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Pranab K. Chakrawarti

Former Sonoma County Planning Director Pranab K. Chakrawarti passed away April 21, 2012, in Santa Rosa. He led the county planning department from 1977 through 1983. More recently, he consulted on development projects and held professorships in architecture and urban planning at several universities in Taiwan.

  During his time in Asia, he continued to maintain an apartment in Glen Ellen and lived there following retirement until suffering a heart attack in 2009. He was cared for by the staff at Oak Tree Lodge in Santa Rosa with assistance from Heartland and Sutter hospices in his final months.

  Born in 1935 at Midnapur, India, Pranab was the eldest amongst the six children of Kali Kinkar and Narayani Chakraborty. His grandfather was a scholar of Sanskrit and a leader of India’s freedom movement. He received bachelor of architecture and master of city and regional planning degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (India). After a brief sojourn as a lecturer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Pranab travelled to Greece to study and work with the noted city planner Constantinos Doxiadis and received a master of science degree in the field of ekistics, the study of human settlements, from the Athens Technological Institute.

  His career took him to London and Boston and in 1970 to California where he was a consultant to the Universal City project near Los Angeles and then planning director of the Murray-McCormick Environmental Group in Oakland before coming to Sonoma County, his chosen place to live.

  He is survived by his brothers, Tridib K. Chakrabarti and Basab Chakraborty; sisters, Gayatri Banerji and Maitreyi Ghatak; and five nephews and nieces. His nephew Utsav Chakrabarti lives in College Park, Md.

  The family will spread his ashes on the Ganges River, in accordance with Hindu traditions.