Encapsulating the loci via hybrid modernity: the political syntax of post-colonial capitals, Islamabad and Chandigarh

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2018
Ahmed , Mansoor
The dissertation aims to comparatively analyses the architecture and urban development of the planned modern capital cities in post-partitioned Indian Subcontinent, through the concept of hybrid modernity. While emphasizing the hybrid character of modernity, the dissertation maps the evolution of modernity in the Indian Subcontinent, through analysing the planned modern capital cities, from early modern period to the post-independence period, concerning the architecture and urban development. Right after partition, the governments of India and Pakistan developed the modern capital cities, Chandigarh and Islamabad, from scratch. For architecture and urban development of these modern capital cities, the new nation-states invited the well-known international architects such as, Albert Mayer, Le Corbusier, Doxiadis, Louis Kahn, Edward Durrell Stone and Arne Jacobson. The design ideas of these architects had nurtured and evolved in a Eurocentric context and these ideas were later contextualized, once they came in contestation with the Indian conditions, during the development of modern capitals in the Indian Subcontinent, which in result paved the way for emergence of post-independence modernity. Through a detailed spatial analysis, the dissertation reaffirms the fact that this “new” modernity is a historical extension of prevailing hybrid modernity of the Indian Subcontinent and should not be read only as an extension of Western modernity. In the discussion of evolutionary modernity, the dissertation provides a detailed analysis of how foreign ideas were imported, legitimized, domesticated and hybridized in the local context, across historical timeline, to develop the modern planned capitals in the Indian Subcontinent.

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Citation Formats
M. Ahmed, “Encapsulating the loci via hybrid modernity: the political syntax of post-colonial capitals, Islamabad and Chandigarh,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2018.