Many of the world’s major urban building efforts have occurred as part of “megaprojects.” It would be very difficult to define “megaproject” in a way that everyone would agree to, but it’s probably fair to say that urban megaprojects are conglomerations of large buildings built within a few years of each other on the basis of a good deal of central planning.1 The Hudson Yards project in New York is one example. Canary Wharf in London and La Défense in Paris are earlier instances. Many, maybe most, of the world’s biggest urban megaprojects have been built in the cities of the Persian Gulf and China, which of course have been growing quickly and doing so with government always a major actor. Examples of such megaprojects are Jumeirah Lake Towers in Dubai and the Lujiazui area in Pudong, Shanghai.
The developers of most 21st-century megaprojects have felt that they had to advertise that their projects are ecologically sound and easy to access and move around in by transit and on foot. There is of course a serious difficulty here, since it’s not simple in enormously large-scale projects to create the kind of small-scale detail that is typical of areas that most pedestrians seem to find pleasant. Even when megaprojects have good rail transit access, setting up pedestrian-friendly connections between stations and destinations has been a huge challenge. The vast concrete platform at La Défense has sometimes been held up as a perfect example of what not to do (although it’s full of people at most hours of the day and evening). The difficult-to-cross roads in Lujiazui present another issue. No one would argue that Lujiazui is very pedestrian-friendly (although it’s got plenty of pedestrians anyway, and the pedestrian bridge over an important intersection has become a popular gathering place).
I visited the Songdo International Business District last week. Songdo (as most people call it, at least in English) is a megaproject in Incheon, South Korea. One doesn’t think of South Korea as having quite such a dynamic economy as, say, China or the Persian Gulf countries, but, in fact, South Korea been growing quite steadily for several decades. Its GNP per capita on a PPP basis is now only a little below Japan’s (and much higher than China’s), and the Seoul metropolitan region (which includes Incheon) now has a population by some measures of something like 24,000,000. The Seoul area features several of what can loosely be called megaprojects, of which Songdo is surely the best known. It has sometimes been billed the largest privately developed real estate project in the world.
Songdo has been built on filled land in the years since 2009. Its peculiar location is a function of its proximity to Incheon International Airport, which opened in 2001. Access is via the 18-or-so-km-long Incheon Bridge.
Map of Songdo International Business Center. Data, mostly derived from OpenStreetMap, may not be quite up to date, especially the building footprints. The heavy red line shows the route of the Incheon subway line 1. Incheon Bridge is on the left.
You can also get to Songdo via the Incheon subway line 1, completed in 2009.
Entrance to Campus Town station of Incheon subway line 1. There are many additional photos (and a report on the line) at the Urbanrail.net Website.
This line connects to the A’rex Line to the Airport, as well as to several Seoul subway lines. Like most other Seoul-area subway lines, its stations are close together, and it can take quite a while to get where one is going. A subway trip to the Airport (according to the Google Map) would likely require at least an hour and a half (the route is circuitous). It would take even longer to get to central Seoul, a distance of more than 40 kilometers, 47 stations away. Buses are faster to many destinations. The bus ride across Incheon Bridge to the Airport, for example, requires approximately 30 minutes. Perhaps the inefficiency of subway travel to and from Songdo explains that fact that the stations had only a handful of passengers when I visited.
Songdo was built self-consciously as an international city. The hope was to attract foreign companies and foreign residents. Songdo’s design reflects this goal. There is very little in Songdo that’s particularly Korean (except for a tiny Disneyfied “Korean village” in a park). Some promotional literature even claims Songdo was designed to look like Manhattan. In fact, except for the height of some of the buildings, it doesn’t resemble Manhattan at all. Most structures are of the tower-in-a-park type. They do not (as buildings in Manhattan do) fill nearly all their lots and touch their neighbors. The plan (although not the architecture) of Songdo could practically have come off an “international-style” architect’s drafting board in the 1930s.2
Buildings fall into the usual types. Songdo includes several large corporate and governmental skyscrapers of which the largest is the Northeast Asia Trade Tower;
NEATT (the Northeast Asia Trade Tower) from Central Park.
a great many high-rise residential buildings;
Apartment buildings north of Central Park.
and numerous educational institutions, including the University of Incheon and the Korean outposts of at least four foreign universities. It also includes a commercial district, a convention center, several museums, a substantial park, called Central Park in English, and some smaller parks. There are a number of pleasant design features. The parks, for example, include some hills (see above); this isn’t really expected on filled land. Also, the groupings of skyscrapers can create some aesthetically pleasing geometric patterns. As is often the case, these are perhaps most striking from the air or from several kilometers outside Songdo itself.
