Metropolis Now
WALLPAPER*
October 2010
Metropolis now
by John Arlidge
On the mudflats of the Yellow Sea, a futuristic city is rising faster than you can say kimchi. But is this new South Korean 'aerotropolis' a green, hi-tech utopia, or the stuff of Orwellian nightmares?
Downshift your gears, here, buddy,' rasps Stan Gale in his Manhattan drawl. ‘We're about to go up a real steep slope.' Gale, a fast-talking developer from Long Island, is late for a meeting with giant South Korean steel firm, Posco, and cycling at a furious pace through Central Park. Gale clang-clatters past trees, rockeries, children's playgrounds and a reservoir overlooked by apartment blocks. But this is not Central Park in New York, this is Central Park in Songdo. And Songdo is Gale's city.
The 59-year-old is trying to pull off an epically ambitious trick. He wants to build ‘instant' cities from scratch, package them up ‘in a box' and sell them off the shelf at $40bn a pop to countries where demand for urban life is rising. ‘We want to crack the code of urbanism, then replicate it,' he says matter-of-factly. With China, Latin America, Africa and India urbanising at record rates, he estimates that the new cities market - a futures market in urbanism - could be worth $5tn. ‘We want to build at least 20 Songdos ourselves,' he says. ‘The G20 - Gale 20.'
With his rat-a-tat-tat voice and cartoonish dark hair, it would be easy to dismiss Gale as a man who has spent too much time in the South Korean sun. But he is so convinced that Songdo can be a model assembly-line city, ready to be rolled out anywhere from Colombia to China, that he and his partners are borrowing $35bn, and he is adding another $100m of his own to make it happen. ‘I'm a risk-taker,' he grins. He's not kidding. Most developers turned down the Songdo deal, saying it was impossible to build.
Songdo will be a 1,500-acre, 1,000-building city located in a low-tax zone between Seoul and South Korea's Incheon Airport. Its 150 million sq ft will comprise 45 million sq ft of office space, 30 million sq ft of apartments, ten million sq ft of shops, five million sq ft of hotel space and ten million sq ft of public space, including a convention centre, a hospital and a golf course. Gale's company, Gale International, has bought the land for $2.5bn, becoming the first foreign outfit to own land in Korea. The urban development - the world's largest privately funded, single real estate venture and the biggest US/Korea project ever - is almost one third complete.
The city's landmark cultural centre, the Incheon Tri-Bowl, opened in April, and over 12,500 people have already moved in to Songdo. When the first 2,200 residential units went on sale in 2005, there were 170,000 applications. When finished, around 2015, the city will be the size of central Manchester in England. Gale's preferred description? ‘It's fucking big.'
Songdo is designed to be a shiny new place for Koreans to live and an efficient Asian business hub for global executives and their families. Incheon Airport is 15 minutes away and one third of the world's population lives a three-and-a-half-hour flight away or nearer. The key to attracting the 60,000 residents and additional 300,000 daily workers Songdo needs is, Gale reckons, to get smart and go green. Songdo will be the most wired, greenest city ever. ‘We're building a prototype for a better form of urbanism - the green city,' he says. Some 40 per cent of the land is parkland and seawater canals. There's none of the smog that makes breathing in many Asian cities like inhaling porridge. Electric cars and bicycles have right of way and priority parking. Hydrogen-powered buses will soon ply the streets. And you'll never see a dirty old dust-cart. All refuse is sucked from buildings down giant vacuum pipes to a central waste unit where it is recycled or incinerated. The heat generated is used to heat water that is pumped to local buildings, which are all built from energy-saving glass and steel and have solar panels and green roofs. Inside, all homes and offices have master switches to power down air conditioning, heating and appliances - except fridges and security systems - when they are empty. All water is reused for irrigation and cooling. Even the land Songdo is built on is recycled, reclaimed from the Yellow Sea.
Gale is determined that the buildings not only do good but look good. Songdo's lead practice, New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), has 60 architects working on the project. HOK, also from New York, has designed seven mixed-use buildings, including two stylish towers that lurch towards each other. A Daniel Libeskind shopping mall is under way and a Peter Zumthor museum is on the drawing board.
But Gale wants to do more than reengineer the hardware of cities. He wants to reprogram the software - the residents - and change the way we behave in cities. The master plan for Songdo, drawn up by Gale and KPF and realised by Arup and Posco (which has a 30 per cent stake in the Songdo project), is designed to foster walking and cycling. Key functions - transport, retail, green space, culture - are no more than 12 and a half minutes on foot from each other. That's the maximum time studies show most of us will walk. A network of 25km of cycle ways will discourage car use for journeys of up to 30 minutes (which covers most of Songdo). ‘By changing the way a city like Songdo is designed, we can offer better quality of life and reduce the eco-footprint of the people who live there,' explains Gene Kohn of KPF.
