Songdo IBD CityTalk

Perspectives from a speaker, humanitarian, and businessman who has made “shaping the world’s future” his lifelong passion.

Joseph Chung

by Joseph James Chung

Coming straight from my home in Silicon Valley, California, I arrived in Songdo hoping to discover the world’s most compelling city. You may ask, what might such a city look like? I was looking for a city that could support a collaborative international community capable of solving the world’s greatest challenges. An entire city well poised to help shape and implement innovative and practical answers to global issues such as finding a cure for cancer, eliminating extreme poverty, developing capable leaders, or constructing the most efficient educational models for people of all ages, is a compelling city to me.

I arrived in Songdo ready to put this new city to the test. Quite naturally, I applied a three step process. The first step was to identify the true intent of the people involved in its development. The second step was to reach out to the pioneers — the people working on the ground — of this community to see what type of response I received. The third step was to investigate the city’s infrastructure and practical matters such as size compared to demand, support for transportation and information flow, and geographic location.

Steps One and Two are integrally connected:
Identifying the true intent of people backing the city by reaching out and working with the pioneers of the community.

My questions were, “Is this city just a flash in the pan? Another glorified tool to obtain money from investors? A castle in the sky?”

Having worked with leaders from several industries and sectors and some of the top talent and faculty developing in the Harvards, Stanfords, Yales, Johns Hopkins’, and MITs of the educational world, and having built teams, organizations, and companies with these leaders, I felt prepared to begin looking for answers to my questions. My approach to answering questions did not include going straight to the people-at-the-top (Mayors, Directors, and Government Officials), who are often surrounded by the typical political and practical barriers people in their positions face. I figured at this point, there was little relevant information I could learn from them, which I couldn’t read on a website.

Thus, I jumped right toward the people doing the groundwork behind developing this city.

The first leader I met was Don Southerton, an American born and educated historian on South Korean business and culture. Don Southerton wrote the book on Songdo from a historical perspective, leading readers into its future vision. The first conversation I had with him was highly educated, inspiring and authentic. The articles and books he wrote came from a passion that money couldn’t buy. Not only this, but his passion came out in his willingness to point me along my journey to discover what Songdo is really all about. Whoever brought him on board was either very lucky or really cared about doing their homework.

The second leader I met was Dr. Jorge Nelson, an expert educator pushing the envelope in education that should have been pushed several decades ago. Of course, I learned that Dr. Nelson has been pushing the envelope on education for several decades indeed. His passion and abilities clearly shine through in a sector (education) that desperately needs it. With the jaw-dropping, highly qualified faculty team he leads, I would beg to be his next door neighbor and put my children through his school any day. I might even consider going through K-12 (what Dr. Nelson now calls K-100) again with him at the helm. As of now, I consider myself lucky to be teaming up with International School Songdo to develop model workshops led and created by facilitators from top Universities around the world. Whoever brought Dr. Nelson on board to become the Headmaster of International School Songdo was once again either extremely lucky or really did their homework to maintain the high quality touted as being the very fabric of Songdo.

The third leader I met was Michel Ouimet, a multi-faceted and talented visionary well grounded in the arts of wise long term and strategic short term investments. Yet his work does not stop with his immediate role as CFO of the International School, but is powerfully manifested through his passion to build a community. Everyone is invited to play basketball in the school’s state-of-the-art gym on Wednesdays, be a contributing musician during music nights in his apartment building, and many more community oriented events. At this point in my endeavor to find the world’s most compelling city, I began to believe maybe the creators of this city were onto something special. Maybe Songdo would truly grow into its role as a global leader. Or, maybe the people that brought Michel aboard were just really lucky again. But meeting Michel, after discovering Songdo and connecting with Don and Jorge, was like watching a grand slam in the first inning of the World Series. It was like watching a highly practiced and prepared team, coming powerfully together for the big opening.

Michel Ouimet, Dr. Jorge Nelson, Joe Chung

Thus, I decided to pull the wild card. There’s no way a city with the slightest hint of inauthenticity could respond positively to this next move. I approached Songdo’s centrally located and first 5-star hotel with a request for a highly integrated, millenium-paced (meaning very fast-paced) partnership to help the city bring several world-class conferences to its doorsteps beginning as early as 2010. I did not think they would agree. Overstaffed and underoccupied given the timing of Songdo’s development, the Sheraton Incheon Hotel had already taken the necessary risks associated with being a first mover in a city that showed great potential. Therefore, either Sheraton’s investors were out of their minds or maybe they really actually knew what they were doing. Either way, if they had over-exerted themselves and weren’t focused on the main objective of a truly fast and successful launch, they would have easily overlooked my request and busied themselves within the much slower and traditional model of growth that all other cities and companies drably inspire from their people. Yet upon meeting with Sheraton’s head of Sales, Mun-Hee Park, and later the General Manager, Alain Rigodin, we began collaborating and I discovered the same common thread of passion-fueled movement integrated with reason-based action-planning truly existed within them, as it had within Don, Jorge, and Michel.

These five instrumental leaders gave me the confidence to wrap up the research completed for steps one and two. But the work was just beginning. In the very nature of conducting my research and being prepared to fully support a worthy endeavor, I was lucky to begin building a working relationship with these leaders and pioneers creating the city on a day-to-day basis. And in my line of work, coming across happy, inspired people working on the city means that the creators of this city have achieved no small feat in putting these teams together and creating these conditions for our success.

Step Three: Investigating the City’s Infrastructure.

Public Transportation and road infrastructure often reveals the first sign of weakness in a city. How fast and efficiently can you get around in this city? Unfortunately, the extremely critical and analytical portion of my research abilities were not able to find any weaknesses here. State of the art, near silent, subway lines, inside of state of the art (glowing light-bubbles included) subway stations, one-way fares equivalent to three US quarters, parks and open space encouraging walking instead of riding, a 20 minute bus ride to an International Airport where you can get to 1/3 of the world’s population within a 3.5 hour flight in any direction, taxi cabs arriving within 3 minutes of calling them (sometimes I think these cabbies have telepathy as they come zooming down the road 100 meters away, shortly after you call them), and my very favorite — the motion-detecting (only moving when you are on them) ultra-green, environmentally friendly escalators. Additionally, in future years there will be a high-speed train launched to transport people between Songdo and Seoul within 20 minutes.

Now onto observing supply as compared to demand in cities that have come from the ground up. With previous development of planned-cities, there have been few parameters in place to stop overbuilding. Some metropolises spread out of control. High supply, such as Dubai’s 70,000 units which came onto the market in late 2009 contributed to the current debt crisis occuring in Dubai today, which some experts estimate at up to $90B USD of troubled debts.

However, with Songdo, I have not observed over-building. The size of land in the main International Business District is limited, tightly knitted together and compact (though spacious with park space). The pre-planning and preparation of this city were unparalleled. Parties involved certainly completed their due diligence as they built Songdo.

Information flow in my version of a compelling, global city, is a must. Thus I will review language and technology.

Considering first the language of Songdo, my experience is that it truly is an English-speaking, International community. Of course Korean will be spoken widely but so far, I have not experienced an immediate need to learn the Korean language while working in Songdo. Other languages that I imagine will be used around the city, given its geographical location between China and Japan, are Mandarin, Japanese, and Cantonese. Once again, this mixture of languages and the International nature of the city, strengthens the necessity and usability of English as the main language used to get around in Songdo.

In terms of the technology backing information flow in Songdo, we are lucky to be sitting on the technological infrastructure created by Korea. People ride around on subways while having video phone conversations with each other or watching television on their handheld phones. This super high speed of data transfer can only mean one thing. Songdo city is extremely well poised to have its roots in Korean technology.

Enter companies such as Cisco. Cisco has developed dedicated lines for communication within the city of Songdo. Currently having implemented its best technology between important locations in the city, Cisco will be opening up the opportunity for people in Songdo to “telepresence” with each other and people and institutions from around the world. This instant form of communication can be likened to Skype Video conferencing x 100,000. These dedicated lines make it possible for data transfer at the speed of light from one point in the city or world to another. The technology behind this allows us to see even the most vivid details of the person you are communicating with and as you extend your boardroom, conference table, or dining table from Asia to Africa, India, Europe, North America, South America, or anywhere else in the world you’re looking to connect to. In Songdo, the world is truly at your fingertips.

Conclusion:

Others might glow red with instant content in a city that is abundant in wealth and profitability through the development of new technologies. But trust me, wealth and technology are just the beginning in a city like Songdo. Songdo is not a flash in the pan, it is not a glorified tool to obtain money from investors, and yet in a special way, it is indeed a castle in the sky. But this, I have found, is a very good thing. As Henry David Thoureau put it, “If you have built castles in the air… that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them,” and that foundation is exactly what we as people, have the opportunity of becoming in Songdo. Afterall, people should be the very foundation of any community, and the fact that Songdo was built with this purpose in mind (that we have this opportunity to become the foundation of this new city), attains for Songdo’s initial creators my most sincere and appreciative thanks for having the audacity for such a vision and the ability to bring it this far.

I first journeyed here to find out if Songdo might be the “world’s most compelling city.” Call me over the top, but after doing my research “A new hope for humanity” is a much more accurate title for a city like this. You might soon find Songdo replacing San Francisco as my new “current city” on my facebook page (so long as my buddies in Silicon Valley can keep up as Facebook recognizes Songdo as one of the world’s newest major cities).

And, I would encourage anyone with an appreciation for advance, quality, community, true learning, adventure, and forward movement to come out and join me!