SONGDO, S.KOREA. UBIQUITOUS-ECOLOGICAL-CITY (U-ECO-CITY)

SONGDO, S.KOREA. UBIQUITOUS-ECOLOGICAL-CITY (U-ECO-CITY)

Since the 1980s, within the broader context of studies on smart cities, there has been a growing body of academic research n networked cities and “computable cities” by authors including Manuel Castells (Castells, 1989; Castells & Cardoso, 2005), William Mitchell (1995), Michael Batty (2005, 2013), and Rob Kitchin (2011). Over the last decade, governments in Asia have displayed an appetite and commitment to construct large scale city developments from scratch—one of the most infamous being the smart entrepreneurial city of Songdo, South Korea. ...to reveal the sensitivity and resilience of a predetermined smart city narrative.

https://interestingengineering.com/discover-songdo-the-35-billion-south-korean-city-built-to-banish-cars

For instance, what happens if the vision moves from the originally intended international-orientated population towards remarketing the city to attract a domestic middle-class population. The lens of the financial crisis in 2008 revealed that the inherent inflexibility of a closed-system approach in Songdo was not sufficiently resilient to external shocks. The shift towards a domestic middle-class population revealed the inequality in accessing the city services in a system designed with formalized and rigid inputs and outputs. By focusing predominantly on technology, the social dimensions of the city were not part of Songdo’s smart city vocabulary.

https://www.lemonde.fr/smart-cities/article/2017/05/29/songdo-ghetto-for-the-affluent_5135650_4811534.html

Therefore, in adopting a technologically deterministic approach (Mullins & Shwayri, 2016) to  achieving efficiency and combating environmental issues, Songdo’s green city model was found insufficient in its ability to cope with the complexity and dissonance that occurs in relation to “glocal” challenges facing cities today.

Before 2008, the vision for Songdo was as a large scale Ubiquitous-City, marketed abroad as an international “city in box” by IFEZ as well as Gale (Shwayri, 2013).

In Songdo, the unintended demographic became the dominant population due to an unforeseen external global event. This event, not only disrupted the intended narrative of the city, but also brought to light the challenge of the citizens’ role and the degree citizen agency afforded by the city developers (Gale), the technology vendors and IFEZ. In this sense, Songdo, rather than becoming

the city of the future, as it was promised by its authors, was arguably repeating the same trajectory as past Modernist Utopia’s such as Brasilia.

MERCADO CALLEJERO EN SEÚL, COREA. https://sp.depositphotos.com/212617722/stock-photo-street-market-city-seoul-south.html

With a technologically deterministic approach to achieving efficiency and combating environmental issues, the U-City/U-Eco-City models are less sustainable in their in ability to cope with complexity.

FUENTE: MULLINS, Paul D. (2017). “The Ubiquitous-Eco-City of Songdo: An Urban Systems Perspective on South Korea’s Green City Approach”. Urban Planning 2017, Volume 2, Issue 2, Pages 4–12. (ISSN: 2183–7635) DOI: 10.17645/up.v2i2.933. En: https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/58369/ssoar-up-2017-2-mullins-The_Ubiquitous-Eco-City_of_Songdo_An.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-up-2017-2-mullins-The_Ubiquitous-Eco-City_of_Songdo_An.pdf

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