u-life in a u-city

Not to be outdone by China's Dongtan Eco-city, South Korea is now building the New Songdo City International Business District as a pilot project for the US Green Building Council's LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND). By 2014, Songdo will be home to 65,000 residents and 300,000 workers - the first new city in the world designed and planned as an international business district.

With its emphasis on international business, Songdo is being branded as a ubiquitous city (as in ubiquitous computing) "where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings".

It's also an entirely for-profit undertaking. Cape Town's Century City on green steroids. Which raises the question posed in an op-ed from The Next American City: Will New Songdo have room for the unexpected?

The designers of New Songdo have made an admirable effort to look at the world’s great cities and incorporate their best qualities–qualities that have emerged after hundreds of years of change. New Songdo’s studiously non-dogmatic approach to planning may do the trick of simulating the effects of history, but it risks becoming a new dogma all its own, ready to be overrun by organic growth.

This is a risk faced by all masterplanned cities (and with current efforts to develop sustainable cities from the ground up, there is a growing number of these), but with its emphasis on attracting multinational corporations to establish their Northeast Asian head offices here, Songdo faces greater risks than most. Like Century City, the space will need to be heavily mediated to provide an environment attractive to big business. So how will it relate to the real world outside? Will it be a western-style enclave?

And what about the one unplanned and ubiquitous element of every city the world over: the poor? Or even the semi-poor? A city this big must, somehow, consider how to accommodate the u-cleaners, the u-cooks, the u-plumbers and the u-bus drivers. U-life for the masses.