Property buyers in Islamabad rarely ask who drew the master plan. They ask about plot sizes, prices, how far a block sits from the main boulevard — fair questions, since those decide whether you can afford to buy. But there’s a quieter decision underneath all of it, made years before those numbers existed, and it tends to matter more over a fifteen-year hold than most of what gets discussed in a sales office. Somebody decided all that before a single bulldozer showed up, and for DHA Gandhara — the project also sold under the name DHA Phase 9 — that somebody is a Singapore consultancy called Surbana Jurong. Most people signing plot booking forms wouldn’t recognise the name if you said it to them.
Who Is Surbana Jurong?
So who are they? Not a boutique studio that landed a lucky contract. Surbana Jurong formed in 2015 out of a merger between two older Singaporean bodies — Surbana International Consultants and Jurong International Holdings — and today it’s wholly owned by Temasek, the investment arm of the Singapore government. Trace the lineage back and you land inside the Housing and Development Board, the agency that designed more than a million public flats across Singapore. The Jurong half came out of JTC Corporation’s technical services division, which laid out dozens of industrial estates during Singapore’s push to industrialise. Put simply, this firm’s original job was solving Singapore’s own housing crisis at national scale, and everything it does abroad grew out of that.
A Track Record Worth Checking
Numbers back the reputation up better than adjectives do. Trade publication Engineering News-Record runs an annual ranking of international design firms, and Surbana Jurong sits comfortably inside the top 25. Its China work alone includes three projects commissioned directly by national governments rather than private developers — Tianjin’s Eco-city, the Suzhou Industrial Park, and Chongqing’s Liangjiang New Park. Add the 2009 master plan drawn up for Kigali in Rwanda, planning input on India’s new state capital at Amaravati, and the Bandar Cassia township outside Penang, and a pattern emerges: nobody hands this kind of assignment out casually. Miscalculate the drainage on something the scale of Tianjin and the fallout isn’t a missed deadline — it’s neighbourhoods underwater for decades.
Why That Experience Matters Here
Drawing plots on a grid is the easy half of this job. The hard half is everything nobody sees on a brochure map — pipe capacity for a population that doesn’t exist yet, power and water routes decided before the first foundation is dug, betting correctly on how much traffic a road needs to carry two decades from now. That’s the gap between a firm that plans and a firm that just draws. When Surbana Jurong talks about water-sensitive design and climate resilience in its own materials, it doesn’t read like a marketing checklist so much as terminology a team uses because they’ve had to justify storm-water math to a government planning office.
Why an Outside Planner at All?
DHA has never needed help selling plots — it’s planned and marketed schemes across Pakistan for decades using its own people. Bringing in a foreign consultancy for Gandhara was a deliberate move away from the familiar formula of rectangular blocks and uniform road widths that shows up phase after phase elsewhere, likely aimed at the buyer DHA wants this time: overseas Pakistanis and younger professionals who’ve lived somewhere with real zoning discipline.
What Surbana Jurong Actually Did
What did Surbana Jurong actually do? Based on what’s publicly documented, their scope is the master plan and urban design — zoning between residential, commercial, and green space, road hierarchy, the broad infrastructure framework. They didn’t build anything; construction belongs to DHA and its partner, Habib Rafiq Private Limited. A master plan is a blueprint, and somebody still has to build to it honestly once the drawings are signed off.
Roads, Parks, and Water Planning
Look across Surbana Jurong’s other work and a pattern repeats: arterial roads built to move traffic, internal roads built to slow it down, green corridors rather than one token park, commercial zones people can walk to instead of drive to. DHA Gandhara‘s plan reportedly follows the same logic. Water deserves its own mention — societies around the twin cities haven’t always managed monsoon drainage well, and anyone who’s bought a low block during a bad August knows what that means. A firm that’s designed for flood-prone deltas starts from different assumptions about storm water than one that’s only worked flat, dry ground, though whether Gandhara benefits from that a decade out depends entirely on execution.
Why This Affects Resale Value
Road width and park placement get treated as cosmetic in most sales conversations, but they aren’t. A poor road hierarchy backs up traffic at one or two chokepoints every evening, which shows up years later as weaker commercial rents and slower resale. Undersized drainage floods the same blocks every monsoon, and buyers remember — those plots sit at a permanent discount no marketing fixes. It’s a big part of why certain DHA phases elsewhere still trade at a premium fifteen or twenty years after launch, while comparable schemes down the road have gone flat.
Set Against Earlier DHA Phases
Most earlier DHA developments were planned in-house, following a fairly predictable formula — rectangular blocks, standard road widths, not much variation phase to phase. Nothing wrong with that for its era, but it wasn’t built around today’s traffic volumes or Islamabad’s increasingly unpredictable monsoons. Gandhara’s departure from that habit is genuine; whether residents feel the difference won’t be clear until later phases are built and lived in, not just rendered.
What This Means for Investors and Residents
For an investor, a credible international planner lowers certain risks without eliminating them — a signal the layout was tested against real benchmarks rather than sketched to fit the maximum number of plots. For someone who eventually moves in, the payoff, assuming the plan survives contact with construction, should look like shorter drives within the society, parks that function instead of sitting fenced off, utilities that don’t fail in year five. None of that is guaranteed by a good name on a master plan; it depends on whether DHA and HRL hold the line during construction, when cutting corners is cheapest and least visible.
Final Thoughts
A master plan is a promise on paper until people are actually living inside it. Surbana Jurong’s involvement gives Gandhara a planning pedigree few Pakistani housing schemes can claim — but a strong name attached to a project isn’t the same thing as a strong result. The actual verdict won’t come from any of that, though — it’ll come later, from things like how badly traffic snarls up at evening rush hour, whether the drainage copes the first time a real monsoon hits, whether those green belts stay usable or slowly turn into fenced-off dirt nobody maintains. Judge Gandhara by what eventually stands on the ground, not by whose name sold you on it.