Songdo, South Korea: City of the Future?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I really wish this was less of a puff-piece for the "City of the Future" Songdo (TM) and looked more into how land was acquired, who owns the rights to land and property, who pays for things, how much does it cost to live there now, etc. It has a skeptical tone but it fails to address any of the real questions people might have about living there or its history.
If it's so empty, why hasn't it been filled up by people looking for low-cost housing? (If the supply is high, <fill in armchair economics here>)
There are few cities with this level of infrastructure planning springing up in the west as far as I know. Lots of people are pointing to empty cities in NK, China, and the UAE but lack of coverage there can be explained by their hostility to free journalism. Are SK voices just as restricted?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City
There's all kinds of secondary reasons for this. Seoul has an astonishingly high population density for a developed country and controls such a vast percentage of the economy that municipal decisions basically act as national policy. Satellite cities all basically follow whatever Seoul is doing and other than Pusan, there's strikingly little major cultural of social development. The rest of Korea is basically farms, minor industrial centers and museums/monuments.
Other smaller issues are things like the problems with depopulation of the rural areas: for example, farmers regularly import wives from nearby countries, leading to a spate of new laws regulating this practice.
So development efforts like Songdo and Sejong are basically intended to spread the population centers around a bit, attract foreign investment and continue the momentum South Korea currently enjoys in becoming a regional and global player.
With Songdo in particular, the attraction is specific, it's the virtual geographic center of the North East Asian regional economy:
Shenzhen, Taipei and Tokyo are all around 3 hour flights to Songdo. This makes business meetings in or from Songdo a (long but doable) single day affair, while doing the same in Seoul adds enough hours* that it turns them into 2 day events.
A trip from Incheon International to central Seoul is easily a 2 hour one-way trip in traffic. Doing the math, 6 hours in the air, 4-5 hours driving, 4 hours in security and waiting to take off (2 hours each way) and you're looking at a very long day.
So why not just do this in Incheon? Incheon is like Seoul, a densely packed, established city mostly existing as a port city for handling imports and exports of goods. It's not the greatest place to do business deals in a nice setting. It's hard to clear out enough space to make work and btw, the road to Incheon passes through Songdo. This arrangement basically makes Songdo the nice showroom for Korea for doing business while the ugly warehouse in back is reserved for the chaos of execution.
Cost to live in Songdo isn't bad. In fact, most of Korea outside of Seoul is fairly reasonable.
http://www.realestatesongdo.com/
For example, A 145m^2 (about 1500 sq ft) 3 bedroom apartment is running about 550million Won or about half a million U.S. Dollars. A similar sized apartment rents there for ~$2400/mo.
By comparison, a similar sized apartment in Namdaemun (an area in Seoul) runs around $1.2million.
Why aren't people moving there? Probably because it's inconvenient. People get really invested in the places they live, and the Seoul metropolitan area is huge. There's nicer places to live for a similar cost in the Seoul Capital Area that are better established and offer more benefits for the average non-international jet-setter.
More importantly, Songdo is part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone, which offers various tax incentives to qualifying residents and businesses, incentives which the average person wouldn't be able to take advantage of. The article focuses too much on Koreans living there. Songdo is really intended as a place for foreigners doing business in South Korea to comfortably live and for South Koreans engaged in International Business to interface with them, a kind of Korean Dubai. For example, highlights are a Golf Course (expensive as sin for Koreans), an International School district and an Opera House.
More reading here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Free_Economic_Zone
this one in particular is basically a brochure outlining most of what I've provided above and providing a few other interesting points, particularly about the benefits of the Free Economic Zone that Songdo is within.
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity...
If South Korean government were really serious about addressing the problem of over-centralization of Korea (hint: the present administration isn't), they wouldn't have built yet another new city reachable by Seoul's subway system.
In contrast, the construction of Sejong city (pioneered by the late president Roh Moo-Hyun) was fraught with legal/political objections from conservatives, who were worried that such a move would undermine their traditional position of power (and potentially do something to finally stabilize the housing market of Seoul, though that's rather far-fetched). The struggle culminated in our own Constitutional Court declaring the original Sejong project (which wanted to make it the new capital of governance) as unconstitutional, on the grounds that it would be against Gyeongguk Daejeon, the "constitution" (or close equivalent) of our dead Joseon dynasty (1392-1910).
(Yep, these guys were desparate, and had the backing of half South Koreans, so "being logical" wasn't a high priority. So went the chance of building a balanced nation...)
Needless to say, none of these guys raised any objection in building Songdo: unlike Sejong, Songdo poses no danger to any established political power, and it might even serve as a convenient way to funnel tons of money into construction companies.
The last that I had read, under President Lee, the city was renamed some kind of generic "special administrative district" instead and most of the government offices started moving anyways? So it's basically going to end up being the capital, just not called it until the GNP and the opposition parties can get it together long enough to pass a constitutional reform.
