Rock Garden: What it teaches us about urban design, sustainability, imagination

In December 2024, the Chandigarh Administration marked Nek Chand’s birth centenary with a week-long celebration, graced by the Punjab governor and widely covered by the local press.

While the events rightly honoured the creator of the iconic Rock Garden, what stayed with me was the stark contrast between this recognition and the quiet demolition, just months later, of part of the garden’s outer wall to make way for road-widening and parking.

The celebration and the protest that followed triggered deeper reflections on what the Rock Garden represents, how it is misunderstood, and what it still teaches us about urban design, sustainability, and imagination.

The demolition and the protest that followed in February-March this year reveal a deeper tension in Chandigarh’s planning ethos: the tendency to prioritise rigid infrastructure solutions over imaginative reuse and long-term sustainability.

The Rock Garden offers two vital lessons. First, it shows that construction waste, often seen as a nuisance, can be a foundational element of design and heritage. And second, it proves that unplanned, outsider creativity can challenge and enrich modernist urban planning.

Built from discarded tiles, crockery, and industrial debris, the garden emerged quietly in the heart of a city designed as a symbol of post-independence modernity.

Initially declared illegal for being built on forest land without sanction, it survived demolition only because of the support of senior officials and locals who recognised its value. Over the years, it has grown not only as a space of art and memory, but as a symbol of how cities accommodate what lies outside the plan.

Yet, despite its global acclaim, the Rock Garden is still viewed primarily as a tourist destination. This is a missed opportunity. Amid ecological stress and rapid urbanisation, the garden offers a model for rethinking construction, material reuse, and public space.

The region’s construction boom has led to environmental degradation, and construction debris is commonly dumped near water bodies and roads. Still, we fail to draw on the example of a local master who demonstrated how this waste could be transformed into something beautiful, functional, and culturally rooted.

Consider the new bus stops constructed under various city development schemes. While neat and colour-coded, they have been criticised for design flaws: they offer no shelter from rain, the colours might fade easily, and many lack accessibility.

Was there ever a thought to apply Nek Chand’s design philosophy here? Couldn’t we have used construction waste innovatively to build more durable, meaningful, and contextual public infrastructure?

Chandigarh rightly celebrates the legacy of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. But in that celebration, we often overlook Nek Chand, whose work arose not from architectural blueprints but from lived memory and improvisation.

His garden does more than entertain; it proposes an alternative imagination of urbanism: ecologically responsive, materially rooted, and open to informal creativity. In re-reading the Rock Garden, we are reminded that heritage is not only what we inherit, but what and how we choose to carry forward.

If we treat it only as a backdrop for tourism or occasional protest, we flatten its message. But if we see it as a living design language that can shape public infrastructure and guide sustainable practice, we honour not just Nek Chand’s memory, but the future he imagined.

(The author is an urban researcher currently pursuing her doctoral studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai)