Chandigarh on Scooter

10.19

We took the scooter the next day to see the city. The next day I wanted to go to the Chief Architect/Planner’s office Sumit Kaur, to see if I could get some files of zoning maps and with density and land that was privately and publicly owned, but apparently they don’t even have GIS maps of these things like they do in the US. It’s like we’re speaking different languages when I ask for these things, so it was pretty disappointing. The difficult thing here is that they don’t have the data like we do in the US. Like most cities now have GIS layers for zoning and density and things like that, and if you ask for it, it’s not a big deal for them to send you the files. Before coming to Chandigarh I called the Chief Architect’s office to see if they had these types of digital files that I could get, and they said yes, I could come and get them. So I get there and they don’t have these digital files at all. I’d really like a map of which land is owned by the government and which is privately owned. In the US you can know this type of information for each parcel. I thought they would have this in digital format; they didn’t. And then the City Museum was closed on Mondays, unfortunately! And then the chief architect suggested I look at Norma Evenson's book on Chandigarh about the density. Except that this book was written in the 1960s! So I'm sure it's changed a bit since then!

Then the Nek Chand Rock Garden which was amazing!This city engineer just started making these sculptures out of discarded materials and it grew into this huge, amazing rock garden. When the city found out about it, they were going to destroy it but ended up giving him the land for it, and now it's a big tourist attraction. The spaces in the garden are really great - all these different patterns made with rock. Mosaics made from broken porcelain toilets, huge waterfalls, lots of animal and people sculptures. It was really amazing!