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. The book promotes a wider and more nuanced knowledge on the history of the modern city, and supports the notion of the capacity of modernity to modernize its own foundations. In these two cases, the pivotal encounter with non-Western contexts influenced the very centre of modernist architectural culture—more specifically the practice and thinking of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, and the discourse and projects of
Team 10, the group of architects that had emerged from the
Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1953—and produced an innovation in its precepts, forces, and features.
