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Global Reach
support, there has been no eminent domain to help jump-start later stage negotiations or keep
costs down. A road bisecting the site cannot be moved due to perpetual easement rights of a
nearby village. While plans are on the drawing boards for a metro line, modern transit service
does not yet extend from Delhi out to Pioneer Park, a 15-mile trip. Nor does utility service—the
project will have its own dedicated water, sewage treatment, and electricity service.
Indian developer Pioneer Urban intends to build a new, sustainable urban community on the 75-acre
site, including high-rise residential towers with 3, 4, and 5-bedroom condominiums, a hotel, a highend
shopping complex, and a 10-acre park with sports fields and clubhouse facilities. Designs call
for an ecological community incorporating co-generation and centralized utility services to reclaim
energy; use of local materials in buildings and landscaping; and structures ranging from 4 to 49
stories that induce cooling breezes and provide shade to public spaces. It is SOM’s first master
planning project in India, although the firm is well-established in India through its New York office.
Schnair says the juxtaposition of old and modern India can be jarring, with office parks and hotels
co-existing with slums, small farms, or vast empty spaces next door. He shows a slide, part of a
larger presentation, of a multi-use office, retail, and residential complex that appears to sit in the
middle of nowhere, self-contained. There is a campus feel to such projects, which are designed to
emulate the look and feel of suburban communities in the U.S—in particular, Silicon Valley.
Clearly, the idea is first to create livable communities in which people live close to where they
work and second to build at higher density in order to provide more landscaped open space and
amenities within each project. But where development is placed is often driven by where land
can be acquired, not by how developments connect and interact with one another and with the
urban core nearby.
To date, Schnair says, SOM has focused on planning projects where a partner is not required and
it can do a greater share of the work. Most of that work is done through offshore entities for tax
purposes, although SOM has an onshore entity in India that can handle certain bids and back
office functions. The firm uses local partners to help with specific code, permitting, and other
regulatory matters. Schnair says government master planning is often rudimentary, frequently
leaving Indian planners and architects in uncharted territory when it comes to dealing with large
complex projects such as planned communities. An absence of government direction and an orderly
public review process increases uncertainty.
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