The Ubiquitous-Eco-City of Songdo: An Urban Systems Perspective on South Korea’s Green City Approach
Introduction:
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 famous being the smart entrepreneurial city of Songdo, South Korea. As noted by Mullins and Shwayri, “these twenty first-century cities have been heralded as archetypal urban developments, owing to their focus on energy efficiency and low carbon emissions”. The global concern of climate change has re-conceptualized these new cities to address environmental concerns—such as carbon emissions to become “green” or “eco”. As Federico Caprotti notes, the building of Eco-city is now at the “forefront of national and global agendas”.
These newly-planned green cities all share the common approach to constructing urban systems based on low-carbon infrastructure (water recycling and automated collection systems), reducing and managing energy consumption (LEED certified buildings, photovoltaic power and thermal cooling), as well as securing land (30%) for green spaces to absorb carbon emissions. In this approach, it is the eminence of “harnessing technologies, including ICT” which has led to these green cities being classified under the more globally used umbrella term “smart”.
Defining Urban Systems:
In this paper, an urban system will be defined as “a set of elements known as subsystems, that interact with each other through socio-economic and spatial mechanisms”. The subsystems identified by Bertuglia et al. include: Housing Market, Job Market, Service Sector, Land Market and Transport.
Ubiquitous-Eco-City of Songdo:
Songdo, along with Cheongna and Yeongjong, were part of a vision to create a transnational space, Incheon Free Economic Zone (hereafter IFEZ). IFEZ, which is overseen by the Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority (IFEZA), established in 2002, was intended to be a new hub for the North-East-Asian regional economy to compete with established metropolises in the region, such as Singapore and Hong Kong.
The manipulation of the U-City concept proved useful as an attractive solution at time of global crisis to create a “U Eco-City in a box”. This was especially true for the developing Non-Annex I countries mindful of the climate change agenda and related financial-aid conditions, but looking to build new developments.
Technocratic Approach and Social Complexity:
One of the main problems found from administering a technocratic approach at a city scale, as in the case of Songdo, is the ability to cope with the challenges of social complexity. Although, the problem of addressing social complexity as part of an urban systems discourse is not a recent challenge and predates the current zeitgeist of smart cities. For instance, Ida R. Hoos’s work on Systems Analysis in Social Policy, nearly half a century ago, noted that by adopting such an approach is to make “certain assumptions about the nature of the social problems and certain presumptions about the state of the art of systems techniques”.
Conclusions:
In a recent study, Mullins and Shwayri traced the evolution of Korea’s green city paradigm and revealed how, “selling the U-City model was prioritized over a fully realized or conceptualized U Eco-City model”. By examining Songdo from an urban systems perspective, this paper intended to unpack some of the challenges of using a green-city model-led and characterized by the same networked-technology that it is trying to showcase. The lens of the global financial crisis in 2008 revealed that the urban system in Songdo was not flexible and formulated as a closed system which underappreciated the impact of fluctuations and variability of external market forces. Unlike the cities that Songdo was supposed to rival—such as Hong Kong and Singapore—the closed system approach was constrained by a static conception of the role of foreign/local actors and relationship with the global markets.
Also Read: Housing Finance for The Poor in Morocco: Programs, Policies and Institutions