Urban villages as a necessary exception: insights from Chandigarh and its relationship with Burail

Urban villages represent a defining yet understudied component of urbanization in India and other Asian contexts. Their incorporation into expanding cities produces hybrid administrative, morphological and socioeconomic conditions that blur the boundaries between rural and urban, formal and informal, planned and unplanned. This paper examines the relationship between the planned city of Chandigarh and the urban village of Burail through an in-depth case study. The research was developed through a collaborative process involving the University of Florence and Chandigarh University, combining extensive fieldwork with subsequent remote analysis. The findings illuminate how the ambiguous administrative status of Burail has shaped its dense and precarious built environment, its socioeconomic heterogeneity, and its role as a provider of affordable housing and commercial functions that are not accommodated within Chandigarh’s planned grid. While this qualitative case study analysis cannot lead to generalizations, it offers empirical insights into how urban villages operate as necessary exceptions within planned urban systems.