The Indian city of Chandigarh is unusual in many ways- a capital split between the two states of Punjab and Haryana, a federalized city like Washington, D.C, plopped down in a rural nowhere, and a snap urban agglomoration built by a dreamy Swiss architect given carte blanche by President Nehru to design India’s city of the future.
Divided grid-like into what are called “sectors”- as in Sector 17, where the hotel zone is located, or Sector 46, where my guide lived- each is planned as a self-contained neighborhood with schools, retail, and green space for leisure, and connected with wide avenues as spokes and Parisian traffic circles as hubs, all capable of taming the wild running of auto-rickshaws even better than the Etoile once tamed the deux chevaux,
Underneath the radiating avenues and recto-streets is India’s first purpose-built sewer system. In a region not long removed from field fertilization and village night soil collecting, this was a huge step forward when built in the 1950s. Being the master planner that he was, Corbu allowed no detail to fall off his drafting table, he also designed the template- in the form of the city map showing each sector in high cast-iron relief- for the 22,000 manhole covers needed to close it off from the public.
Corbu’s biographer Stanislaus von Moos called these covers “a public icon”, “an elementary language of heraldic forms symbolizing the essential values in which a community of men is able to recognize itself and its spiritual aims” Ah! The spiritual aims of sewerage! Especially first thing in the morning.
All would be well if most things that Corbu and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret touched in Chandigarh had not become hot selling collectables. The cane-seated government office chairs once abandoned on sidewalks and auctioned off by the pile- one was recently inexplicably found in pieces in a farmer’s field- now sell for for thousands.
And the manhole covers too have become more than public icons. A recent survey found only 2,224 covers, including one in Chandigarh’s urban planning museum, of those originally installed still in place. Many have been stolen, some sold at auction- prices in New York and Paris came in over $20,000. At a weight of 93kg, that comes to $215/kg.
Indian raw iron is priced near $45/ton, or about a nickel/kg. So a smart Indian junk man would be well advised to steal a few more manhole covers and realize a profit four thousand times over its wholesale price. But where would that leave the Chandigarhian waiting for his morning constitutional?