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South Korea invents the 'privatised' city
October 2005
New cities have been built before but nothing in history quite matches Songdo - a multi-national, privately-funded metropolis for half a million people now taking shape on a landfill island in South Korea.
The initial price tag is $US 25 billion and the aim is to create a new commercial and business hub - much like Hong Kong - to service Northeast Asia. Construction started last year and the plan is to have 500,000 residents in their new apartment blocks by 2010.
The new city will also be the first in the world to be totally wired with a "seamless IT infrastructure". That means every household, school, office, street and building will all be linked to the same, "ubiquitous computing environment".
"Through organic connections to a central control centre in charge of the integrated management and monitoring of diverse services, a wide range of services including facilities management, IT service, security and healthcare will be provided on a one-stop basis," according to the city's joint-venture partners.
The partnership is made up of the New York-based property developer, the Gale Corporation which is responsible for drawing up the master plan and marketing the project and Korea's largest engineering and construction company, POSCO E&C which is responsible for construction management.
Their reclaimed island covers about 3700 hectares - enough for the initial 40 million square feet of office space, 10 million square feet of retail area, 10 million square feet of public space and 5 million square feet of hotels.
The developers are hoping that along with the city's "Free Economic Zone" status its big selling advantage will be its proximity to key Asian markets. Two bridges from the island to South Korea's new Incheon International Airport will put Songdo City within three-hours flight of an increasingly affluent one billion people. Seoul is just 40 km off to the northeast while the nearest point to China is just 400 km away.
One of the bridges to the airport, due for completion in 2008, will be entirely dedicated to freight and is expected to offer truck journey times of just 15 minutes.
