Look at the map of several North Indian cities and you may spot a neighbourhood called Model Town. The name is familiar in places such as Delhi and Ludhiana, where it is associated with established residential colonies. But how did the same name come to be used in different cities? And does it have anything to do with the idea of building a model neighbourhood?
The thesis describes Lahore’s Model Town as an adaptation of British urban planner Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept. In 1919, Khem Chand proposed setting up a Model Town on the outskirts of Lahore. The project took shape over the following years, and its first building was inaugurated in 1924, according to a doctoral thesis by Shama Anbrine at the University of Liverpool , which examines the history and planning of the Co-operative Model Town Society. First outlined in his 1898 book, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform , the concept was later developed in the 1902 edition titled Garden Cities of To-morrow.
The government had to find places where families arriving from Pakistan could rebuild their lives. Faridabad, near Delhi, was one of the townships developed for this purpose. A study published in the journal Rural History by Cambridge University Press explains how the Faridabad project formed part of the government’s efforts to rehabilitate refugees. The township was also intended to give residents opportunities to work and learn new skills. As Indian cities expanded, planned residential colonies became a more familiar part of urban development. Government bodies, improvement trusts and private developers began creating new housing areas with roads, residential plots and basic civic facilities. Delhi offers an example of this growth.
Partition in 1947 left millions of people displaced and created an urgent need for homes, jobs and basic facilities. In 1949, the government proposed setting up a model town there to accommodate around 50,000 people who had migrated from areas that became part of Pakistan. The company was founded by Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh in 1946 and developed 22 urban colonies in the capital between 1950 and 1964, according to DLF’s official history .
