Less than five years ago, the 1,500-acre patch of reclaimed land that hopes to one day stand as “The Gateway to North-East Asia,” was almost impossible to find on a map. By 2015, however, New Songdo City, located about forty miles southwest of Seoul, plans to host one of the world’s happiest, greenest and most commercially competitive populations in the world.
The privately funded development is part of a constellation of Economic Free Zones (FEZs) that South Korea has been working to erect to cope with increased competition in the global economy. As South Korea has found it more and more difficult to compete with nearby China and Vietnam in the manufacturing sector, developers are looking to knowledge-based industries—finance, IT, logistics and high-tech—as the best options for economic growth.
As the head of the IFEZ’s Business Opportunity Bureau, Min Hee-kyong told the BBC last year, New Songdo City is looking to attract “anything from art all the way to bio or nanotechnology, the brain-based industries.”
In order to attract such businesses, Songdo is harnessing its position as a completely new city to construct an infrastructural base that is hoped to facilitate innovation in the knowledge-based industries and allow for an unrivaled quality of life. The model is known as a “ubiquitous city," or U-city, wherein all of the major information systems—residential, medical, business, governmental, etc.—are interconnected via a wireless computer network.
With data-sharing computers threaded through the city’s homes, streets, and offices, residential ‘smart-keys’ will be able to do everything from unlock a building to access individual medical records. Developers believe that Songdo’s built-in connectivity will not only set the new urban standard in modern convenience and efficiency, but will foster an inspired and intelligent lifestyle they term U-Life.
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