Nestled in a landscape full of chalets in the Swiss style and freshly cut green meadows, in the shadow of the Sahyadri hills, Aamby Valley is a green oasis in the dust of Maharashtra. In many respects, Aamby Valley looks more like a luxury holiday resort rather than an exclusive utopia. It boasts one of the best climates of the country, with temperatures that rarely exceed 32 ° C and gentle breezes throughout the year.
There are the water parks, hiking trails, climbing walls, a golf course of 18 holes, 5 star restaurants, a hospital with 1500 beds and an airport for private jets. Aamby Valley looks very much like an abandoned Hollywood set. One of the most glaring examples is Aamby Valley City and is also not far from Mumbai on the banks of another artificial lake. In this case it is a gated community for the super rich who are offered the opportunity to fly to and from the Indian financial capital aboard a private jet.
With its golf courses, jet-skiing and the artificial rock walls, Aamby Valley City is like, more than a city, an amusement park for adults ensnared by the idea to spend a weekend in a villa with a spa tub on each balcony. Here, as in Lavasa, the architects have not been able to resist the romance of the exotic with only instead of the Mediterranean port, there are the exclusive Burmese Chalets, whatever they may be. Despite some stylistic aberration, the phenomenon of new urban centers seems destined to take hold.
The city's rules, are reminiscent of a sense of law and order from the Singaporean flavor. There is a certain excitement among the new rich of the country for an insolent, audacious India claimed its place in the world. And the thought goes, in an era of outsourcing, high technology and nuclear weapons, the image of India abroad that cannot be reduced to elephants, maharajas and saris.
Aamby Valley gives Indians an opportunity to escape from their own country. You would wish you were 10 years younger, so you could enjoy it all the more. Aamby Valley is run by a private company, the Sahara group of companies that had launched a national airline, operates television and banking networks in northern India.
Lavasa
The houses are built next to each other and painted in bright colors. Behind them there is a hill covered with trees and dotted with villas. In front of a small creek around which are bars, shops and restaurants. Sounds familiar? Probably yes, but here by the Warasgaon, an artificial lake in central India, the reference to the most famous seaside village of India is less obvious than it seems spread out over 32 thousand hectares of hilly land.
Behind this project that has already put on the market there is much more simple and somewhat casual promise of a Mediterranean retreat. It is the first project attempted in India to develop a new urban center with an economy that works 365 days a year and that is able to offer a quality of life greater than that of other Indian cities.
No wonder then that the highway from Mumbai to Pune is littered with billboards of residential complexes, townships or, as in the case of Lavasa city with escape routes that promise a life in which everything is at hand from cinemas, shops, restaurants and in which one can live a life away from dirt, inefficiency and the surrounding misery.
