Residential Typologies and Their Transformation

This chapter analyses local adaptations and changes in residential typologies. The ‘traditional’ typology in pre-colonial Delhi and its villages was usually the ‘courtyard’ arrangement, the so-called haveli. In the villages these were simple huts for men, women and animals, organized around an open space. When the British began to build the Civil Lines residential area north of Shahjahanabad, they adopted the bungalow model rather than the haveli one. After Independence there was no returning to the ‘traditional’ courtyard typology, rather the bungalow plot model prevails, which is often reduced and adapted, becoming a house plot. The transition from the classicist bungalow to the medium/small modernist single-family house shows an adjustment to the setting and the pressure that architectural elements undergo. The residential situation is multi-faceted, and the transition, first from the haveli to the bungalow and finally to the small middle class single-family house, is only one of many forms of cultural adjustment.

Urban Areas and Colonies

This chapter analyses local transformations and adaptations on the more restricted scale of single colonies. The colonies, through which the megalopolis grew, especially after Independence, are part British and part American in heritage, with local reinterpretations and certain Japanese influences. The study discusses how these colonies were established in the first place by the British in the nineteenth century and were home to the rich upper class or aristocratic English, who wished to move out of Shahjahanabad. Later on, towards the end of the colonial era, Indians and lower level government employees lived in neighbourhoods such as Jangpura, Karol Bagh and Lodi Colony. Finally, after independence, colonies became the main way of building the megalopolis. An interesting aspect in post- Independence colonies such as Malviya Nagar is that residence and industrial plots are kept within the same colony, becoming bulwarks to the concept of zoning imported by the Americans.

Insights into the Cities of India, Cultural Exchanges, and Identities

This chapter suggests and in many ways provides a method and a point of view with which also other cities could be analysed. It shows the possibility of analysing similar problems in other colonized countries and of how important it is to keep the focal point on cultural exchanges when seeing how traditions developed and where the identity of a place can be found. This method of analysing cities through cultural exchanges can, not only be applied in other parts of the world, but also touches a very important issue present nowadays, which is the process of globalization, which in turn raises the questions: How much are local cultures able to resist? Why does one country resist more than the other? How are different traditions created? To what degree are foreign imported models valid? And how important is it to find them directly in loco?

Community Spaces and Public Buildings

With the arrival of the British (1803) in the capital there is a noticeable change in public buildings. Churches and missionary schools joined mosques and temples of various faiths; the market takes the place of the market-road and the bazar or there is a progressive transition towards buildings of power. After 1947, instead, the most significant aspect is the focus on buildings for the collective. The trend, however, was to add rather than to re-build or demolish, the city absorbed pre-existing buildings, making them become part of the present, shows the inclusive attitude the capital had established with regard to time and cultures. Nonetheless, more than in other urban elements, many buildings, both from the colonial and the post-colonial period, pose the question of how to be ‘Indian’.

Two Conceptions of the City

This chapter compares the plan put forward in 1912, during the colonial period, with the one approved after Independence in 1962. It demonstrates that both plans bear foreign influences; in the first case British, in the second American. The city that came after 1947, rather than being a centre of power and administration, was designed to be a residential city. New Delhi was planned based on the ideal of the Garden City and the City Beautiful movements. By contrast, the city imagined after Independence follows the principles of zoning and functional separation. It is particularly interesting how despite the strong foreign influences some of those English architects working in Delhi had tried to go beyond utopia and tie a link with the pre-existing city of Shahjahanabad and imagined architecture based on the observation of traditional typologies.

Renegotiating Delhi

This chapter focuses in particular on Delhi’s architecture and urban developments from 1912, when the British Town Planning Committee for New Delhi was formed, to 1962, when the first Master Plan was implemented. The chapter gives an overview on the analyses of Delhi’s elements of architecture and planning that develop in detail in the following chapters, briefing on the exchanges processes that occurred. This chapter poses a fundamental question: How active was the role of the evolving urban capital city in the cultural exchange process? It attempts to view influences not only as flowing from West to East, but as a much richer, intricate, and more complicated process, giving insights on how much Delhi has developed its own tradition and its own identity through a unique negotiating and renegotiating of numerous influences from within the country and from abroad.