There is a huge amount of promotional literature about Songdo, mostly extolling its ecological and technological virtues. Click here for the official Website and here, here and here for some additional descriptions from corporate contributors. One of Songdo’s chief claims to fame is that its major buildings are almost all LEED-certified. Songdo also self-identifies as a “smart city”: residents all have wifi access; and traffic and sewage collection among other things are controlled by computer.3 Of course, as admirable as this is, it isn’t something that’s visible to the naked eye. There has also been some academic (or quasi-academic) literature in Songdo, but the pieces I’ve read appear to be based more on the promotional literature than on fieldwork.4 Songdo is an ambitious place, as one can perhaps gather from this poster that I saw on a construction site.
A Songdo poster showing NEATT and the G-Tower (which mostly houses government offices) among some of the world’s other important buildings.
When I visited (on a warm but rather gray weekday last month) I was chiefly struck (as other visitors have been) by how empty the place was. There are not many pedestrians on the self-consciously built pedestrian paths, some of which run rather pleasantly through forest strips along major roads. In a country less law-abiding than South Korea, these empty paths might have set off alarm bells; there are no “eyes on the street” (except maybe CCTV cameras).
This empty footpath is not far from a busy arterial.
There is also a very nice network of bicycle paths, but I saw hardly any cyclists. The dense commercial district also seemed rather deserted.
Convensia Street, a major northeast-southwest artery.
There is, however, a fair amount of traffic on the exceptionally wide roads, theoretically facilitated by the fact that, as in other Asian cities, it takes a very long time for traffic lights to change.
A street crossing a couple of blocks from the city center. Red paint marks bicycle lanes.
A great deal of parking is available, and only some of it is underground.
University of Incheon campus. Note parking at left.
It needs to be said that Songdo isn’t “finished.” There are many un-built-on lots, and numerous buildings are still under construction.
New apartment towers under construction in Songdo.
Most of the new buildings are residential structures (despite Songdo’s formal name, apartments have attracted more interest than offices). Perhaps when all the building is completed Songdo will have a bit more bustle. There is also of course the possibility that it will just end up with more cars, which the wide roads will probably be able to handle. I rather suspect that, despite the emphasis on sustainability in the promotional literature and the inclusion of facilities for pedestrians and cyclists, Songdo was chiefly designed to be moved around in by automobile. If that’s true, Songdo would of course be just like most of the world’s other new urban constructions of the last several decades, and it would be fair to accuse its promotional literature of being less than honest.
I have no idea whether market conditions in South Korea would have allowed the creation of a denser, more truly pedestrian-oriented Songdo.5 The lack of bustle at the moment can’t in any case be blamed straightforwardly on any Korean aversion to crowds. Central Seoul and several of its neighborhoods (most famously Itaewon and Gangnam) are pleasantly crowded places. Songdo isn’t. Do its residents and workers perhaps see the place’s emptiness as a sign of progress? The fact that Songdo’s official Website shows more people in some photos than I saw while walking around for a whole day suggests that this isn’t really the case, that is, that Koreans have the same positive feelings about busy urban neighborhoods that many Westerners have come to have in recent years, but I’ll admit that I don’t have a deep enough feeling for Korean culture to be sure. As I walked around Songdo, I kept thinking of the shots of an empty EUR in the famous last minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse. To someone who prefers to encounter a few people not enclosed in cars while walking around cities, it’s somewhat depressing that contemporary planning is still producing such empty places even though it knows better.
- For a book-length description of urban megaprojects, see: Urban megaprojects : a worldwide view / edited by Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría. Bingley : Emerald, 2013. The book defines urban megaprojects as “large-scale urban development projects that sometimes have an economic design component, that usually aim at transforming or have the potential to transform a city’s or parts of a city’s image, and are often promoted and perceived by the urban elite as crucial catalysts for growth and even as linkages to the larger world economy” (page xxiv). ↩
- Despite the focus on international design, Songdo is said to have been much more successful at attracting Korean residents and companies than foreign ones. ↩
- The promotional literature also claims that Songdo is a “ubiquitous city,” but I really don’t quite know what this phrase means in English. ↩
- See, for example, John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis : the way we’ll live next (New York : Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011), especially pages 3-6 and 353-358; and Parg Khanna, “Beyond city limits : the age of nations is over, the new urban era has begun,” Foreign policy, no. 181 (September-October 2010), pages 120-123 and 126-128, especially pages 127-128. Click here for JSTOR access to the latter. ↩
- It’s not simple to determine just how dense Songdo is. The site is 600 hectares (1500 acres), but its southeastern and southwestern edges are not yet developed. Its current population is said to be 36,000. Its overall population density would thus be 6,000 per square kilometer (15,584 per square mile)—but more if one only includes developed land. Its population density is thus pretty high by American standards but lower than Seoul’s 10,400 per square kilometer and only approximately a quarter of Manhattan’s. ↩