Sectors. Chandigarh, read room by room Open in the atlas

Sector 1 to 53 · park

Leisure Valley

An eight-kilometre park that threads the whole city, made by re-landscaping a useless erosion gully into the city’s lungs.

Where it sits in the city
The parks are the thing I mourn most. They were beautiful and full, and now they sit empty while people pay two or three thousand rupees for half an hour on a turf, to play the cricket and badminton and volleyball we used to play for free. I remember watching the elder boys play on the field and thinking that was the coolest thing in the world.Anirudh · the owner’s memory

Then & now

Then
Part of the master plan (development from 1954, the park dated to 1966); it runs Sector 1 to Sector 53.
Who
Conceived by Le Corbusier; the planting detailed by M.S. Randhawa’s Landscape Committee.
Before
The eroded bed of a seasonal rivulet, the N-Choe, kept and reshaped rather than filled in.

The OG move

It’s not one park but a green spine following the N-Choe stream, stringing gardens along its run: Rajendra Park (1), Bougainvillea (3), the Rose Garden and Shanti Kunj (16), the Garden of Fragrance (36), the Garden of Palms (42). Corbusier read the city as a body: the Capitol its head, Sector 17 its heart, this its lungs.

A fact that reframes it

The city’s central park is a flood problem turned beautiful: Corbusier kept the erosion gully and sculpted it into the green backbone instead of fighting the land.

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Sources (3)
  1. ~8 km linear park, Sector 1 to 53, made by reshaping the seasonal N-Choe; the plan’s "lungs"; park dated 1966
    chandigarh.gov.in/green-chandigarh/leisure-valley; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_Choe
  2. Gardens strung along it: Rajendra Park (1), Bougainvillea (3), Rose Garden + Shanti Kunj (16), Fragrance (36), Palms (42)
    chandigarhtourism.gov.in/pages/gardens/leisurevalley
  3. Le Corbusier set the linear-park armature; Randhawa’s committee gave it its botanical content
    questionofcities.org/chalo-chalein-learning-from-the-urban-ecology-of-chandigarh/