By SHELTON BUMGARNER
Marmot’s Hole Guest Blogger
When I first came to Korea, one of my Korean co-workers took all my school’s oegugin
teachers to see what one day will become the Songdo New City. Not much was there, but everything I’ve heard about it before and since that trip sounded really cool.
Or maybe not.
All the rumors of the city — and all those dang ads you see in the greater Seoul area — make it sound like an entire city with the the coolness factor of the newest campus dorm where everything is state of the art and The World of Tomorrow will be at our fingertips. (Cameo by Angelina Jolie not included, of course.)
The New York Times piece on the city makes the city seem more like a cross between the misplaced optimism of Weird Science with the creepy tech evil of Metropolis.
Imagine public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions.
These are among the services dreamed up by industrial-design students at California State University, Long Beach, for possible use in New Songdo City, a large “ubiquitous city” being built in South Korea.
A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.
One’s vision of the city seems to rest on whether you trust technology or not. For technophiles, it’s better living through technology, for technophobes and privacy rights people the Songdo New City rests somewhere between Colossus: The Forbin Project and Maximum Overdrive.
But before you start huming the first few bars of AD/DC’s Who Made Who, maybe we should put all of this in perspective. We are talking about Korea after all, and I’m sure after a few fits and starts the whole thing will end up being like Ansan on the Bay. Or maybe it’ll be Korea’s Oakland, with “No there there.”
That’s what I like about Incheon and Seoul, they may be crowded and lack all the technogoodies of the New City, but at least they have…soul.
No pun intended, of course.
[Writer's note -- this post has been corrected since it was originally published to correct errors noticed by readers.]
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13 Comments
INCORRECT: De waegugin een da kee chin heard heemself weethe dee nife.
CORRECT: The oegugin in the kitchen hurt himself with the knife.
i see that they now tacked another five billion onto the expected construction cost.
if fully realized, songdo would be an awesome testbed not just for hard technology, specifically networking capabilities. more interesting, however, would be the anthropological studies coming out of it.
at this stage, the most successful part has been the apartment sales (read real-estate speculation). there’ve been a lot of difficulties getting commitments from foreign companies although Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Intel will be in there. if it were to actually be a free economic zone (singaporean sense), there’s a lot of hope. if it’s a “free economic zone” in the korean sense, lacking true incentives for foreign investment i think it’ll bust. with the Roh administration recently implementing retroactive taxes on foreign investment firms here (and the shameless way they did it) they’re certainly not helping to build a very business-friendly global image.
big players all around, from the hospital administration to the schools to technology and of course design and construction. this will truly be an interesting case-study of massive, aggressive and risky korean planning and development.
politics will be the deciding factor.
Everybody prayin’ and drinkin’ that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on the inside straight,
Well I got no chance of losin’ this time.
Sacramento, with ?€œNo there, there.?€?
I think this was first said by Gertrude Stein about her native Oakland, though it’s probably more true of Los Angeles, and really most any other strip mall sprawl in the US.
I did see a funny t-shirt the last time i was in California that said “Sacramento, it really does suck here.”
I’m very optomistic about this city. It won’t be the flashy technology that will be impressive. It will be the fact that a Korean city finally gets good schools, good hospitals, good buildings, and good world class businesses that attracts talented people from everywhere in the world. It will be the fact that openess to new ideals from the outside will be a catylist to start off similiar drives to be globalized for the rest of the main land. I keep hearing comparisons with Brazilia, but look at the differences in geographic locations and competetive economic systems of Brazil and Korea. There is no comparison. Songdo City will be a smashing success that will put Korea on the world map for the first time.
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Yes Kimbob but I will believe improvement has come to the way things are done here when I see it with my own eyes. The cultivation of public awareness and enlightenment is a tricky thing to forecast anywhere especially when it depends upon the growth of many seemingly minor details. It is precisely these little details that the grand and great ideas rest upon.
it could be grand, but korea is still extremely unstable. let’s not forget about conflict with or absorption of north korea, the ever darkening shadow of china, low-level english capability, extremely low birth rate (read labor shortage and limited tax/consumer base in the near future), xenophobia (causing difficulty obtaining skilled foreign labor in the near future) and a twenty year future pension system plan that is either in deep stealth mode or expected to run on magic.
why would foreign investors put money here instead of somewhere like thailand, malaysia, singapore or even china for that matter? they’re all more stable or better able to absorb instability than south korea, and their respective price competitiveness is much better.
I lived in Oakland for 16 years and can tell you that yes, it was about Oakland that Gertrude Stein said “no there there,” and I also agree with commenter above that it’s much more true of Los Angeles. Sacramento isn’t really there at all.
Judge, some of what you say is true. But that has always been true for the past 50 years for South Korea, if not worse. It just seems that investors, foreign or domestic, prefers to put money where the prospect for growth is high, taking into account for risk. China and Malaysia, for example have the same exact problems you list and to a even worse degree.
I think the determing factor is and has always been price. China, Malaysia, Thailand may all offer lower risks(a point I disagree with), but neither are they offering higher techonology or educated workforce.
I have never been to Brasilia but I have heard that one of the principal causes of its unpopularity is that it was designed entirely around the automobile, which at the very least, I think will not be true about this place. I’m sure you’ve all seen pictures of Brasilia’s architecture, which is quite nice, and I think maybe even got a nod from UNESCO, so it wouldn’t necessarily be completely terrible to have buildings a bit like Brasilia.
Songdo ought to be compared to Milton Keynes, not Brasilia. Brasilia was created out of an attempt to balance political regionalism, while Milton Keynes represented an attempt to further develop the way in which people live. Incidentally, as time has shown, Milton Keynes didn’t suceed in that attempt.
So where exactly is this new tech. city to be built? anyone have a map?
http://www.congnamul.com