Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of press coverage of the under-construction ‘city’ Lavasa on the Pune – Mumbai route, and keeping the controversies aside, I realized that the idea is truly mind-boggling!
Reading ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, and playing Caesar IV was the closest we can get to imagining actually building and inhabiting a city, but there are people who have the gumption to go out and do exactly that in real life! Whether Lavasa will be the phenomenon of the decade or the squib of the century – only the listing on NSE will indicate, but whatever the result is, the sheer romanticism of building a whole city – ground up – on a virgin piece of land – is absolutely awesome!
There was a great ad which came out on the front flap of last week’s India Today, and the stats are quite amazing – really! Once complete, the city is supposed to be home to over 3 lakh inhabitants, and is designed to handle a tourist inflow of over 20 lakhs per year! The idea is so well conceptualized that several biggie companies have joined the bandwagon to set up a presence in the to-be-city. Apollo already has a huge hospital in the place, and several of India’s top hotel chains have picked up tracts of land. There are supposed to be 240 kms of paved roads which will connect the city and several bridges linking both sides of the lake (Lavasa is built on a huge lake and the sloping hills bordering it).
The picture in this post will remind anyone who’s played city-building games of their endeavour in front of their PCs, and getting a city like that up and running really stretches the limit of human imagination. (Click on it for a larger view)
Thousands of cities have been founded the world over by conquering civilizations and by great leaders, but normally they are not planned to be so huge. Our mega cities like Delhi started off as a small (relatively) enclaves and then grew on to become megapolises. But getting a city designed to accommodate so many thousands of families is a vision in itself! The concept of the city is such that people work, live, are entertained, eat, travel, and socialize in an area that can be walked around; or can be reached in just a few minutes by vehicle. But think of the complexities of designing so many things at once, and then making sure that they all integrate seamlessly.
There is bound to be a challenge in finding companies to create jobs in the new city, and then to find the people required to man those jobs. Unless that balance is struck, nothing else will come together. Once that is done and people start moving in, all the other things need to tie in. In ‘One Hundred years of Solitude’, Macondo is founded by accident, and it grows by itself (and also self-destructs). Lavasa, in contrast, has been planned to perfection (theoretically atleast), and if everything goes its way, could be the perfect solution to our teeming cities! Auroville (near Pondicherry) also follows a similar kind of a concept, but is rooted in the idea of a community living together irrespective of boundaries. Even after almost forty years of conceptualization, the town is yet to reach its full potential. But then, that is a whole different idea when compared to Lavasa – which is commercial in nature.
In a few years time, the new-city will take some sort of a shape, and it is bound to attract tourists – just to see the magnitude of the idea. Unless something drastic (a.k.a. Jairam Ramesh) freezes the idea!
