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Still half-built a decade after construction started, is Lavasa – India’s controversial $30bn mega-project – the brave new world for smart cities, or an expensive flop?
he All American Diner plays 1950s rock’n’roll through a tinny speaker, the retro booths are traditional red and the burgers are suitably oversized. The period decor and details are all right, but it all just feels so wrong.
The restaurant is 8,000 miles away from where the “diner” was born on the northeastern coast of the United States in the late 19th century. It sits on another continent, in a city that until recently didn’t exist, and now, a decade since construction began, sits just one-fifth finished.
Outside the window, it is not small town America that is viewable, but the rolling, verdant Sahyadri mountains of western India. On an August afternoon, it’s the permanent downpour of monsoon season – not late summer sunshine – beating on the sidewalk outside. The soundtrack is a tired collection of rock’n’roll, a dozen or so songs on repeat. Smartly dressed waiters greatly outnumber their clients and watch customers’ every move like hawks. There is no folksy smalltalk. When you take a sip of water, your glass is refilled before you have the chance to set it down.
American diner folklore traces the birth of the roadside “lunch wagon” to Rhode Island, 1872. Around the same time, the British Raj was establishing itself in India. Among the signature institutions of British imperial rule were “hill stations” – conurbations built high in the hills for colonial officials tired of the mad hustle and bustle of Indian cities.
Since independence in 1948, no new hill stations have been constructed – untilLavasa, the first city in India to be built whole cloth by a corporation, and where this simulacrum of an American diner sits. Officials in the city say they have already entertained official delegations from China, Latin America and Europe, keen to see if this might be the brave new world for 21st century cities.
Lavasa’s influences reportedly include the picturesque Italian fishing village Portofino, for which this street is named. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Lavasa is the $30bn (£20bn) baby of Ajit Gulabchand – a high-profile billionaire industrialist known as much for his mega-projects like highways and dams as for installing a helipad on his office building in Mumbai – and his powerhouse Hindustan Construction Company (HCC). It is an ambitious, and deeplycontroversial, project to build an entire private city from scratch. The name Lavasa is the invention of a US branding firm, having no meaning, but meant to conjure up images of mystery and exoticism with its abstract poeticism and hint at Hindi.
The Hindustan Construction Company claims 80% of Lavasa’s population will live a 15-minute walk from the centre. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Lavasa is supposed to be modelled on principles of New Urbanism, the urban design movement that promotes walkable communities with much of the land set aside for green and open space. The corporation claim 80% of the population will be able to access Dasve town centre with a 15-minute walk, for example. Lavasa’s other influences reportedly include the picturesque Italian fishing village Portofino in the Italian Riviera, which lends its name to some of the city’s streets and buildings.
Once the rains come, these gulleys will fill with water and resemble an Italian canal. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
“The company has sweeping rights over nearly all aspects of the life of the residents,” warned Persis Taraporevala, a researcher at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi in a 2013 article. “It has the right to evict, to tax, to determine the use and design of land, to change the governing body and to change the rules while controlling the rights of people to object to these processes.”
The least expensive apartments in Lavasa now sell for between $17,000 and $36,000 – out of reach for most middle-class Indians. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
While Lavasa is privately built, it has also received state support. Lavasa was made possible by the state government of Maharashtra introducing what is called “enabling legislation” to encourage building of new hill stations as a strategy to boost tourism. The hill station legislation literally cleared the way for Lavasa. In the process, 3,000 villagers from more than a dozen villages were reportedly displaced.
smart cities” one of the totem policies of his administration, although it is hard to make out what a smart city actually is.
“As long as people feel happy and proud of the place, then it’s a smart city,” said Suresh Pendharkar, Lavasa’s chief planner, who was previously part of the development authority of Navi Mumbai, the 1971 project to depopulate the west-coast megacity. “It is a catchphrase – in order to really fire up the imagination of people and make them do something new.”
Lavasa has much in common with the old colonial hill stations of the British Raj.
The New Cities Foundation, a Swiss non-profit focused on “the 21st century global city”, describes the benefits of Lavasa as those “distinctly lacking in most current Indian cities: abundant access to nature, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, good schools, a functional and clean city, an uninterrupted power supply, high-speed internet, e-governance, drinkable tap water and a walkable city in which the need for cars is minimal”.
