enclaves within Machine Cities

The case of Burail village

Le Corbusier designed the city of Chandigarh in accordance with the principles of

CIAM and the rationalist methods of city planning over a tabula-rasa condition. In the
process, during the initial phase of the citys development, sixteen existing agricultural villages
had both their farmlands and the inhabited areas acquired by the Government, exercising
eminent domain. As the city was set to undertake a second phase of construction and
expansion, village dwellers from four villages, located at its then southern periphery, formed a
pind bachao (save the village) committee in 1969. Constituting a formidable vote bank, their
protests were heeded by the administration as the committee successfully managed to resist
acquisition of their homesteads within the lal dora1 while their farmlands were nevertheless
acquired for development.
Thus, Burail village was cast within the rational sectoral grid of the modern city,
subverting the organisation and performative diagram of the citys neighbourhood units. Roy
(2012: p149) on planning and informality argues that the state reproduces its power through
the capacity to construct and reconstruct categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy. The
subsequent generation of of planners and designers, not knowing how to tackle the problem,
laid out a circumferential street around the village, oblique to the citys grid, in a bid to
contain what has been deemed unplanned or unplannable.
Although the village physically or territorially became a part of the new city, the Capital
of Punjab Act which is instrumental in regulating the growth and controlling its architectural
and urban character was never extended over the villages. Special enclaves were thus created
within the city as they were exempt from the stringent norms and regulatory bylaws, lending
it a space between the extremes of formality and informality. While the village inhabitants
retained the titles and tenure to their properties as well as the right to participate both in the
Literally meaning a red line, a colloquial term popularised by the centuries old land revenue system and
charting of landholdings where the revenue officer would mark the limits to the inhabitable land to prevent
people from encroaching onto the revenue generating farmlands.
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civic processes and the market, the village as an urban entity remained outside the realm of
state control. As migrants and labourers flocked to the city to indulge in the construction
activity, the villages over the course of time became its entry points or refugia, where people
and activities excluded from the rigid pavilions2 of the modern city. Within the village, the
rental economy became the primary source of income for the erstwhile farmers who continue
to construct dormitories, mixed use complexes, motels, warehouses and spaces for back-end
processing for the citys commercial enterprises. Lack of controls or order meant that footfalls,
vehicular accessibility, the grain of parcel sizes and the topography of the village governed the
density and land-use within the enclave. Resultantly, the village degraded into an urban
backyard with slum like characteristics owing to congestion, lack of sanitation and a
haphazardly developed urban fabric prone to fire and earthquake hazards.
The surprise element unfolded through my interactions with the pind bachao
committee members who were disappointed with the way things unfolded for the village and
they say that, despite their efforts, in retrospect they would rather have had the entire village
being acquired and demolished than let it exist in the condition it has degenerated into. Half
a century hence, the master planning paradigm still dominates city development processes
throughout India as evident from the debacles of Gurgaon, and from my personal experience
while working on the project of Kalinganagar, an upcoming greenfield steel-city, touted to be
the worlds largest steel producing complex and a candidate for a National Investment &
Manufacturing Zone. While the term greenfield expresses the context from an industrial
standpoint, meaning that no supporting infrastructure existed in place, the territory consists
of hundreds of villages where tribal communities practice subsistence agriculture and already
face the challenges of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. The case of Burail highlights
or projects the future of villages in Kalinganagar if the status quo is maintained and it would
be pertinent to explore alternatives to deal with the issue of a socio-physical inclusion and
integration of existing development with new investments in the territory.

Note: Burail village was the site for my undergraduate B.Arch thesis while I am
currently involved with Kalinganagar as a graduate fellow in the MIT-TATA Center,
Urbanisation group.

The term pavilionisation refers to the Athens Charter where the idea that every program must be housed in a
separate building was propagated as a means to rid the city of its problems by a process analogical to the design
of medical facilities, hospitals and quarantine areas. (Shane, 2005: 47)
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