Case studies in urban revival: Prague's Marian column restoration with stone from Rajasthan and India’s urbanization imperatives

By the time the Old Town Square in Prague received its new pillar in 2020, the story of that column had already traced several continents. The Marian Column — first erected in 1650 as a Baroque devotional monument sculpted by Johann Georg Bendl and torn down in the political turmoil of October 1918 — was the subject of decades of debate, fragments rescued and transferred to lapidariums (stone museums) and private collections, and finally a contested campaign for reconstruction that brought the stone column from Rajasthan to the heart of Central Europe. The reinstallation of the column was at once a local restoration of a Baroque landmark and a small, surprising chapter in a wider story about how cities stitch together memory, material and meaning across geographies.

Here is the sequence. The original column — almost 16 metres high and crowned with a two-metre gilded statue of the Virgin Mary, its base forming a small chapel and its corners ornamented by four symbolic angels — stood on Old Town Square for more than two and a half centuries before being toppled in the autumn of 1918 amid the anti-monarchy fervour that accompanied the birth of Czechoslovakia. Fragments were salvaged, and for much of the twentieth century the idea of restoration lay dormant, interrupted by war and later by the politics of a regime suspicious of religion.

That history changed in the 1990s. A private association set up in Prague in 1995 began to raise funds and to seek out craftsmen and stone suitable for a faithful replica. After years of searching, sculptors in the Czech Republic identified a stone that met their standards in India; in late February 2001 five stonemasons reached Jaipur to prepare the pillar, which was transported by truck to Mumbai and shipped from the port of Nhava Sheva in March 2001. Over the following years, sculptors from the Czech Republic worked with fragments, photographic records and surviving pieces to produce reconstructions — the statue copy, for example, was modelled from a preserved torso and completed in 2002. The column itself took shape through a mixture of materials: the Corinthian shaft was carved from Indian sandstone, a statue copy made in Božanovský sandstone, while the pedestal was supplied by the Italian town of Vitorchiano (Pietra Dorata). Reconstruction work that began in mid-February 2020 was substantially concluded by early June and the new column was formally reinstalled and opened to the public on 15 August 2020 — a date deliberately meaningful both for Prague and, interestingly, for India - being the country's independence day.

That date, and the Indian stone, turned the column into more than an architectural restoration; they made it a visible link in a network of cultural exchange. For many Indians the fact that the long pink pillar came from Rajasthan — prepared in Jaipur and shipped via Mumbai — was a point of quiet pride, and commentators noted that the official inauguration on India’s Independence Day added symbolism to the ceremony. Yet the restoration was not universally welcomed in Prague. For some the column remains a contested symbol — a reminder of Habsburg and Catholic power — and the proposal for reconstruction met repeated resistance from city councils and from a group of 26 Czech art historians who publicly urged restraint. Proponents, including the mayor, argued that the project aimed less at a celebration of power than at preserving historic artistry; opponents saw a reinstallation as a divisive act. The debate shows how material choices (which stone, which sculptor) become stand-ins for competing memories of the city.

If Prague’s column is a study in how a city recovers and brings back heritage from overseas, India’s contemporary urban story is about scale and speed. India’s urban landscape is changing with an intensity rarely matched elsewhere: demographic shifts driven by rural-to-urban migration, a shift toward services and industry, and projections that by 2036 India’s towns and cities will house about 600 million people, with urban areas contributing close to 70% of GDP. These numbers — and the pressures they imply on housing, transport, sanitation and governance — appear repeatedly in recent policy analyses that call for integrated, people-centred planning rather than piecemeal expansion. The risks are familiar: fragmented planning, governance gaps and environmental strain can produce unchecked sprawl and social and spatial exclusion unless coordinated frameworks are put in place.

On the ground, India’s response to the growing urbanization requirement, has mixed innovation with uneven outcomes. The Sabarmati Riverfront Development in Ahmedabad, begun in 2004, aimed to convert an 11.25 km stretch of river into a public amenity — promenades, 42 parks, boating areas and a 28.5 km cycling track — and it has attracted visitors, won awards and transformed a once neglected waterside into a landmark. Yet the same project has been criticised for an elitist bias and for the displacement of informal settlements, a reminder that public-space improvement can coexist with social displacement. Similarly, Indore’s Slum Networking Project (1994) showed how investment in basic infrastructure — water, sanitation, drainage — combined with community participation can significantly improve lives, while also exposing the limits of technical solutions when the root causes of poverty and housing shortfalls remain unaddressed. The Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment in Mumbai, a long-running, phased regeneration led by a community trust since 2009, exemplifies yet another tension: high-density renewal that promises new homes and infrastructure while forcing complex negotiations over heritage, tenure and resident displacement.

Those tensions — between public good and displacement, between technical excellence and social equity — point to why technology alone will not resolve urban exclusion. Yet technology is fast becoming an essential instrument in the planner’s toolbox. A high-profile partnership announced in September 2025 between Tata Consultancy Services and IIT Kanpur’s AIRAWAT Research Foundation is an example. The collaboration plans to use artificial intelligence, remote sensing and digital twin technologies to enable rapid ‘what-if’ scenario modelling for planners: from generating high-resolution air-quality maps (integrating satellite and in-situ sensor data) to forecasting flood risk, optimizing green space and simulating land-use futures before they are built. The ambition is to turn cities into dynamic systems that can be modelled, tested and refined, so that interventions are both predictive and human-centered.

But this is a cautionary tale as much as a hopeful one. A recent survey of Indian urban renewal projects argues that successes are always partial; they require sustained communication, genuine community participation, and long-term management plans to prevent facilities from decaying or becoming enclaves for those who can pay. Technical systems — digital twins, satellite maps, AI models — can sharpen decisions and expose trade-offs, but they cannot themselves decide who moves, who stays and on what terms. Sustainable urbanization, analysts insist, will require marrying technological tools with governance reforms, inclusive land policies and a politics responsive to small towns as much as megacities.

Seen together, the Prague column and India’s urban experiments tell a common story about cities as layered settlements: layers of stone and policy, memory and modelling. The Prague Column is an object of recovered craftsmanship — a shaft quarried in Rajasthan and chiselled to stand again in a European square — and Indian urban planning is a process of creating new urban commons and new abilities to plan for the future. Both demand attention to material provenance (what the column is made of), to ritual timing (the choice of an inauguration date), and to human purpose (who the rebuilding serves). Neither history nor technology is sufficient alone; each becomes most valuable when combined: when heritage projects are sensitive to contested memories, and when high-tech planning is rooted in the everyday needs of citizens.

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