Chandigarh

State capital of both Punjab and Haryana, Chandigarh is part of neither, being administered by India's federal government. Its history begins in 1947, when Partition placed Lahore in Pakistan, leaving India's state of Punjab without a capital. Nehru decided to realize his vision of a city "symbolic of the future of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past, [and] an expression of the nation's faith in the future". The job of designing it went to Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, alias Le Corbusier. Begun in 1952, CHANDIGARH was a ground-breaking experiment in town planning. Le Corbusier's blueprints were for an orderly grid of sweeping boulevards, divided into 29 neat blocks, or Sectors, each measuring 800 by 1200 metres, and interspersed with extensive stretches of green.