New Delhi can be seen as an imperial urban artefact of British colonialism in India. The term urban artefact is borrowed from Rossi's The Architecture of the City, where he argues that their characteristics take us back to some important themes of individuality, place, design and memory. He consciously excludes the theme of function in these attributes, expressing his criticism of naive functionalism, arguing that "any explanation of urban facts in terms of function must be rejected if it is a question of clarifying their structure and formation". Rossi conceives that "Function, physiological in nature, may 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 argues for type as more accurate classifier of urban facts. Say no. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Although New Delhi adheres to all the attributes established in Rossi's construction of an urban artifact, it also differs from it in the complexity of its nature. While 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 compared to the physically limited clarity of Rossi's construction. Perhaps Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City's attributes (Legibility, Structure, Identity and Imageability)' best describes Delhi's qualification as an urban artefact. Regarding the notion of memory, on the one hand, Rossi's concept of memory is aggravated by the clash between imperial-type (manifest) physical determinism. through strong iconography, axiality, scale, hierarchy and segregation) and the resulting desire for democratization (after independence, on the other hand, it is burdened by antiquity and conservation pressures that inhibit the functional evolution of a contemporary metropolis); For some, the city embodied an obsolete imagery and a waste of urban land. To others it seemed like a precious artifact worth preserving. Examining the capital district of New Delhi as an imperial urban artefact thus provides physical, social, cultural and political benchmarks (across colonial and postcolonial time frames). These comparisons are used to construct a coherent narrative that corroborates the claims made in this thesis. Although at first glance New Delhi appears to have accepted changes in usage and identity over the years, the physical determinism of the imperial (not limited only to typology but also to ideology, symbolism, identity and institutionalization ) persists and embodies the inertia of the city. resist change. The relatively unchanged characteristics of the imperial ideologies constructed by the plan are a testament to this inertia. They thus led to a notion of the persistence of empire, which challenged the plan democratization attempted through Delhi's master planning in its postcolonial era. Many saw this persistence more as resistance to support an imperial image of Delhi “as a protected enclave for the administrative elite.” Anthony King points out that the symbolic representation of imperial power continues to persist in Delhi. the inherently separatist structures of the imperial city and its asymmetric power relations are continually reinvented, albeit in an internal imperialist form. " Kevin Lynch comments on the 'bipolar' (native and foreign) form of colonial cities: "Once the colonial hold is broken. . . like in Delhi today, hierarchies and segregations come.