> If South Korean government were really serious about addressing the problem of over-centralization of Korea (hint: the present administration isn't), they wouldn't have built yet another new city reachable by Seoul's subway system.
I have an notion that someday most of the country will be on Seoul's Subway system, you can already to Seoul from Sinchang after all. That's half-way to Daejeon! ;)
Gale International holds 61%, Posco 30% with Morgan Stanley Real Estate holding the final 9%. Infrastructure, labor and funding are being provided by the city of Incheon.
I don't know who owned the original area. But I imagine as these things go, regardless of who owned the tidal flat property Songdo is being built on (and my guess is that the answer was "nobody" since it would be under water most of the day), the government would end up owning it as an intermediary using South Korea's relatively strong eminent domain laws.
There's a long history in South Korea of displacing people out of traditional areas in the name of development. Projects like Sejong City and the new Pyeongtaek development (where the U.S. military is relocating to) are all large eminent domain land grabs in fairly rural areas. The tradeoff is usually a guaranteed apartment or some subsidy on a new apartment in one of the new developments.
It's tough to do development on a large scale in a very small country with even more limited usable land. Land reform in South Korea is one of the oldest government issues dating back thousands of years.
I'm no expert in the exact situation of Songdo, but I think I can answer this. It's because no one wants it to be low-cost housing, least of all Songdo's residents (there must be some).
Housing price is akin to religion in South Korea. Those who finally buy a house, frequently do so only after working for a decade and making heavy loans, and they may literally become homeless if housing prices drop. They will do everything to keep the price afloat.
So, even if a construction company finds half of the apartment units empty, it cannot readily offer reduced prices to potential buyers, without angering everyone already there. You don't want to face a thousand angry Koreans.
(If only they were half as angry at the daily procession of political corruption... sigh.)
Speaking of that, nearly every city in Korea has an official marketing slogan in English:
http://waegukin.com/english-slogans-korean-cities-the-comple...
That is, not bulked out by endless roads and parking allowances. There are many charming and walkable cities around the world but so often these "designed" cities are created on the scale of cars and end up feeling so wrong.
If you need service roads and parking, hide them underground perhaps.
Images of Houston are often used to demonstrate the sprawl you get from giving way to the convenience of cars and parking: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/files/2012/06/Houston...
Picture: http://www.downtownhouston.org/site_media/uploads/photos/201...
Toronto has PATH - 29km of underground pedestrian tunnels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(Toronto)
I do think working vertically is a solution, whichever way it's approached. Just needs to be a little more organised than areas with urban monorails like Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur where your walking is constantly interrupted with stairs to cross streets, or vistas are blocked by raised train lines.
There are some human-scale areas here with more regular activity, but they're relatively small and widely separated, and public transit is pretty limited.
Consider, an American company from Boston is put in charge to manage, fund, and (formerly) profit from building a world class city with questionable demand over the course of 15 years (financial crisis anyone?) while partnering with a mediocre contractor in the mud flats of Korea (ruining natural bird habitats along the way).
Poor logic and planning has contributed to the low population and overall eery feeling of the city.
If you go to DC, on the other hand, all sidewalks are thoroughly planted with trees and shrubs and such, and there are many buildings with big lawns and gardens. DC feels much greener than NYC.
Traditionally good neighborhoods have lots of parks.
DC is very similar IMO. The through streetscapes were intended to be beautiful, which anyone who has seen Queens boulevard can tell you is not true of NYC. But at the neighborhood level, it's pretty similar.
Right, but even if you go to the outer boroughs there is still almost no green space. I would like to see a map of where they are polling from.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/New+York,+NY/@40.6853394,-... (This is Queens)
In Boston, there is at least one cemetery that is filled with wildlife, trees, and walkable monuments, so there are different ways to do it.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boston,+MA/@42.3709798,-71...
That's true. I forgot to account for them because they're not really open access. They're also too full of gravestones to have activities in.
There were at least a few dozen "pocket parks" within a 15 minute walk of my home. Juniper Valley park was a larger park about 15 minute drive/30 minute walk. Forest park was a little further.
This article claims that 96% of residents live within 1/2 mile of a park.
http://dcist.com/2013/06/dc_rated_as_nations_sixth-best_city...
Here's a review of percentages
http://cloud.tpl.org/pubs/ccpe_Acreage_and_Employees_Data_20...
It turns out D.C. and NYC have almost exactly the same percentage of parks (19.4% and 19.5% respectively).
However, if you look at cities with lower densities, Albuquerque, San Diego and Virginia Beach all handily beat D.C. and NYC as cities with a high percentage of parks.
And later down you can see other interesting figures, like Acres per 1,000 residents (Oakland and D.C. come out on top while NYC comes out much lower (and not surprisingly the parks in NYC are packed full of people on nice days).
(To a lesser extent, there is also the Hudson River greenway, and the new Brooklyn Bridge park. These take up a good chunk of space too.)
But then I'm not sure where the tourists would go.
