DDeePPaauuww UUnniivveerrssiittyy SScchhoollaarrllyy aanndd CCrreeaattiivvee WWoorrkk ffrroomm DDeePPaauuww UUnniivveerrssiittyy History Faculty publications History 1-2015 NNeeww SSoonnggddoo CCiittyy:: AA CCaassee SSttuuddyy iinn CCoommpplleexxiittyy TThhiinnkkiinngg aanndd UUbbiiqquuiittoouuss UUrrbbaann DDeessiiggnn Glen Kuecker DePauw University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.depauw.edu/hist_facpubs Part of the History Commons, and the Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Kuecker, Glen David. "New Songdo City: a case study in complexity thinking and ubiquitous urban design." Conference Proceedings of the13th AESOP Planning and Complexity Thematic Group Meeting, 15th-16th January, 2015, Tampere, Finland. Ed. Jenni Partanen. This Conference Proceeding is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University. Kuecker: New Songdo City NEW SONGDO CITY: A CASE STUDY IN COMPLEXITY THINKING AND UBIQUITOUS URBAN DESIGN Glen David KUECKER Department of History DePauw University [email protected] AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 188 Kuecker: New Songdo City ABSTRACT A new urban form has emerged amid the perfect storm of global crises: climate change, energy transition, demographic shifts (growth, aging, and urbanization), food and water insecurity, pandemics, economic stress, and ecological degradation. Known as “smart cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” this urban form is characterized by deployments of computer technologies and analytics that promise enhanced efficiencies within the urban metabolism. This paper presents South Korea’s New Songdo City as a case study in ubiquitous urban design by asking if it constitutes an opportunity within the perfect storm for an emergent, resilient urbanism. A key player in building New Songdo City is Cisco Systems. The project is an important strategic transition for Cisco Systems as its move from internet “plumbing” (routers) to whole systems design. An emergent property within global capitalism, ubiquitous urban design is a driving force in reproducing markets, technology, and investment. The emergent property, however, is nested within Gale International’s (the developer) top-down, Haussmann-like approach to urban planning. It has a high modernist, linear approach to urban design that attempts to impose order on the oscillating environment of global crises. Core to the resulting tension between bottom-up and top-down approaches, is how ubiquitous design increases efficiency within modernity’s late conservation phase, and how it drives the system into a deeper state of overshoot that threatens to tip into a hard collapse. As we build more of these cities, we need to question if they are the proper strategy for weathering the perfect storm AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 189 Kuecker: New Songdo City Introduction: The Bridge to the Future Among the great lines of social science inquiry is the process of becoming that rests at the core of humanity’s reproduction. Every moment we experience the predictable yet unstable flow of regeneration, a process of local to global micro and macro systems interacting to constitute anew the world we live in. Within the flow resides the potential for emergence where random interactions within the sub-parts of a complex system find repetition that result in the formation previously unknown patterns. With further repetition emerging patterns form rule-sets that constitute the production of new systems. Commentators like Steven Johnson (2001) and Malcolm Gladwell (2002) teach us that emergent properties are hard to discern, and often do not become knowable to us until after the fact of their formation. Given the complexity of a globalized world, one experiencing unprecedented stresses and turbulence within its key systems, we face the challenge of knowing when something new and important is transitioning from the world of noise (the random un- patterned interaction of system parts) to the process of becoming, what complexity theorist Mark Taylor (2001) describes as the process of “in”- “formation.” The time scale of the process of becoming is part of the discernment challenge. In some cases, the tipping point is sudden and brings radical change, while in others a Braudelian wave of long duration best defines the process of becoming. Of course, part of the line of inquiry concerns the question of if rapidly emergent properties are actually the product of the long duration, as suggested by E. P. Thompson’s (1965) notion of the “Great Arch,” in which bourgeois sentimentality came into being through multiple, mini- revolutions spanning a century. AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 190 Kuecker: New Songdo City Walking along almost vacant streets designed for large, urban automobile traffic, one comes to the edge of New Songdo City, an “instant city” that the City of Incheon, in the Republic of South Korea, built from scratch. A six-story tall building with a silver apron of mixed glass and metal stands on the edge of the urban form facing both the newly constructed urban form and an expanse of land, reclaimed from the sea by the mega-development project. The structure’s design consists of oddly juxtaposed straight lines with long curves and seemingly random stairways, patios, and entrances that make one wonder if the building best resembles Picasso’s Cubism rather than an example of the “smart city” planning of the city’s developer, a Boston, but now New York City, based firm, Gale International. Entering “Tomorrow City,” as the developers, in an embarrassingly over-eager attempt to brand their creation as a “bridge to the future” (Kuecker 2013), have named the building, one finds a fascinating collage of built spaces designed to showcase the cutting edge gadgets of 21st century technology, the so-called “internet of things” that some see as representing an emergent property that will generate a new complex adaptive system both utopian for the human condition and savior to a looming planetary collapse. Tomorrow City occupies 47,000 square meters (505,900 square feet), that contain the U-Transit Center, U-City Vision Center, U-Mall, and U-Square; all spaces of demonstration, for the smart city’s ubiquitous urban design. AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 191 Kuecker: New Songdo City Figure 1: New Songdo City’s “Tomorrow City” After visiting Tomorrow City, one might understand why so many observers resort to superlatives in their attempts at capturing what New Songdo City represents. Halpern, LeCavalier, Calvillo, Pietsch, in their essay, “Test-Bed Urbanism,” pronounce, boldly, “Songdo is, arguably, the most extreme instantiation of a far more prevalent and genuinely ubiquitous faith in the place of big data and interactive feedback to monitor and sustain daily life” (290). In the Foreign Policy special 2010 issue, “Metropolis Now,” Parag Khanna (2010, 128), a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, wrote, “Songdo might well be the most prominent signal that we can—and perhaps must—alter the design of life.” Greg Lindsay (2010), a business journalist and promoter of John Kasarda’s areotropolis AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 192 Kuecker: New Songdo City urban design (Kasarda and Lindsay 2011), boldly states, “New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago.” Interviewing author J.C. Hallman, Salon on-line magazine explained (Rogers 2010), “New Songdo is the most ambitious of the six examples in J.C. Hallman’s ‘In Utopia,’ his new book about modern-day utopian projects. Fascinated by the decline in utopian thinking over the past century, and inspired by his own suburban upbringing, Hallman wanted to look at far-fetched ideas that are pushing the boundaries of our social imagination — and, to varying extents, succeeding.” A new urban form has emerged amid the perfect storm of global crises: climate change, energy transition, demographic shifts (growth, aging, and urbanization), food and water insecurity, pandemics, economic stress, and ecological degradation (Kuecker 2007). Known as “smart cities,” or “ubiquitous cities,” this urban form is characterized by computer technologies that promise enhanced efficiencies within the urban metabolism. This paper presents New Songdo City as a case study in ubiquitous design by asking if it constitutes an opportunity within the perfect storm for an emergent, resilient urbanism. The essay utilizes complexity thinking to explore smart cities as emergent properties, which is the central organizing concept for the essay. To better understand the relationship between the smart city, emergence, and maladaptation, the essay also integrates critical theory with complexity thinking, which contributes to the growing critical urbanism literature on the topic of smart cities. The essay commences with a discussion of smart cities and their relationship with capitalist reproduction. Building from this analysis, the essay next considers New Sondgo City within complexity thinking, and develops the emergent properties analysis of smart cities. The following section considers the “true believer’s” epistemic, which is AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 193 Kuecker: New Songdo City juxtaposed to a discussion of smart cities and the “right to the city” in the final section. Together these sections argue that smart cities represent a maladaptation to the perfect storm, a form of emergence that will sustain a death spiral of systemic overshoot. Additionally, the essay argues that the pursuit of smart city prevents alternative forms of emergence that enhance human resilience in an era of deep crises. Internet of Things, Smart Cities, and the Reproduction of Capital Smart cities find their origins in the emergence of the “internet of things” made possible by the continued waves of information technology revolutions of the past 30 years. In particular, the explosive development of “smart phone” technology and its global adaptation, made it possible for the vast array of electronic appliances and gadgets connected to the world wide web to be controlled by one device. International Data Corporation (IDC) (Clarke 2013, 4) estimates that about 1% of connectable devices are currently connected to the internet. By 2020 the number of connectable items will reach a staggering 212 billion “things.” Further, they estimate that by 2017 earth will have 3.5 billion people connected to the internet, and 64% will be by mobile connections. “People and connected things will generate massive amounts of data, an estimated 40 trillion gigabytes, that will have a significant impact on daily life,” explains the IDC study (Clarke 2013, 4). “The internet of things will enable faster response times to medical or public safety emergencies and save lives, it will improve the quality of citizen life by providing direct and personal services from the government, and it will uncover new information about how our cities work, thus enabling city leaders to use resources more efficiently and save money while providing superior services” (Clarke 2013, 4). As indicated by IDC, AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 194 Kuecker: New Songdo City the internet of things provides near endless opportunities for companies, such as Cisco Systems, a sponsor of the IDC study, to mine vast amounts of data. Over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the cities of the world will require approximately $40 trillion, which is equivalent to the 2006 market capitalization of all shares held in all stock markets in the world (Doshi, Schulman, and Gabaldon 2007). Urban analytics promises to be a central player in the market, so much so, Kamel Boulos and Al-Shorbaji (2014, 23), state “The topic of 'smart cities' is among the hottest emerging research and business themes of the 21st century.” They note that University College London (UCL) launched two new master degree programs in Smart Cities in 2014. They cite Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers keynote address at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he valued the public and private sector of the internet of things at $19 billion for the following decade (Kamel Boulos and Al-Shorbaji 2014, 23). They (Kamel Boulos and Al-Shorbaji 2014, 23) state that the Cisco CEO explained that “hyperconnected cities could… transform the retail industry through smart shopping carts and virtual concierges, reduce city energy costs for streetlights, revolutionise city waste management through connected garbage bins, and change the way cities handle parking through a real-time parking finder communicating with connected parking spots.” Anthony Townsend’s Smart Cities (2013, 31), the leading book on the topic, confirms these findings; he estimated the smart city share of the $40 trillion market to be $100 billion. The way companies like Cisco Systems and urban agencies like the City of Incheon are using the innovation of the internet of things to AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 195 Kuecker: New Songdo City constitute new patterns within the urban form appears to be yielding a new urban rule-set. Yet, as an emergent property, the newness of something like New Songdo City is marked by a lack of discursive traction for what to call the new urban form. As Taylor (2001) suggests, an urban form like New Songdo City has left the stage of being “noise” and appears to be “in” – “formation.” A 2011 report published by OVUM (Green 2011, 6), an information technology consultancy, for example, states, “The idea of the smart city or community has a center but no clearly defined boundary. There is not even a general agreed terminology, with ‘smart city’, ‘intelligent city’, ‘wired city’, ‘senseable city,’ and ‘smart and connected community’ all used to describe similar concepts.” The report states, “While no one owns any of these terms, some tend to be associated with particular vendors or linked to particular approaches.” OVUM uses Cisco Systems as an example, stating, “Cisco prefers the term ‘smart and connected communities’ to ‘smart cities’, and tends to use this term to indicate an orientation towards behavior-centric implementations.” The report (Green 2011, 6) asserts, “A common trend is the need to complement existing disciplines of physical urban planning with a new discipline of digital planning so that cities will have their own digital master plans.” The research consultancy Forrester (Bélissent 2010, 3) defines the smart city as a “city that uses information and communications technologies to make the critical infrastructure components and services of a city — administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities— more aware, interactive, and efficient.” The report (Bélissent 2010, 3) develops the definition by stating, “This new approach to urban governance is enabled by the next macro cycle of information technology innovation, which Forrester labels ‘Smart Computing.’” It uses “real-time AESOP Planning and Complexity TG Meeting 15.-16.Jan 2015 Tampere, Finland 196