It is, however, not designed to help India’s urban poor. The least expensive apartments in Lavasa now sell for between $17,000 and $36,000 – out of reach for most middle-class Indians. Gulabchand says the company has modified its plans to include affordable rental apartments for young professionals, as well as “starter homes” that will rent for as little as $11 a month, a price he says labourers and domestic servants can pay.
Along Portofino Street, buildings are still being completed. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Lavasa’s planners insist that construction on all five towns will be finished within 20 years, although walking around Dasve, that looks ambitious. It still looks half-built.
Back along the road to the centre of town, there is more construction works with posters declaring: “This summer, the coolest indulgences await you at Lavasa!” Flat concrete expanses stretch out on either side of the road on top of which gargantuan puddles collect the rainwater. Over the bridge traversing the Warasgaon Lake is the Lavasa International Convention Centre, the biggest building in the town, and meant to be a major draw for international events. It’s closed this week, and has long black damp stains across its roof. Not the kind of place – yet – you can imagine as an international events hub.
Up from the convention centre, on the way out of town, sits the Dasvino Town and Country Club, a vast complex with a gym, spa, snooker room, table tennis room, squash courts, outdoor swimming pool looking out across the water and a restaurant. But it also has very few people.
Jenny Peiray is a guest relations manager at the Club House. She never expected to be working in hospitality. Originally from the Indian state of Manipur in the extreme east of the country, Peiray moved for work. In Lavasa, after deductions, she gets around 13,800 rupees (£137) a month for her six days of work.
Back at the Waterfront Shaw, Dhaval and Vidhi Shah, a couple from Mumbai, are just leaving. “Because of the rainy season, the weather is very good,” says Dhaval, an engineer. In Lavasa – hard for a Brit to comprehend – the constant downpours are a draw. “In Mumbai, it’s very hot, but you can relax here.” He added: “We found out about Lavasa from our friends and relatives – they said everything is planned and works. Nothing in India is planned; this city is efficient and clean.”
His wife, Vidhi, chimes in: “It doesn’t solve the problem of Indian cities – it’s very expensive. This is more a holiday place for most people. I would move here if I had the money, but the facilities are not great. The hospital and education are not the biggest. For living here, it’s not that suitable.”
If Vidhi is right, it will have huge implications for the future of urban development for decades to come – and make one Indian oligarch considerably poorer.
he All American Diner plays 1950s rock’n’roll through a tinny speaker, the retro booths are traditional red and the burgers are suitably oversized. The period decor and details are all right, but it all just feels so wrong.
The restaurant is 8,000 miles away from where the “diner” was born on the northeastern coast of the United States in the late 19th century. It sits on another continent, in a city that until recently didn’t exist, and now, a decade since construction began, sits just one-fifth finished.
Outside the window, it is not small town America that is viewable, but the rolling, verdant Sahyadri mountains of western India. On an August afternoon, it’s the permanent downpour of monsoon season – not late summer sunshine – beating on the sidewalk outside. The soundtrack is a tired collection of rock’n’roll, a dozen or so songs on repeat. Smartly dressed waiters greatly outnumber their clients and watch customers’ every move like hawks. There is no folksy smalltalk. When you take a sip of water, your glass is refilled before you have the chance to set it down.
American diner folklore traces the birth of the roadside “lunch wagon” to Rhode Island, 1872. Around the same time, the British Raj was establishing itself in India. Among the signature institutions of British imperial rule were “hill stations” – conurbations built high in the hills for colonial officials tired of the mad hustle and bustle of Indian cities.
Since independence in 1948, no new hill stations have been constructed – untilLavasa, the first city in India to be built whole cloth by a corporation, and where this simulacrum of an American diner sits. Officials in the city say they have already entertained official delegations from China, Latin America and Europe, keen to see if this might be the brave new world for 21st century cities.
Lavasa’s influences reportedly include the picturesque Italian fishing village Portofino, for which this street is named. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Lavasa is the $30bn (£20bn) baby of Ajit Gulabchand – a high-profile billionaire industrialist known as much for his mega-projects like highways and dams as for installing a helipad on his office building in Mumbai – and his powerhouse Hindustan Construction Company (HCC). It is an ambitious, and deeplycontroversial, project to build an entire private city from scratch. The name Lavasa is the invention of a US branding firm, having no meaning, but meant to conjure up images of mystery and exoticism with its abstract poeticism and hint at Hindi.