It would be great to see different trends in design and architecture splayed out across a list of cities.
Baltimore has a raise sidewalk covering a few blocks which also provides significant benefits as it's a high foot traffic area. However as it's exposed to the elements and does not add space for shops. So, I suspect it's going to be more costly to maintain long term.
Other options: Moving sidewalks are unfortunately energy hogs and limited to fairly low speeds. But, I suspect some raised bike lanes separated from foot and road traffic could move a lot of people at fairly low costs. The advantage over bike lanes is safety and they don't reduce density. Which of course opens the door to other forms of personal rapid transit. The important bit IMO is even 20 MPH can cover a lot of ground if your not stuck in stop and go or deal with pedestrians.
I associate unplanned areas with developer-dictated sprawl.
You could say that those rules are accidental instead of planned. Certainly when they were first mandated by the Roosevelt administration during the depression, the planners didn't envision the kind of soulless wasteland America is becoming. But those are the rules you need to make it easy to drive everywhere in a car. Changing them will require accepting that some places are nicer when you have to walk and that middle class people can bike or take transit sometimes.
By not changing those rules, we are planning for nasty sprawl everywhere. Parking requirements are often called the single biggest anti-market intervention in US development, [0] but there is a byzantine network of sprawl rules.
Before the dictatorial intensity of modern zoning, cities grew in a more organic fashion. Places like Tokyo and central Seoul (not the part in op) still do grow organically and do not have sprawl. They can be delightful places to live. San Francisco is very desirable for having grown before sprawl zoning as is Boston. You can't say Tokyo, Seoul, SF, or Boston are strictly unplanned but they grew under a set of rules much less distortive of market preferences. People love the less distorted cities and the prices of the limited quantity of walkable, organic real estate in America keeps shooting up because they can't make any more of it but more and more people love the healthy lifestyle it enables.
[0] The High Cost of Free Parking by D. Shoup http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf later expanded into a great long book which you should also read
If you look at a city like Paris for example, Haussmann's plan, in my opinion at least, has created an absolutely stunning and unique city. But within it, there's been a lot of room for organic development.
But if you look at a city like Detroit, you get the developer-dictated sprawl you mentioned. But that, too, is planned. If you create building permits for block after block after block of single-family detached home, you get detroit's urban sprawl where you'll figuratively die of hunger in the unfortunate case your car is out of fuel and you need to walk to the nearest mall haha.
Anyway, I think in general European cities have gotten it right quite often. Lots of open spaces, green spaces, make cities walkable, good public transportation, mix housing with light commercial areas, keep heavy industry outside of the city, mix housing catering to various socioeconomic classes, create a good amount of density so you don't get sprawl, but so you don't get overcrowding either, and focus (public) transport on connecting residential and office/commercial areas. You usually get a great quality of life, little polution, social cohesion, affordability, little social tension, and create an impression that it's unplanned and organic (i.e. don't use graph paper to model a city)
I reached for that word because (in the modern-day US, anyway), a "planned community" is a very specific thing: a giant, car-centric tract of residential housing, with the developers making a nod towards the needs of real communities for things like grocery and other retail shops by plunking a shopping or strip mall in the middle. It's the Levittown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York) model, but with McMansions instead of the small Cape Cods and ranch houses (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/building.html) of the original post-WWII building era.
The sentiment I was trying to express was that the homogeneity of building everything at once made Songdo sound more like that than it did a city like, say, New York, which (while there have been master plans guiding development there too) can still feel diverse and lived-in.
I'm a fan of organically evolved cities, but planning isn't some sort of poison that ruins everything in any amount, and indeed it can be done in a way that really works well. Look at Edinburgh, where large parts of the central city are the result of several eras of large-scale urban planning (all centuries ago). It's one of the most beautiful and livable cities in the world.
I think one has to be much more wary of modern efforts at city planning, in part because the modern obsession with automobiles means that modern city plans are almost always oriented around them—and this is pretty much universally poison for a livable city.
And that's most of the cities you would even want to visit.
Of course more modern and with even higher buildings.
It's a nice look but not very comfortable for living. Taking a walk across the street might take fifteen minutes.
Building a city on top of sand is trouble to begin with, take a look at Dubai's projects. Spending billions on a city where nobody will come reminds me largely of the ghost cities in China.
I just have a feeling this is a giant financial disaster for the Korean government, the only people who benefit from this are the Korean companies that lobbied and bribed their way to pocket billions of dollars in fees.
Are you sure ? I live in Dubai and have many clients who sell mega-projects. they sell out really fast and the hotels occupancy rate is really high (~80%)
Even the airport has taken over Heathrow as the busiest airport for international passengers.
[0]http://geology.about.com/od/seishazardmaps/ss/World-Seismic-...
In a 2009 article describing the collapsing Dubai
economy, The New York Times reported that the Palm was
sinking and this has been confirmed now by geological
surveys, at the moment it is 5 millimetres (0.20 in) per
year but this could increase rapidly.