by This blog was written in the centenary year of Mr. Nek Chand’s birth, following the demolition of a part of the Rock Garden’s wall in early 2025. It reflects on the layered meanings of this space, as heritage, protest, urban design intervention, and an incubator for sustainable practices, and asks what it means to truly honour a visionary like Nek Chand in today’s planning culture.
In December 2024, when I realized it was Mr. Nek Chand’s birth centenary year, I began reflecting on his incredible work, The Rock Garden. Having visited his beautiful creation many times as a child and a few times as an adult, I was always awestruck and inspired by his creativity and the wonderland he shaped from construction waste. I feel privileged to have met him briefly during one of my visits to the Rock Garden. He obliged our group with a photo and smiled when we appreciated his creation, a humble man of few words. Over the years, I often saw him at the Rock Garden supervising the work and upkeep, sometimes simply sitting quietly in one corner, possibly thinking of new ideas, reflecting, or observing.
For me, as an urban researcher, the Rock Garden is a deeply enlightening space. In the utopian modernist planned city of Chandigarh, the Rock Garden, situated in the very core of this ideal, stood as a counter, not only to the symmetry of the plan but also to its rigid zoning logic. Yet, it is precisely this dystopian counter to the planned ideal that has also brought international recognition to the city. The Rock Garden’s waste-to-wonder story offers a crucial insight that remains highly relevant today. It is an inspiring experiment in the use of construction waste, not just for sculptural art, but as a foundational component of built heritage.
The case of the Rock Garden is a testament to the tensions between urban planning and the everyday, between the blueprint and lived reality, and how these interactions shape the city. It is also an example of how “champions” within bureaucratic machinery become integral in supporting projects that fall in gray zones. What began as the creator’s personal project, an emotional attempt to connect with his pre-partition home and village, was soon deemed an “illegal development” on forest land within the planned layout of the new city. Remaining unidentified for almost 18 years, when the administration realized the scale of the development, it was faced with imminent demolition in 1974-75. However, local support and championing by senior officials averted the demolition and provided the founder with manpower and resources.[1]
Every few decades, the Rock Garden faces new threats to its layout and design. The most recent demolition in February-March 2025 of its outer wall on the side facing the Punjab and Haryana High Court for a road-widening and parking project. Residents protested and highlighted the threat to Chandigarh’s modern heritage, its forest, and its wildlife.[2]
These tensions are inevitable as the city and its population grow and existing infrastructures strain. However, how solutions are found depends significantly on how “non-planned” spaces, such as the Rock Garden, are understood and valued within the planning and power hierarchies of Chandigarh. Rather than investing in more sustainable alternatives such as underground or multi-level parking, or a robust, well-connected public transport system that reduces the dependency on personal vehicles, then does the demolition of the Rock Garden wall present an easier, more politically and financially convenient solution?
This blog may not offer a single answer to such questions; perhaps there isn’t one. However, I want to emphasize two key points. First, we must stop treating the Rock Garden merely as a tourist spot or one-time curiosity. It deserves recognition as Chandigarh’s artistic heritage and as an incubator of sustainable reuse, one that can inspire contemporary practices in construction, design, and waste management, specifically construction waste. Second, in the words of our first Prime Minister, Chandigarh was to be “free from existing encumbrances of old towns and old traditions, an expression of the nation’s faith in the future”.[3] To me, Nek Chand’s Rock Garden embodies this very vision, a space that connects past and future. It invokes nostalgia, but also asserts that creativity and experimentation are timeless acts of optimism.
In today’s construction boom across the city and its region, the Rock Garden offers insights into how construction waste can be meaningfully incorporated into design. While the work of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret is highly celebrated for using local material (riverbed stones excavated during the city’s construction), I find that Nek Chand’s use of construction waste, such as tiles and electrical sockets, to create beautiful figurines and landscapes, is no less significant. For years, these figurines adorned homes across the city; similar but taller sculptures greet travelers as they step outside the railway station. This is not mere nostalgia.
Each time I travel through the tri-city area, I see construction waste dumped along water bodies and open spaces. Studies have shown that construction waste is one of the biggest contributors to urban pollution. Therefore, I wonder, when our city is blessed with a master who showed us how to reuse such waste creatively, why are we not drawing from that wisdom in our homes, public spaces, and institutional buildings?
To reduce the Rock Garden to a tourist attraction is to limit both its potential and Mr. Nek Chand’s legacy. Though I do not come from an architectural or design background, I recognize the potential that the Rock Garden model holds for enhancing public spaces. Take, for example, the new bus stops constructed in the city. Clean-lined and painted in blue, red, and yellow, these bus stops have multiple flaws in design[4] such as not being disability-friendly, they do not offer protection from rain, and the colors of paint on them fade easily.
I wonder whether any thought was given to making these shelters using the design philosophy of Mr. Nek Chand? Could construction waste have been used creatively to build more durable, contextual, and aesthetically rooted structures, ones that reduce waste, improve functionality, and celebrate our modern design heritage as a living, evolving tradition?
In closing, I believe Mr. Nek Chand’s work is not just a symbol of past genius. It is a guidepost for future sustainable urbanism. In the contemporary scenario of ecological precarity, construction waste proliferation, and generic urban design, the Rock Garden holds out a different imagination. One that is handmade, embedded in local materiality, yet universally inspiring. Chandigarh does not need to look outward for sustainable design lessons. They already exist, tucked between broken tiles and poured cement, in a garden made of dreams and debris.
Note: An edited version of this blog was published in The Tribune on 5th August 2025. You can read it here: Rock Garden: What it teaches us about urban design, sustainability, imagination
[1] Despite odds, Nek Chand stood rock solid behind his dreams
[2] Rock Garden Demolition assault on UT’s artistic, cultural identity: Residents
[3] Fitting, P. (2002). Urban Planning/Utopian Dreaming: Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Today. Utopian Studies, 3(1), 69-93.
[4] At Rs. 10.8 crore, new bus shelters in Chandigarh low in design, high on cost.
