By: Vandini Mehta and Arunava Dasgupta
1. Visiting Faculty, Department of Urban Design, School of Planning and Architecture, Indraprastha Marg, New Delhi, India.
2. Professor, Department of Urban Design, School of Planning and Architecture, Indraprastha Marg, New Delhi, India.
Karol Bagh, known to many as the refugee neighborhood populated by refugees from the India-Pakistan partition is also a bustling and crowded commercial area of Delhi. One of the first planned extensions in Delhi was called the Western Extension Area (WEA) and was developed pre-independence as one of the first and largest city extensions in Delhi. Few know that this coincided with the building of the Imperial Capital of “New” Delhi in the early half of the twentieth century. Proposed as one of the largest city extensions by the Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT), to respond to the overcrowding of the walled city of Delhi, the development of this area, however, tells a story quite contrary to the making of the grand Imperial Delhi – built primarily for the British and Europeans. Colonial architecture and urban planning have a long legacy in many Indian cities particularly Delhi. But often ignored behind the grand avenues, colonial bungalows and monumental official buildings of New Delhi is the planning of the native parts of the city which were as much an outcome of colonial rule as the making of its imperial buildings and European quarters. With the example of WEA as the first planned extension of the city for its native population, this paper critically examines and decodes archival records, communication and data from 1900–1940, to examine how colonial control of urban resources and the techniques of governance, facilitated spatial segregation and inequality in the city that continue to carry an imprint in the city space even today.
Urban history, Delhi, colonial ideology, improvements, Karol Bagh-western extension
Citation:
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