Digital Cities of the 21th Century

For the first time in human history, there are more people living in urban environments than in rural ones. This monumental demographic shift has come as cities in growing nations are growing at a breakneck pace, and not always with an eye toward efficiency and sustainability. Environmentally, these quickly expanding cities can prove problematic, to say the least, generating massive waste management difficulties, air quality problems and traffic.

The New Songdo International Business District in Inchon, South Korea, will feature mass transit, a self-watering park and a centralized pneumatic waste-disposal system. Gale envisions New Songdo as a business hub and a “smart and sustainable city,” featuring extensive public transportation, open space, water management and a centralized pneumatic waste-disposal system. Every building in the city will be certified by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for energy efficiency.

Of course, New Songdo is far from the first city to make almost-utopian promises about building the great city of tomorrow. Its designers say they hope to learn from the mistakes of other planned cities like Brazil’s Brasilia to answer the complex challenge of building a city that didn’t evolve organically but still feels human and livable. According to Murcott, Gale has already entertained more than 40 offers from Chinese municipalities that are hoping for developments similar to New Songdo in their own areas, and the company has plans for several new projects throughout the country. One project in Meixi Lake will feature a five-mile-long network of urban farms.

It’s a product like no other — a complete city for a million people. As tens of millions of people across the developing world migrate from the countryside to new cities, Cisco Systems Inc. is helping build a prototype here for what one developer describes as an instant “city in a box.” Cisco is wiring every tech nook and cranny of the new city, making it one of the most technologically sophisticated urban centers on the planet. Delegations of Chinese government officials looking to buy their own cities of the future are descending on New Songdo City, a soon-to-be-completed metropolis about the size of downtown Boston that serves as a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities. In addition to state-of-the-art information technology, Songdo will emit just one-third of the greenhouse gases of a typical city of similar size.

Cities of a million-plus population are popping up across the developing world, but the foremost market for the prototype here is China, where a massive demographic shift from rural to urban already is underway, requiring hundreds of new cities. The potential is so big that executives at Cisco, the key tech partner for the development, get giddy talking about what could be a $30-billion business over coming years for the San Jose networking giant. Just a year ago, the usually buttoned-down Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers engaged in a night of “love shots” — locked-elbow drinking toasts — with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to seal the Songdo deal Korean-style. It’s easy to see why Cisco is intoxicated with the possibilities: According to a study by investment bank CIBC World Markets, governments are expected to spend $35 trillion on public works projects during the next 20 years. In Songdo alone, Cisco sold 20,000 units of its advanced video-conferencing system called Telepresence — a billion-dollar order — almost before the ink had dried on the contract, said developer Stan Gale, the chief visionary of the project.

To provide better living conditions for the foreign workforce in the international business district, the Incheon metropolitan government introduced a new concept for the city, dubbed Smart City, to Songdo. Under the plan, the city is building an urban space that has it all for its dwellers. All activities of residents will take place within a five-minute drive. The local government elaborated that the new concept of the city is appealing and creative to experts, companies and institutions and its pleasant living and working environment creating added value. In addition to city dwellers, the target clients of the Smart City also include tourists or visitors who plan to ome for leisure and sightseeing.

Officials of the IFEZ believe that such upscale infrastructure will make it a lot easier for them to attract professionals, researchers, academics and students to come there to work, live and lead a quality life. In addition to universities, they aim to attract global and local businesses, world-class research institutes, hospitals and international organizations in the business district. Several zones with different purposes have been set aside in the brand new city. They include the bio and medical clusters, education and research facilities, the global business sector, and leisure and tourism clusters. With the state-of-the-art facilities, Songdo seeks to position itself as the Northeast Asian hub for international business when construction ends in 2020.

echnology firms like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Google, besides research institutes, are helping make cities more responsive to the needs and desires of inhabitants. The 250,000 citizens of Songdo, a business district which borders the Yellow Sea in Incheon, a free economic zone in South Korea, are seeing hectic activity.

Every nook and corner is being wired. The idea is to have everything connected — buildings, cars and even energy grids. Networking technology from Cisco is being embedded into buildings, and every home, school and government agency is being equipped with telepresence video technology. Cisco, which is helping build a prototype of an ‘intelligent city’ here, has sold 20,000 units of telepresence — its advanced videoconferencing system. Much of Songdo will have been wired by 2014. Cisco and New York City-based Gale International hope the $35 billion Songdo project will soon lead to similar developments in China, India [ Images ], Vietnam and other countries.