Chandigarh Casablanca documents two different but complementary urban realities that have played a fundamental role in the imagination, the definition, and the redefinition of the 20th-century modern city: On one hand Chandigarh?planned by a team consisting of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, Jane B. Drew, and Indian architects and planners?and on the other Casablanca?conceived by Michel Ecochard and a team of young French and Moroccan architects. The contemporary gaze shifts here from the symbolic use of architecture in the construction of monumental masterpieces to the formation of public space, housing, and social facilities. Considering the objective to present a contemporary perspective on these cities that counteracts their reading as ?exported urbanism”, the book includes commissioned work by Yto Barrada (born in Paris and educated in Tangier, Morocco) and Takashi Homma (Japanese), two non-western photographers especially engaged in investigating everyday life conditions in urban scenarios. The study of modern urbanism has traditionally ascribed universal value to avant-garde ideas originating in Europe and North America, and seen developments in non-Western regions as derivations from those original models.
Chandigarh Casablanca aims to decenter this dominant view and to contribute to a new geography of the modern city that is attentive to its entangled multiplicities and to the productive interactions that took place across cultures and borders. In a broader perspective, Chandigarh Casablanca fosters fresh discussions on the engagement of local particularity with the universal in the framework of the growing economic and political cooperation promoted by the United Nations and other global organizations in the decades following World War II.
