There are good and bad things about Le Corbusier's plans and designs for Chandigarh. As we face the environmental and social uncertainties of the 21st century, it may be more productive to focus at the good things. Urban problems in India are somewhat different in nature, and certainly larger in scale.
Urban sustainability is bound to become one of the key planetary issues in the next century.
The encouraging side of this prospect is that the knowledge and the technological means to deal with urban ecology are abundant. There is hardly a better place in all of India than the existing Corbusian matrix of Chandigarh to start a pilot project on ecologically sound urban development. Corb's model of the city as a machine, just as his analogy with human organism, may be obsolete and crude, but they are not totally misplaced. The latest in the theory of sustainable urban development suggests that cities should indeed be viewed as organisms, with their metabolism integrated with the surrounding ecosystem. The latest in design theory suggests that architecture, and technology in general, are moving towards artificially intelligent and ecologically benign solutions.