Gale is also using technology to remove the need for Songdo residents to do things most of us who live in ‘normal cities' do all the time, further reducing their environmental footprint. So technologically challenged he can scarcely work his Korean mobile phone, Gale has handed over all the techie stuff to a fast-talking, beer-loving Dutchman, who sports a shock of uncontrollable hair and lives in dusty Bangalore. ‘Welcome to the future,' says Wim Elfrink as he greets me. It doesn't look like much. The 58-year-old is sitting in a remarkably plain conference room in his office in the Indian tech hub. But don't be fooled: he is a techno-evangelist who has $2bn in his back pocket to make his vision reality. Elfrink is chief globalisation officer and executive vice president of US tech giant Cisco. He is plumbing every square inch of Songdo with synapses - from underground lines to filaments coursing through every wall and fixture - to create a central nervous system. ‘Everything will be connected: buildings, cars, people, you name it. This will be a self-aware city that runs on information,' he explains.
Data make cities greener because they expose patterns of waste and give programmers the information they need to avoid it. Thanks to Cisco's digital plumbing, its controllers can learn the rhythms of the inhabitants of every building in Songdo. Controllers can dial up and down the heat, lights, and electricity - even make sure the lifts are in the right place at the right time - to provide just enough energy and service, and no more. Thanks to mobile phones and sensors in cars, buses and trains, controllers will know exactly where people and vehicles are, how fast they are moving and, based on previous travel patterns, where they are likely to be heading. Controllers can adjust traffic lights and crossings to reduce journey times and cut pollution.
That's if the residents need to go anywhere at all. Cisco's TelePresence screens, offering video communication almost as good as face-to-face, will be in every home, office and school. Elfrink hopes residents will use TelePresence to do things at home that they used to go out to do, including working, exercising, even going to the doctor. TelePresence, he estimates, can cut the number of journeys made in a city by 20 per cent. As he sees it, Elfrink is building the first urban ‘operating system' for the city, which third-party developers can then use to create the services of the future. ‘Think of it as the relationship between the iPhone and the App store,' Elfrink says. ‘We create the hardware. Others come up with services.'
If most of what Gale plans works, Songdo's buildings should use at least 20 per cent less water than conventional buildings and 14 per cent less electricity and heating. Overall, the city could emit one third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size and use 30 per cent less fresh water. All this from a developer who cut his teeth building suburban business parks in New Jersey and is notorious for knocking down Boston's landmark Filene's department store building, then running out of money and leaving a giant hole in the ground.
Gale caught the eco-bug in 2001, thanks to Tom O'Neill, son of Tip O'Neill, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives. Tom O'Neill knew Jay Kim, a consultant hired by Posco to find a developer for Songdo. O'Neill put Kim in touch with Stan Gale's then partner, John B Hynes III. Kim's offer was simple: Gale would borrow $35bn from Korea's banks and use the money to build Songdo. When Gale arrived on the site, all he saw was the Yellow Sea's open water and mudflats on the spot where General MacArthur landed in 1950 at the start of the Korean war. He signed anyway, and has made 153 round trips since.
The Songdo project is a megalomaniacal risk, for Gale and the South Korean government. But Gale is convinced that destiny and demographics are on his side. Shanghai and Mumbai are among hundreds of cities across Asia that are already so polluted that professionals are voting with their feet and moving to duller but cleaner cities, such as Singapore. Songdo is a green and pleasant land four hours closer to key Chinese centres than Singapore. You do the math, says Gale. And even if you don't want to live in Asia, everyone agrees green cities have a key role to play in reducing our carbon footprint. The world's 20 largest cities already consume a staggering 75 per cent of its energy and that figure is getting worse all the time because we are urbanising so fast. Analysts estimate China alone needs 500 new Songdo-size cities to cope with an urban population that will reach 1bn by 2030. India needs 300.
The fastest way to shrink urban carbon footprints is to build new green cities. But will countries buy Gale's metropolis now? China is interested. Official delegations are descending on Songdo. ‘They come and say, "I'll take one of these",' says Jorge Nelson, headmaster of the California-based Chadwick International School, which has just opened a $130m campus in Songdo that is a strong contender for the most advanced school in the world. Gale and Cisco have already signed deals with two Chinese municipalities, Chongqing and Dalian, to create new green cities. These, and every Songdo clone that follows, will be made up of many of the same components, right down to the light fittings. Cisco is so convinced new cities will sell, it has spent $100m on a Global Innovation Center for Replicable Cities in Songdo with 200 staff.
How much could the ‘instant cities' market be worth? Is Gale's $5tn estimate realistic? Global research firm IDC pegs the smart-city business at $122bn over the next two years alone. Over the next two decades, governments will spend $35tn on public works projects, according to a study by Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets. A large chunk of that will be on green cities.
Gale and his partners have got their business model as fine-tuned as their urban model. ‘Whether I'm in Manhattan or Korea, I'm an entrepreneur,' Gale says. ‘Yes, it's about making money. Development is all about cash flow.' Gale generates cash from selling parcels of the 1,500 acres he bought to other developers, and from selling flats and renting office space in his own developments. So far, he has sold over 9,000 of the 30,000 homes he is building, for an average price of $500,000. Much of that money is ploughed into developing commercial properties. At the end of the process, Gale will own several large commercial buildings in Songdo. Cisco is paid hefty fees for planning and wiring cities and installing TelePresence screens and smart appliances. In Songdo, Cisco has sold 20,000 TelePresence units - a $1bn order. Gale and Cisco have set up an ‘operating company' for Songdo, called My Life, to take a cut of the fees (up to $100 a month) residents pay to use the services that run on Cisco's network.
