Inside Lavasa, India’s first entirely private city built from scratch
▻http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/19/inside-lavasa-indian-city-built-private-corporation
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 deeply controversial, 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.
According to the project’s promotional materials, life in Lavasa – two hours from IT hub Pune, and four hours from Mumbai – “has been envisioned as energetic yet calm, aspirational yet affordable, hi-tech yet simple and urban yet close to nature”. A promotional brochure describes it as a “stirring adventure”, “an enterprise that will redefine the very notion of a city as we know it.” (Upon entering Lavasa, you must brace yourself for an onslaught of corporate bromides.)
