The firm behind Palm Jumeirah designed Dholera's 920 km² master plan.
Halcrow Group was founded in 1868 by Thomas Meik, a British civil engineer who started with river and harbor work in the northeast of England. Over 140 years, the firm grew into one of the world's largest infrastructure consultancies. Their portfolio reads like a list of humanity's most ambitious construction projects: the dredging of Dubai Creek, Port Rashid, Jebel Ali port, the Palm Jumeirah artificial island, and Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. In 2011, Halcrow was acquired by CH2M Hill (now Jacobs), adding American engineering capacity to their existing British and Middle Eastern expertise.
In May 2009, the Gujarat government and DMICDC appointed Halcrow to prepare the master plan for Dholera Special Investment Region. The mandate covered 920 square kilometers, making it one of the largest urban master planning exercises in the world at that time.
The choice was not random. Halcrow had spent decades working on coastal engineering and megastructure projects in the Gulf, where they dealt with similar challenges to what Dholera presents: flat, arid terrain; harsh climate; the need for large-scale water management and desalination; and the requirement to build entire urban systems from scratch. They understood how to plan cities on difficult terrain where nothing existed before. That experience was directly transferable to Dholera's saline, flat landscape on the Gulf of Khambhat.
Halcrow structured Dholera around a "Live-Work-Play" concept. The 920 km² area is divided into 12 core functional zones, each with a specific purpose (residential, industrial, commercial, institutional, recreational). These zones are linked by six sub-centers, which act as local service hubs so that residents do not need to travel across the entire city for basic amenities. The zoning is designed to minimize commute times and keep essential services within walking or short transit distance of residential areas.
The detailed design and construction supervision was contracted to AECOM, a global infrastructure firm with experience delivering projects at scale. AECOM's role is to translate the master plan into engineering drawings, manage contractors, and ensure that what gets built matches the original design intent. The firm uses Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to manage the enormous amount of data involved in planning a city of this size. Every utility line, every road alignment, every plot boundary exists in a digital twin of the city that can be updated as construction progresses.
When you buy a plot in Dholera, you are not buying into an unproven concept sketched by a local developer. You are buying into a master plan designed by one of the world's most experienced urban planning firms, backed by a construction management team with global project delivery credentials, and governed by a detailed zoning system that has already been approved by the Gujarat government. The planning is done. The infrastructure is being built. Your investment is in the execution phase, not the idea phase.
← Back to Vision