There are about 150 urban mega-developments
branded as new cities underway,
and they're located in over 40 countries around the world.
And that's not including China,
where there are at least 500 new cities
being built from scratch.
We're in the age of new cities right now.
This is one of them,
Songdo in South Korea.
Looking at the city today you could almost forget
that two decades ago it was just an idea.
We used to just joke around calling Songdo "Songberia"
that's a combination of the word "Songdo" and "Siberia".
The master plan starts with a blank page.
There's not a line for a road,
there's no dot for a subway stop,
in this particular case
after all, it was landfilled.
So you're literally starting tabula rasa
before there is even any terra firma.
As the urban population grows
so does our need for new cities.
And there are hopes that Songdo could be a blueprint
for other developments around the world.
But the design and construction
of this $40 billion smart city
hasn't been universally well-received.
It's not the nicest place on earth
but it's definitely one of the best examples
of new cities developed in the last 20 years
that actually have people living in here
that haven't been pushed or forced to live here.
We call it Tomorrowland.
Both to kind of reference this idea
that it feels a little Disney-ish and very manicured,
but also to joke that like - it'll be better tomorrow.
New cities have generally
always been built by governments or kingdoms.
They have been built since antiquity,
but there are moments of intensification.
So during the colonial era
we were seeing dozens and dozens of new cities
being built in the colonies.
And then it's cities of the 1950s, 1960s,
like Chandigarh and Brasilia
were built as nation-building projects.
These are cities that were experimental.
They were using a new type of aesthetic,
a new type of architecture
to represent a country
that wanted to take a totally new direction.
And now, since the last 20, 25 years,
new cities are seen as being
profit-making machines basically.
Some of these are even private gated cities.
It's almost like a gigantic mall,
except it's the size of the city.
There are other private cities
that are listed on stock exchanges
and they're answerable to shareholders.
And so a tremendous amount
is being invested in these projects
in the hopes that they'll attract foreign direct investment
and sort of spark a new type of digital economy.
One of the most expensive examples of this idea
is Songdo International Business District.
The city is built on reclaimed land in the Yellow Sea,
just a two hour flight from major destinations in Asia.
The land reclamation began in the mid-1990s
and Songdo became an extension of Incheon,
a neighboring city whose government set up
the Incheon Free Economic Zone
to facilitate free trade between South Korea
and the rest of the world,
including China,
which at that point wasn't a part
of the World Trade Organization.
Songdo has a goal to become an international city.
So I think they might've purposely
not to make it feel like it's a Korean city.
The Incheon government contracted KPF,
a New York-based architecture firm,
to design Songdo's master plan.
Lead designer James von Klemperer and over 60 architects
spent eight years completing the project.
There were hundreds of consultants,
of engineers,
designers,
forecasters,
material science people.
So overall you probably had,
I would say,
up to a thousand different designers and consultants
working on this city at one time.
We don't make a city without any kind of templates
and any kind of precedents that inform us about urban life.
As they say,
we stand on the shoulders of others.
And rather than trying to start with some new theory
about human interaction and building density
and form and urban patterns,
we borrowed, in a way,
pieces of solutions from other cities.
So we sort of pulled and pushed,
and like an artist making a collage
with different preset elements,
tried to use these pieces of cities as inspirations
and borrow from some of their dimensioning systems
and strategies.
These ideas were all woven into Songdo's urban fabric,
the physical structure of every city
that defines its character.
Things like building types,
open spaces, roads, and lighting.
The team created neighborhoods using a pattern of streets,
local stores,
and a mix of low rise buildings and towers,
all centered around a school and parks.
When it comes to the urban fabric of Songdo,
we have a relatively large city block
and large avenues and a lot of a really big scale
green areas and open spaces.
Alberto Gonzalez is an architect and urban planner
and has been living in Songdo since 2017.
One of the nice things about Songdo urban design
is that the blocks are very open.
So you can actually walk through all the blocks.
Many of them have outdoor gyms,
others have playgrounds for kids.
So it's literally open for anyone who wants to go in.
That's kind of a key distinction
if you compare to other Asian cities
in which you typically have gated communities.
So yeah, here is one of the small pocket parks.
And even though you are not too far
from one of the main avenues,
you feel like in a more protected site.
I think it really makes a city a bit more vibrant.
One of the tenets that we accepted or embraced
in New Songdo City plan was to make it a pedestrian city,
a place where you'd be comfortable walking
from district to district or within districts.
But Korean planning and Korean practice of building
had embraced the automobile.