The Hindustan Construction Company claims 80% of Lavasa’s population will live a 15-minute walk from the centre. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Lavasa is supposed to be modelled on principles of New Urbanism, the urban design movement that promotes walkable communities with much of the land set aside for green and open space. The corporation claim 80% of the population will be able to access Dasve town centre with a 15-minute walk, for example. Lavasa’s other influences reportedly include the picturesque Italian fishing village Portofino in the Italian Riviera, which lends its name to some of the city’s streets and buildings.
Once the rains come, these gulleys will fill with water and resemble an Italian canal. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
“The company has sweeping rights over nearly all aspects of the life of the residents,” warned Persis Taraporevala, a researcher at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi in a 2013 article. “It has the right to evict, to tax, to determine the use and design of land, to change the governing body and to change the rules while controlling the rights of people to object to these processes.”
The least expensive apartments in Lavasa now sell for between $17,000 and $36,000 – out of reach for most middle-class Indians. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
While Lavasa is privately built, it has also received state support. Lavasa was made possible by the state government of Maharashtra introducing what is called “enabling legislation” to encourage building of new hill stations as a strategy to boost tourism. The hill station legislation literally cleared the way for Lavasa. In the process, 3,000 villagers from more than a dozen villages were reportedly displaced.
smart cities” one of the totem policies of his administration, although it is hard to make out what a smart city actually is.
“As long as people feel happy and proud of the place, then it’s a smart city,” said Suresh Pendharkar, Lavasa’s chief planner, who was previously part of the development authority of Navi Mumbai, the 1971 project to depopulate the west-coast megacity. “It is a catchphrase – in order to really fire up the imagination of people and make them do something new.”
Lavasa has much in common with the old colonial hill stations of the British Raj.
The New Cities Foundation, a Swiss non-profit focused on “the 21st century global city”, describes the benefits of Lavasa as those “distinctly lacking in most current Indian cities: abundant access to nature, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, good schools, a functional and clean city, an uninterrupted power supply, high-speed internet, e-governance, drinkable tap water and a walkable city in which the need for cars is minimal”.
It is, however, not designed to help India’s urban poor. The least expensive apartments in Lavasa now sell for between $17,000 and $36,000 – out of reach for most middle-class Indians. Gulabchand says the company has modified its plans to include affordable rental apartments for young professionals, as well as “starter homes” that will rent for as little as $11 a month, a price he says labourers and domestic servants can pay.
Along Portofino Street, buildings are still being completed. Photograph: Spencer Wynne/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Lavasa’s planners insist that construction on all five towns will be finished within 20 years, although walking around Dasve, that looks ambitious. It still looks half-built.
Back along the road to the centre of town, there is more construction works with posters declaring: “This summer, the coolest indulgences await you at Lavasa!” Flat concrete expanses stretch out on either side of the road on top of which gargantuan puddles collect the rainwater. Over the bridge traversing the Warasgaon Lake is the Lavasa International Convention Centre, the biggest building in the town, and meant to be a major draw for international events. It’s closed this week, and has long black damp stains across its roof. Not the kind of place – yet – you can imagine as an international events hub.
Up from the convention centre, on the way out of town, sits the Dasvino Town and Country Club, a vast complex with a gym, spa, snooker room, table tennis room, squash courts, outdoor swimming pool looking out across the water and a restaurant. But it also has very few people.
Jenny Peiray is a guest relations manager at the Club House. She never expected to be working in hospitality. Originally from the Indian state of Manipur in the extreme east of the country, Peiray moved for work. In Lavasa, after deductions, she gets around 13,800 rupees (£137) a month for her six days of work.
Back at the Waterfront Shaw, Dhaval and Vidhi Shah, a couple from Mumbai, are just leaving. “Because of the rainy season, the weather is very good,” says Dhaval, an engineer. In Lavasa – hard for a Brit to comprehend – the constant downpours are a draw. “In Mumbai, it’s very hot, but you can relax here.” He added: “We found out about Lavasa from our friends and relatives – they said everything is planned and works. Nothing in India is planned; this city is efficient and clean.”
His wife, Vidhi, chimes in: “It doesn’t solve the problem of Indian cities – it’s very expensive. This is more a holiday place for most people. I would move here if I had the money, but the facilities are not great. The hospital and education are not the biggest. For living here, it’s not that suitable.”
If Vidhi is right, it will have huge implications for the future of urban development for decades to come – and make one Indian oligarch considerably poorer.
But its a good try let's see weather it succeed or become another closed community living in oblivion
