Designed by Le Corbusier’s team in the 1950s as the city’s commercial heart, Sector 17 remains Chandigarh’s civic living room
The central fountain plaza, pedestrianised and family-friendly, has survived the mall era on its own terms
Government emporiums, old bookshops, and golgappe stalls hold ground alongside newer cafes and showrooms
On a Sunday evening in Chandigarh, the question is not whether to go to Sector 17. The question is whether you can find parking within a reasonable distance and whether the golgappe stall near the south end will still have the green chutney you like.
Sector 17 Plaza has been the commercial and social centre of Chandigarh since the city was built. It was planned as such by the team that drew up Chandigarh in the early 1950s, following Le Corbusier’s vision of a pedestrian commercial zone at the heart of the city. The central fountain, the covered walkways, the government emporiums arranged around the plaza: all of it was deliberate, thought through, and built to last.
Seventy years later, it has.
What the Plaza Holds
Walk into Sector 17 from the north end and you pass the Punjab Emporium and the Haryana government shop, both of which have been selling local handicrafts, phulkari dupattas, and wooden furniture longer than most of their current staff have been alive. The Khadi Gramodyog outlet is a few steps away. These are not glamorous shops. They are, however, honest ones, and on a slow Tuesday afternoon you can spend an hour in them learning more about what Punjab actually makes than any boutique will show you.
The bookshops are still there, though thinner than they used to be. A generation of Chandigarh students bought their textbooks here, their competitive exam guides, their first Premchand novels. The shops have adapted, added stationery and gifts, but the books remain.
The golgappe situation is, as always, excellent. There are at least four dedicated stalls, each with their loyal clientele, and the debate over whose tamarind water is superior has been running for decades without resolution.
The Evening Crowd
By 6pm on any evening, the plaza is properly alive. Families with children. Couples. Groups of college students from PU who have come in by bus or metro. The central fountain is the meeting point for all of them, a landmark so established that directions in Chandigarh often end with “near the Sector 17 fountain” regardless of whether that is actually accurate.
In summer, the ice cream carts do business that would embarrass most formal restaurants. In winter, the same spot becomes the place to buy peanuts from a man with a kerosene heater, which is one of those perfectly adequate substitutes for central heating that Chandigarh has always been good at.
Yahan pe dukan 1979 se hai hamaari. Mall aaya, log gaye, phir wapas aane lage. Plaza hi asli jagah hai. (Our shop has been here since 1979. The mall came, people left, then they started coming back. The plaza is the real place.)Rakesh Kumar, shoe shop owner, Sector 17
The Mall Question
When Elante opened in 2013, there were genuine fears in Sector 17. Footfall dropped. Some shops closed. The pessimists said it was over.
The pessimists were not entirely wrong, but they were not entirely right either. Elante took the young crowd, the multiplex crowd, the brand-name crowd. What it could not take was the civic function that Sector 17 performs. This is where the government offices are. This is where you go to sort out paperwork. This is where the banks are clustered, the insurance offices, the CA firms that have been in the same rooms for thirty years.
And on Sundays, the families still come. Not because there is nowhere else to go, but because this is the place. It has earned that. You do not replace seventy years of Sunday evenings with a food court.
The Architecture Nobody Talks About
Visitors who come to Chandigarh for Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex rarely spend much time in Sector 17, which is a shame because the plaza is part of the same vision. The covered walkways, the scale of the buildings, the way the space is organised so that you can move through it comfortably in the rain or the heat: these are not accidents. They are the result of thinking carefully about how people actually live in cities.
Chandigarh has not always been good at protecting this architecture. Some of the original buildings have been altered beyond recognition. But the bones of the plaza remain, and on a clear evening when the light falls across the fountain and the families are out and the chai is hot, you can still feel what it was supposed to be.
There is also the Neelam cinema hall, one of the oldest operating cinemas in Chandigarh, which continues to pull crowds despite every streaming service available. The cinema hall is not glamorous. The seats have seen better days. But on a Friday evening when a new Punjabi film releases, it is packed, and the sound of the audience reacting fills the plaza outside.
A city centre. The city’s centre. Still, after all these years.
Sector 17 | Symbolic picture | Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) | For representation