Those who are working with us
from government ministry said,
"you must have an eight lane road
at the edge of this part of town,
or even going through the middle of a neighborhood."
We said, "well, that doesn't sound very attractive."
KPF couldn't stop the highways being built.
So instead they focused on how they were designed.
Zoning restrictions in Korea
mean that buildings along these large avenues
are usually set back from the street
to protect residents from noise and pollution.
But the large sidewalks created as a result
often lacked character,
like textures on the facades or shops and cafes
that make streets interesting for people to use.
And so we had to, in essence,
break or change the Korean code
to be able to have architectural textures
and buildings right on the street.
It would have been very difficult to do
with a small one-off design,
but the kind of scale of this project
warranted that everybody step back and think again
about what made the best kind of rules for building.
Public transportation will get better,
but until then I'm going to use my car.
Some elements of Songdo's design,
like reducing car use,
may not be fully realized yet,
but with 40% of the city left to be built
there's a call-out for initiatives
from the public on how to improve it.
Alberto is consulting on one of those projects.
We are exploring ways in which we can
bring the space back to the people,
reduce the usage of cars.
So this is one of the spots that people criticize a lot
and, of course, with a lot of reasons.
We have like a total of 10 lanes,
five on each side, plus the buffer area.
I mean, we literally have a huge avenue.
It's almost like a highway type of scale.
So the idea is that in this central section
there is enough room to put in a light rail here,
like a tram,
and maybe one or two lanes at both sides
can get reduced and can be occupied
with seating areas, with pop-up kiosks.
So by getting rid of certain areas
that are now purely used by cars,
we can actually increase the chances
for randomness to happen.
So this type of urban randomness
is actually what makes city life much more interesting.
Technology was another key element
in Songdo's initial design
and it became one of the first smart city projects
in the world.
I see a lot of CCTV.
If you go out on the street
you don't see any power poles or wires,
they're all underground.
Cisco committed to spending $47 million
to provide the city with smart infrastructure.
We designed systems that would ensure
a highly efficient use of energy and other resources,
like water, even the use of waste.
So this is the sort of thing you can do
when you design a city from scratch
because those infrastructural systems are not there.
This is Songdo's operation center,
which manages all the infrastructure
as well as monitors over 5,000 sensors and cameras
spread around the city.
A lot of these new city projects
brand themselves as smart.
They are trying to be the Silicon Valley of Southeast Asia
or the Silicon Valley of Latin America
or the Silicon Valley of Africa, et cetera.
They seem to be inspired
by this sort of entrepreneurial stance of taking big risks,
moving fast and breaking things.
But it's not just their money that they're risking,
they're risking land,
they're risking the lives of residents
who relocate to these places.
The risk of failure is high
with some new cities turning into expensive ghost towns
that aren't designed to cater to the needs of locals.
Oftentimes locals are priced out of these new cities
because the new cities are not built for them,
they're built for investors.
So we're seeing cities that are only 10%, 20% occupied.
The units are all sold,
there's just nobody living in them.
There are a lot of ghost cities in China
that have been filled in.
There are other ghost cities
that are still very under-occupied.
But whether these new cities get built or not,
whether they happen or not,
whether they fill in or not,
people are still gonna make money.
Songdo seems to be defying this ghost city trend.
Its population is tracking its development,
now at about 60% of the original target of 300,000,
and there's an appetite to replicate its success.
The development has been described
as an example of a "city in a box",
with ready-made and tested solutions
that can be quickly applied elsewhere.
The same developer and architects were contracted to design
a new city in China called Meixi Lake.
Its detailed master plan took two and a half years
while Songdo's took four.
No city should ever be a copy of another city
because the particular needs of place and time
are so different.
But,
there are some techniques in city-building
that have been taken from one city to another
quite successfully.
And you could see if somebody needs to build very quickly,
they might want to understand some templates
of techniques that have been used before.
I think Songdo is a successful story,
it's definitely something
that is gonna be a work in progress.
And the typical question is can we replicate this,
can this "city in a box" type of environment
be literally transferred to other areas?
I think there's so many ingredients that came into the mix
for Songdo to happen that I certainly think
that it's not easy to replicate.
This sort of notion that we can build something
that other people will want to emulate
and we'll be the first,
we'll be a model for other people to copy,
that's a really appealing aspect
of a lot of these new cities.
Cities evolve over the centuries and over the millennia
into cities that we know today,
Beijing or Delhi or other major historical cities.
And so, given time,
maybe any new city can fill in and evolve
and become something lively and successful.