Touring India

swissnex San Francisco invites a panel of experts to discuss the past and future of urban planning in India, highlighting two examples: Chandigarh, a city mandated by the Nehru government in the 1950s and designed by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and NanoCity, a yet-to-be-built metropolis initiated by entrepreneur (and Hotmail co-founder) Sabeer Bhatia and designed by the Berkeley Group for Architecture and Planning.

In many ways, these two cities suggest a shift from municipalities planned by governments to ones dreamed up by influential individuals. They may also herald a transition of power from the hands of political decision-makers to those of the business world. Even the function of cities themselves seems up for reinvention. Where Chandigarh was established as an administrative capital, NanoCity aspires to be a hub for education and high-tech.

Moderator Mark Jarzombek, Associate Dean at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, leads the discussion with panelists Sabeer Bhatia, founder of NanoCity; Nezar AlSayyad and Susan Ubbelohde, both professors of architecture at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and design directors of NanoCity; and Vikramāditya Prakāsh, architecture professor at the University of Washington and author of Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India. An exhibition about Chandigarh and NanoCity accompanies the discussion and travels to swissnex Bangalore later this year.