Songdo IBD (International Business District): experimental prototype for the city of tomorrow?

ABSTRACT

Hailed as a cutting-edge, ‘smart city’, Songdo IBD (International Business District) is considered by its promoters to be the most ambitious master-planned project since Brasília. Built entirely from scratch on reclaimed land, this city-building project includes a high-rise central business district, an assortment of upscale residential housing, and luxury tourist venues. Our case study approach allows us to avoid deductive theorizing that forces us, on a priori grounds, to either celebrate Songdo as an exemplary expression of ‘smart urbanism’ or dismiss it as fraudulent masquerade. Looking at the design motifs, planning principles, and discourses behind Songdo enables us to critically assess the dynamics leading to the production of the spatially disjointed, socially disconnected metropolises that have blossomed at the start of the twenty-first century. While sharing many features with other similar projects, Songdo IBD is distinct in its commitment to forging what its boosters see as a near-technological utopia.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart urbanism
• Songdo
• smart city
• eco-city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Napong Tao Rugkhapan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0278-4342

Notes

1. It is important to distinguish the development of ‘new towns’ from the implementation of Free Economic Zones (FEZs). FEZs enjoy exceptional deregulation and generous tax benefits that new towns do not have. Songdo New City has been classified at various times as both. At first, Songdo was considered to fall under the rubric of a new town, but in 2003, it became a FEZ (Shin, Park, and Sonn 2015, 1619).