Why it looks like this

Chandigarh is India's great modernist experiment: a brand-new capital for Punjab after Partition, planned by the architect Le Corbusier in the early 1950s. The city is a grid of sectors, each about 800 by 1,200 metres, designed as a complete neighbourhood with its own market, schools and green strip.

The roads follow a strict ranking — seven types, from V1 highways down to V7 footpaths. The grid you see is really a traffic diagram, drawn at the size of a city and then filled with life.