
Lessons from Gurgaon, India's private city (2014) [pdf] - yummyfajitas
https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/Lessons%20from%20Gurgaon.pdf
======
captn3m0
Abstract from the author's Publications page:

>In just thirty years, Gurgaon has grown from a tiny hamlet to a city of
nearly two million people and it has done so based almost entirely on the
private provision of public goods, including transportation, utilities, and
security. In some rankings, Gurgaon is the best city in India in which to live
and work (Behl 2009). Gurgaon, however, lacks important infrastructure,
especially in areas such as sewage and electricity where the optimal scale
exceeds that of most builders. Thus, for large-scale infrastructure, important
externalities are not internalized. We examine where Gurgaon has succeeded,
where it has failed, and how people are adapting to both the successes and the
failures. We compare Gurgaon with other private cities built on a different
model, including Jamshedpur in India and Walt Disney World in the United
States. The developing world, including India, is urbanizing rapidly. We draw
lessons from Gurgaon to suggest how new private cities could be built on an
even-greater scale, thus internalizing externalities while still keeping the
advantages of private provision.

[0]:
[https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/TabarrokPublishedPapers.html](https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/TabarrokPublishedPapers.html)

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ams6110
> Gurgaon, however, lacks important infrastructure, especially in areas such
> as sewage and electricity where the optimal scale exceeds that of most
> builders.

I'm not sure I see how this explanation makes sense. How can a bunch of
bumbling elected city councils manage to construct adequate water and sewer
works, and private builders who actually know what they are doing cannot.

~~~
bane
It's like roads. Private builders enter into agreements all the time to enter
into deals with local governments where they'll expand roads or whatever right
around where they're developing. If you get lucky you'll have a contiguous
string of adjacent developers and you'll end up with a nice road for a few
miles. If you're unlucky, you'll end up with 4 lane divided road-farm road-4
lane divided road-farm road, off and on for miles and miles and it's pretty
much the worst.

Private developers don't have incentive to build a national highway system,
they'll just build whatever is the minimum necessary that figures into their
profit model.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Private developers will build whatever people want, which sometimes is
completely unlike what people need. Sometime back, there was a recently built
over-55 community discussed here. It looked just like your generic
subdivision. One wonders how much misery will be there 20 years from now. Wide
roads without sidewalks are not good for people with low mobility and vision
problems, and there is no adequate hospital and nursing services around, not
even a food store within close distance. The future in that development will
be fun to watch.

~~~
bane
> Private developers will build whatever people want

I think maybe a better way to think of it is that developers will build
whatever makes them money -- a good enough proxy for wants in many cases, but
not for all.

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vadym909
I have friends that live and work there and they swear they wouldn't if they
had an option. Gurgaon and NOIDA on the opposite end of Delhi grew because
real estate prices were skyrocketing in Delhi. Multinational companies
outsourcing to captive centers in India wanted cheap office space and
therefore setup in Gurgaon. Outside of the glass and steel towers are potholed
roads that never get fixed. It takes >1 hr to get to from Delhi even though it
is just 15 miles because of bad traffic controls. There is no assured water or
electricity. I hope people don't take lessons from Gurgaon. Older cities like
Mumbai, Chandigarh and New Delhi are still better.

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cconcepts
I've spent time in Gurgaon, and I hypothesize that some of the perceived
successes of the city were more about marketing and social positioning than
anything else.

It is "the place to be" for the simple reason that other young, wealthy up and
comers are seen there too. This is a much more powerful drawcard in certain
circles than whether there are proper municipal facilities or not.

similar things have been achieved across India, EG Mumbai's Bandra-Kurla
complex. Property developers well understand their target market's desire to
appear a certain way and leverage this knowledge extremely well.

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ramgorur
I do not agree, this the worst place to live in haryana, "corporations putting
up glass buildings" is not a good metric to measure progress.

I think rural haryana is a better than gurgaon even without 24 hr electricity,
there you can at least breathe.