So far, so futuristic. But there are so many unknowns that Songdo could still end up a ‘Yellow Sea bubble'. Even Kohn concedes: ‘No big city has been built so fast starting with a blank canvas. It's like a painter doing a portrait with no model sitting in front of him.' Since no one has ever built an entire green city before, many of the benefits Gale promises remain just that: promises. Take his claim that carbon dioxide emissions will be cut by two-thirds. It's a best guess at best. Andrea Di Maio, a public-sector analyst at US firm Gartner, accuses Gale of coming up with the figure ‘by simply bolting together existing technology and calculating the carbon savings that - he hopes - will result.'
Many of Gale's and Cisco's assumptions are questionable. It's easy to imagine TelePresence screens removing the need for residents to travel to the office or the doctor. But that may mean they have more time to do other things, perhaps more energy-hungry things, such as flying off for the weekend. As leading US writer on urbanism and author of Aerotropolis, Greg Lindsay, puts it: ‘It's hard to see what TelePresence has to do with sustainability, unless your plan to shrink your carbon footprint is never to leave your house.'Gale's plans for faster, greener traffic flows are untested. Ever since Norman Bel Geddes' fantasia of free-flowing motorways at the 1939 New York World's Fair, planners have been telling us freedom from congestion is only a drive away but, no matter what they try, the future of driving always seems to be ahead of us.
And Gale and Cisco's efforts to rewire Songdo residents' brains - as well as their drains - may also be misguided. Pip Coburn, a technology analyst and author of The Change Function, argues: ‘If you're trying in advance to define a future city, you're out of your mind. Cities are highly complex systems and when you monkey around with them, their predictability goes to zero.'
Songdo is a green and pleasant land four hours closer to key Chinese centres than Singapore.
Indeed some Songdo residents may actively oppose Gale's and Cisco's ideas. There's no doubt that TelePresence screens in every apartment and live tracking of residents to establish behaviour patterns are useful but, to many, they are also creepy - as Google has found out lately to its cost. It's the kind of stuff the North Korean government, just a few miles north of Songdo, dreams of. ‘For the average guy, I know it can be intrusive,' Gale concedes. ‘It's gotta be opt in.'
Then, of course, there's the bigger problem: how to inject character. The world's new cities are already all too familiar. They have the same international architecture, branded restaurants and golf courses. Jack Nicklaus designed the 18 holes in Songdo, as he has done in just about every new emerging market urban development you can swing a club at. If Songdo ends up a sterile metropolis for global executives and their desperate housewives, it will fail. Which explains why Gale and Kohn are trying to ‘build in variety and soul'. Unlike other developments designed for a single purpose - London's Canary Wharf and Paris' La Défense for financial services, or Canberra and Brasília for government - Songdo will be a diverse city with a bit of everything and, hopefully, something for everyone.
Architecturally, Gale and Kohn are importing ‘the best bits' of existing cities ‘as an antidote to sameness'. Central Park and the skyscrapers on the waterfront echo New York. The canals, town houses, pedestrian areas and multiple cultural centres reference European low-rise cities. The wide, efficient Los Angeles-style roads may not look green, but will be if most of the cars and buses run on electricity and hydrogen. Different vegetation and materials - the limestone of Paris, the bricks of London - are used for each urban area. This patchwork will create ‘changes of scale, character and geometry that will make Songdo livelier than any other new city,' says Kohn.
To the varied bricks and mortar, Gale is working to add diverse communities. ‘We know that right now we are not funky,' he says. ‘We need artists, internet entrepreneurs, fashion designers, so we are building incubator spaces in the city to try to get the mix right. You can't manufacture grit, but you can encourage it.' There's a long, long way to go, if you ask Gonzalo Simo, 35, a music teacher who left his home in Madrid to join the staff at Chadwick School. ‘It's kind of quiet round here,' he shrugs. ‘I've asked the headmaster to hire some more single women.'
And, of course, Gale can't plan for the ultimate risk: the outbreak of war between South Korea and its nuclear hermit neighbour. Or can he? ‘This is a ballsy place to put a new city,' he says, pointing to the spot in the ocean where North Korea recently sank a South Korean naval vessel, bringing the two states to the brink of conflict. ‘But you know what? It could be the new capital of a united Korean peninsula. Unification City, they'd call it!'
What will Songdo be when it is finished? An architect's utopia? A developer's playground? The future of a troubled peninsula? In Gale's eyes, it will be ‘the place where we find a new method of creating cities'. As he parks his bicycle next to First World Tower 1, where he lives in a $4m flat on the 63rd floor, he says: ‘Urbanisation is a fact. We can't stop it. But it could stop us. Our carbon footprint is terrifying. We have to discover a new urban paradigm because the alternative is: "We're screwed!"'
∂ www.songdo.com