Sleepy in Songdo, Korea’s Smartest City

> To promote walkability, developers placed venues like shopping malls and convention centers within a 15-minute walk from Central Park.

Think about that. The "Central Park" is completely surrounded (to a walking distance of about 30 minutes) by hotels/convention centers and shopping malls. No residential. No high-density commercial. Few eateries, all chains. By some heinous oversight, no banking facilities either. (I got stuck there once without cash and without money on my transit card. It took me 3 hours to find a bank and leave.) It is quite literally a desert, designed to cater to conferences and business travellers, rather than residents.

Songdo is a culturally dead city. The building density is high (all those 30-floor apartment complexes), but the land use planning/zoning is exceptionally poor. Apartment complexes kilometers on a side need to be mixed in with commercial space; instead, shopping areas are siloed into single buildings as you can see in the article pictures. There are few public-use indoor spaces, aside from churches which have gobbled up commercial space. The result is shopping districts and living disticts, kilometers apart.

The large block designs result in distances that make walking infeasible, and don't get me started on the lack of shade. Large plazas without trees or grass (everywhere! In residential areas, commercial areas, universities) make the summer heat unbearable for pedestrians.

The article mentions that the city was struggling to attract foreign companies. One thing they did about 10 years ago was give large land grants to universities: 1~5 square kilometers, far removed from the city center. These are served by subways and busses, but unlike other college towns, the zoning nearby is for office parks. As a result you have these huge university campuses with tens of thousands of students ... who would have to walk for an hour to get to any restaurants. At which point it is almost easier to take the bus to Seoul. Of course, the universities knew this. The entire ground floor of Yonsei University's new satellite campus is a parking garage; "sustainability" was always just buzzwords, and the "smart" city is a dystopian nightmare.

"Build it and they will come"

I spent a couple of days in Songdo and this was my experience, quite eery walking around at night, with nearly no cars. I almost started to miss the crowds of Seoul. Hopefully in a few years it will have a sense of community, something that can't be built with the typical ppalli-ppalli fashion. Smart cities everywhere seem to be plagued by this.