Chandigarh was commissioned after 1947 because East Punjab had lost Lahore. The first plan was by the American Albert Mayer with Matthew Nowicki; Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950 and Le Corbusier was brought in with Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry.
The plan is a grid of sectors, each roughly 800 by 1200 metres, each intended to contain its own shops, school and green space, with a hierarchy of roads from the arterial to the residential.
The Capitol Complex at the head of the city holds the Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court, with the Open Hand monument, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016 as part of a group of Le Corbusier's works.
It is the only city Le Corbusier built and one of very few twentieth-century capitals planned from nothing and completed.
The villages that were on the site were displaced. Their names survive as sector and village names inside the city and their histories do not.
It works better than most planned cities and it was designed for a population and a vehicle count a fraction of what it now carries.
Pierre Jeanneret stayed about fifteen years while Le Corbusier visited, so most of what was actually built was executed under his hand: the housing, the schools, the colleges and the furniture.
The materials are exposed reinforced concrete, brick and local stone, chosen because India could make all three without importing anything. That decision is why the city has weathered the way it has.
The criticisms are old and fair: the scale is inhuman on foot, the sectors segregate by income, and the city has no place for the informal economy that every Indian city runs on.