My City In Chandigarh

Herb Caen once said, “A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams.” Sometimes I stroll through the streets of Chandigarh and I get this sudden rush of joy - a sense of belonging and appreciation that I'm privileged enough to live my life in my city.
Here in Chandigarh, it's architects who built the buildings that made the city iconic and are the objects of adoration - not a flock of asinine monarchs.
Chandigarh is the concentrate of art, commerce, sports, religion, finance and entertainment, bringing to a single stage the contender, the missionary, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. Its cultural diversity is woven into the people, the food, the music, and even
The air-conditioning is on, yet I’m peculiarly brushed by emanations from my environment. I am less than 30 feet from the mesmeric blossoms at the Rose Garden, 5 kms from where Nek Chand would cycle along to secretly build his epochal Rock Garden, 7 kms from where siberian ducks and exotic cranes will migrate to at the Sukhna Lake; and for that matter I am probably occupying one of the very houses that Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew dedicated 3 years of their lives to unveil. They could have sat in this very room, brimming with their own touch of emanations from without.
Chandigarh has changed in tempo and temper over time. There is greater strain, heightened irascibility. The natural frustrations of urban life are visible all around. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges confronting Chandigarh. But, from my perspective, the well-connected city is a cogent paradigm and an engine for inclusivity and coalesce. Since technology is at the epicenter of my proposals, my vision for Chandigarh is, “Cyber Nucleus by 2020”.
In today’s tech-age, citizens within a city are constantly in contact with each other. To become “Smart”, Chandigarh needs to tap into this infrastructure and facilitate this communication even further.
In Sector 17, car parking is congested and erratic. Parking Apps that indicate where the closest accessible parking spot is, will save drivers time, gas, emissions and cash,
and other face recognition programs can be used for both verification and identification of criminals.
Barcelona has a network of smart traffic lights. After an emergency is reported, the approximate route is entered, setting all the lights to green and a mix of GPS and traffic management software allows emergency services to reach the incident without delay.
John McKnight once characterised people as having, “the power to decide there was a problem, the power to decide how to solve the problem – and the power to solve the problem”. The assembly of involved and linked citizens that enabled our democracy to thrive in early India is now essential in the early network era. A Smart Citizen must act responsibily in their neighbourhood; be an active member of community organizations; and critically decipher sociological and economic structures, and that is precisely what I intend to do.
In ancient Athens, they had a mandatory pledge for anyone looking to become a citizen. They had to swear that they’d leave the city not less, but more beautiful than they’d found it. As the “City Beautiful”, we can concoct a similar