Brigade Gardenia our second enclave in
J.P. Nagar, fully booked

Brigade Gardenia, our 15-acre residential enclave in J.P. Nagar 8th Phase, is fully booked. Launched in September 2003, the project has 1025 apartments in five blocks of 15-storeys each. It also has the Augusta Club, with over 25,000 sft built-up space.

All the five blocks in Brigade Gardenia are at an advanced stage of construction and will be ready for occupation progressively from the next quarter. With extensive landscaping and over 85% open space, Brigade Gardenia will be a picturesque place when completed.

Serenity, our maiden venture in designing apartments exclusively for Senior Citizens, is also situated in Brigade Gardenia. Serenity is now nearing completion and will be ready for occupation from the third quarter of 2005.

Brigade Millennium: Magnolia Block
Completed

Magnolia, the second of five apartment blocks in the Brigade Millennium enclave has been completed and residents have started moving in.

Magnolia, along with Mayflower (also completed) and Cassia (nearing completion) Blocks, is fully booked.

A few spacious 4-bedroom apartments are available in Jacaranda and Laburnum Blocks, both of which are at advanced stages of construction.

Have Cities a Future?
Is urbanisation destroying our cities? Many fear that as cities grow more urbanised and dense, the infrastructure demands and social changes arising as a natural corollary will lead them to decline and, maybe, self-destruct.

Jane Jacobs wouldn't agree. Jacobs is a writer and activist whose thinking revolutionised city planning around the world (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, written in 1961, is arguably the most influential and inspiring American book on the inner workings and failings of cities). Jacobs is an advocate of ‘mixed-use’ urban development. She feels that to create community vitality and ‘cities that work’, urban areas should integrate business, commercial, social and residential uses, and ensure that people of different ages inhabit these spaces.

According to Jacobs, "Vital cities have marvellous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties... Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves". As for population density, she believes a high concentration of people is vital for city life, economic growth and prosperity.

Ramesh Ramanathan, founder of Janaagraha (a Bangalore-based movement that advocates citizens' participation in city development and administration), is also concerned about the economic, environmental, social and philosophical fallout of urbanisation. In his column in the Financial Times, third week March, 2005, he writes, “Beyond the good or bad of urbanisation, a third question is, can anything be done about it? The past two centuries of world history have had one singular, unmistakable trend—increasing urbanisation. In 1950, less than 30 per cent of the world's population were urban dwellers. 2007 will be a watershed year—beyond that, there will always be more of us living in cities than villages”.

What will this projection mean to our cities? According to Ramanathan, “All cities have an elan vital, a survival instinct that comes from a combination of public-spirited individuals, economic interests, political power; it is this energy that prevents a city from dying. Cities have constantly reinvented themselves. However, this requires that they be allowed to ‘find’ their destinies, and reshape themselves”.

Integrated enclaves:
The only route to sustainable
urban development

A view of the club and some of its outdoor facilities at Brigade Metropolis. All the spaces between the towers—a minimum of 100 ft—will be intensively and imaginatively landscaped. (An artist’s impression)

As city populations swell, civic authorities are hard pressed to provide the infrastructure required to meet current needs—let alone those of the future.

Bangalore's present population of 6 million is expected to cross 10 million by 2020. Bangalore is already facing problems created by water shortages, congestion (both human and vehicular), expensive real estate and a generally frenzied pace of life.

One solution—gaining popularity all over the world—is the concept of integrated enclaves: enclaves that combine residential, business, social and commercial spaces. Integrated enclaves encourage a city to grow in a sustainable manner. They create new pockets of urban activity, and by doing so help ‘decongest’ the city. And enclave campuses give residents the luxury of excellent amenities, complete security and a high-quality environment. It's not surprising, then, that enclaves are now the preferred choice of city dwellers everywhere, including Bangalore.

Brigade Group is the pioneer of integrated enclaves in Bangalore. Brigade Millennium in J.P. Nagar, raised existing benchmarks of excellence, to become a landmark project on Bangalore's cityscape.
Now we will be extending our track record with two new enclave projects that are larger, richer and more inspiring than any other we have undertaken so far. The first is Brigade Metropolis, a 36-acre integrated enclave on Whitefield Road. The second is Brigade Gateway, which covers 40 acres in the Malleswaram-Rajajinagar region. Both projects are trend setting in nature and have been conceptualised by the best architects, engineers and landscape designers.

Office occupancy costs
Total annual rent, taxes and operating expenses
$'000 per sqm (Jan 2005)

Tall buildings
Hong Kong has 7,417 skyscrapers, more than any other city, according to Emporis, a firm that tracks the construction of high-rises. By its definition, a building must be over 35 metres tall to qualify as a skyscraper. New York ranks second with 5,444 skyscrapers; Los Angeles has just 450. Chicago's Sears Tower has more floors than any of its rivals, though other skyscrapers are taller.