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If you have not heard of Songdo IBD, you soon will. Touted as the “first new sustainable city in the world”, New Songdo City (otherwise known as Songdo International Business District) officially opened on August 7, 2009. Located just outside the western edge of Seoul, South Korea, it was designed as a designated Free Economic Zone and spans 1500 acres of reclaimed land. It is strategically located 15 minutes from Incheon International Airport and 3-1/2 hours flying time to 1/3 of the world’s population and regional markets such as China, Russia and Japan.

Songdo IBD is planned as an international city that offers every conceivable amenity to attract multinational and domestic corporations. With 600 acres of open space and parks, an advanced technology infrastructure, fine hotels, international schools, museums, a luxury retail mall, and the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, Songdo IBD is built to offer residents, workers and visitors an unparalleled quality of life.

Woven into the Songdo IBD master plan is a rich set of amenities inspired by some of the greatest cities of the world. It boasts wide boulevards inspired by Paris, a 100-acre Central Park from New York, and a modern canal system of Venice. New York based and world-renowned architecture firm Kohn Peterson Fox (KPF) was selected as the master plan architect in August 2001 and completion of this masterpiece is expected by 2015.

Songdo IBD is attempting to show it’s commitment to sustainability for this new city by establishing six core design goals: open space, transportation, water, energy use, recycling, and operations. These goals are aimed at reducing energy consumption, increasing energy efficiency, utilizing recycled and natural materials and generating clean or renewable electricity.

Proponents of Songdo claim it is not an architect’s utopia, it is not a developer’s playground, it is not an engineer’s machine, nor is it a governmental planning document. Developed by Gale International and Korea’s POSCO E&C, this master-planned metropolis is to be a model of sustainable, city-scale development and innovation. Other participants with joint ownership, both public and private, Korean and American, have broadened the team to include an array of mutually supporting contributors in the areas of policy, trade, law, development, construction, environmental planning, engineering and design.

Last spring, Cisco was selected as the exclusive supplier of digital plumbing for this “smart city” studded with chips talking to one another. More than routers, switches, and citywide Wi-Fi, Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses. From trunk lines below the streets to branch networks through every wall and fixture, it promises this city will “run on information.” Cisco claims they are upping the “software as a service” model to “cities as a service,” bundling urban necessities like water, power, traffic and telephony into a single, Internet-enabled utility.

The developer team has announced plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India using Songdo as a template. With more than US $10 billion invested to date and approximately 100 buildings completed or currently under construction, the question becomes, “Is this truly sustainable?” Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasilia 50 years ago, which of course was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. There is a lot more riding on the Songdo experiment, and it has been hailed as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. Is this our new reality, or is this just the next version of “SimCity?”


As of now, we are officially an urban species, with more than half of us – 3.3 billion people – living in a city. And these numbers are projected to double by 2050. The fastest growing country is China, but it doesn’t need cool, green, smart cities like Songdo IBD, it just needs cities, period. While humanity has been building cities for the past 6,000 years, that was apparently a warm-up for the next 40. Cities are expected to be the sites of new wars – wars for water, for a clean environment, and for people displaced by climate change.

The battle against global warming will be fought in city streets. The world’s 20 largest megacities consume a staggering 75% of the world’s energy. Buildings alone contribute 15% of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined (13.5%). Unlike Walmart, which has a real-time glimpse into every store, truck, and warehouse in its system, cities are nearly impossible to parse. But hook them up to the right mix of sensors and software and who knows what efficiencies might be revealed? When buildings, power lines, gas lines, roadways, cell phones, residential systems, and so on are able to talk to one another, that information can expose patterns of waste and ways to avoid it.

Everything could be connected and everything could be green. Technology could be used to dial up and down the heat, lights, and electricity. Cisco could create a sort of urban operating system used to identify and create services that streamline everything from health care to education to traffic to shopping. Then they will take a slice of every transaction that runs through their software. Smartening up cities could reduce emissions worldwide and, heck, it may become bigger than the whole Internet, but at what cost?


Companies like HP, Autodesk, Oracle, and Cisco are issuing white papers on topics including “Digital Cities,” “City 2.0,” “Intelligent Urbanisation,” and even a “Central Nervous System for the Earth.” This type of reality is so new that no one can predict what’s at stake. Governments are looking to cash $3 trillion in stimulus checks, and behind that comes an estimated $35 trillion in global infrastructure spending over the next two decades.

Is this really our future? It would be one thing if Songdo IBD were a one-off experiment by a multi-billionaire, but this is targeted to crack the code of urbanism, redefine it as new urbanism, and then mast produce it around the world.

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