Songdo: A Prototypical Smart City

Songdo is a smart city being built on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea in Korea. It will not be finished until 2015, but its anticipated completion is already stirring supporters as well as critics. “New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously over-scale, and immediately encircled by slums.”

It is intended to be an experimental digital city of tomorrow, which will be equipped with computer sensors and chips talking to one another everywhere. The development team for the city is planning to roll out 20 more cities across China and India using Songdo as a model.

“A flurry of white papers has been issued by the likes of HP, Autodesk, Oracle, and Cisco on topics including "Digital Cities," "City 2.0," "Intelligent Urbanization," and even a "Central Nervous System for the Earth." However, an industry expert envisions three possible outcomes: 1, no one will live in these cities, 2, there will be some interest initially but people will give up eventually and 3, people will inhabit them but in completely unimagined ways.



Reference: Lindsay, Greg, Cisco's Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities From Scratch, The Fast Company
 

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