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34 Reading India invents a city Read the text about Lavasa, a new city in India. Answer the questions (1–8) using a maximum of four words. Write your answers in the spaces provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. Four-word answers 13 India invents a city At –rst glance this could be Italy – the promenade, the cafés and ice-cream parlours, the terraces of little apartment houses. Even the name of the place, Lavasa, sounds vaguely Italian. But look again and it clearly isn’t Italy. It’s too clean, too new. And there are hardly any people. What makes it all the more improbable is that Lavasa is in India, the land of auto-rickshaws and slum dogs, of sweat and dust and litter. With only a handful of residents, Lavasa is a city-in-waiting. But its corporate backers believe it will soon represent a new model of urban development and governance in India – a country where the term ‘city planning’ has long been a contradiction in terms. Lavasa lies in the mountains some 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, India’s –nancial and enter- tainment capital, and 40 miles west of Pune, a growing hub of so ware programming and computer animation. If all goes according to plan, Lavasa will eventually house more than 300,000 people. It will have a world-class medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools, sports acade- mies, a space camp, and, its developers hope, animation and –lm studios, so ware-develop- ment companies, biotech labs and law and archi- tectural –rms – all of the knowledge industries at the heart of the ‘new India’. Lavasa is the brainchild of Ajit Gulabchand, a high-pro–le billionaire industrialist and the chairman of a conglomerate known for mega- projects like bridges and dams. It’s the –rst city in India to be planned accord- ing to the principles of ‘New Urbanism’, which advocate walkable cities that mix business and residential development, o†er mixed-income housing and preserve green space. Lavasa will provide centrally pressurised running water, reliable electricity, sewage treatment, garbage collection, and even –ber- optic connections in every home. ese things are so alien in India that when prospective house buyers –rst saw Lavasa, many asked why they couldn’t see water tanks on the roofs and whether the price included a septic tank. Perhaps the most radical thing about Lavasa is the fact that it is built and governed by a private corporation. Most Indian cities are run largely by regional states, so urban development falls to overstretched bureaucrats or state politicians chie£y interested in winning over rural voters. e Lavasa Corporation has hired an experienced American city administrator to run the city: under state law the Corporation can assume many of the functions of the state, though it does not have police powers and cannot levy taxes. However it employs private security guards and raises funds from home sales, rentals and revenue-sharing agreements with businesses. Most big development projects are controver- sial and Lavasa is no exception. e biggest criticism is how it can claim to represent a model of urban development for India, where 830 million people live in poverty, when it caters mainly to the rich. e least expensive apart- ments in Lavasa are out of reach for most middle- class Indians. e developers talk of starter homes and a†ordable rental apartments but then worry that they’ll deteriorate into slums. ere is much talk of sustainability and ‘bio- mimicry’ (copying nature), yet Lavasa feels strikingly inauthentic. Even its name is arti–cial, a meaningless word dreamed up by an American branding –rm. Gulabchand argues that India’s need for new cities is so pressing that the country can’t stand by until they evolve on their own. “Why should we look to the past? India is a young society. is is an experiment. We may not get a perfect city,” he says “but this is a model for a more vibrant, inclusive, greener place in the future, one that still has soul.” Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv