South Korea’s $35 Billion Dollar Real-Life SimCity Experiment

Making use of reclaimed land that once was hidden beneath the Yellow Sea, South Korea has put $35 Billion dollars on the line to build an entire city from scratch.

New Songdo City, is, in a way, like a real-life SimCity project. It’s a technology-oriented, high-concept place meant to attract foreign companies to establish more of a presence in South Korea as a way to compete with places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul.

What makes Songdo different comes down to this: it’s the first place in Korea where foreign companies can own land, and, it’s intentionally designed to feel and look like it's on the cutting edge of style and technology, unlike the homogenous developments outside of it.

But like any city-building endeavour, this is still a risk: the privately-owned (the majority shareholder is New York-based real estate development and investment firm Gale International) project’s only about a third of the way done. While parts of the nascent city show futuristic promise, much of it is still a construction site.

The project started almost 20 years ago, after some observed during the construction of the Incheon International Airport 35 miles west of Seoul, that about a third of the world’s population lives within a three-hour flight to the area. And that’s not to mention the some 30 million people that pass through Incheon annually. Songdo International Business District was thus born.

Upon completion, New Songdo City is expected to house around 65,000 residents and welcome another 300,000 quotidian commuters.

That is, of course, until the real-life Rush Hour expansion pack launches. 

Via: Read Write Web