New Delhi can be considered as an imperial urban artifact of British colonialism in India. The term urban artifact is borrowed from Rossi's The Architecture of the City, where he argues that their characteristics take us back to certain major themes of individuality, place, design and memory. He consciously excludes the theme of function in these attributes, expressing his criticism of naive functionalism by asserting that "any explanation of urban artifacts in terms of function must be rejected if the issue is to elucidate their structure and formation." Rossi conceives that “function, physiological function” in nature, can be compared to a bodily organ whose function justifies its formation and development and whose alterations of function imply an alteration of form. »17 While Rossi rejects function, he advocates type as a more precise classifier of urban artifacts. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Although New Delhi adheres to all the attributes outlined in Rossi's construction of an urban artifact, it also differs in the complexity of its nature. Even though the imperial can be classified as the type of its form, the change in the city's identity (from imperial to democratic) over time remains ambiguous due to the physically limited clarity of Rossi's construction. Perhaps the attributes of Kevin Lynch's City Image (Legibility, Structure, Identity and Imageability) better describe Delhi's qualification as an urban artifact. As for the notion of memory, on the one hand, Rossi's concept of memory is aggravated by the clash between physical determinism of the imperial type (manifested). (through strong iconography, axiality, scale, hierarchy and segregation) and the resulting desire for democratization (after independence); on the other hand, it is weighed down by antiquity and the pressures of preservation which hinder the functional evolution of a contemporary metropolis. » For some, the city embodied obsolete imagery and a waste of urban land. For others, it was a valuable artifact worth preserving. Examining the capital district of New Delhi as an imperial urban artifact then provides physical, social, cultural and political points of comparison (across colonial and postcolonial periods). These comparisons are used to construct a coherent narrative that supports the claims made in this thesis. Even if, at first glance, New Delhi seems to have accepted the changes in usage and identity over the years, the physical determinism of the imperial (not only limited to type but also to ideology, symbolism , identity and institutionalization) persists and embodies the inertia of the city. to resist change. The relatively unchanged characteristics of the imperial ideologies constructed on the plane testify to this inertia. They therefore led to a notion of the persistence of imperialism, which challenged the democratization of the plan attempted through the Delhi Master Plan in its postcolonial era. Many saw this persistence more as resistance to an imperial image of Delhi “as a sheltered enclave for the administrative elite”. Anthony King points out that the symbolic representation of imperial power continues to persist in Delhi. The inherently separationist structures of the imperial city and its asymmetrical power relations are continually reinvented, albeit in an internal imperialist form. » Kevin Lynch comments on the “bipolar” form (native and foreign) of colonial cities: “Once the colonial hold is broken. . . like in Delhi.