As mentioned in a previous Forbes guest article, I live in Belmar, a new urbanism community in Colorado. With today’s global and often virtual workplace, about half my day centers on Korea. Between trips to Seoul and being highly involved in Korea-facing business I’ve long observed Korean trends toward quality of living, green and sustainability. For example, trendy Korean Starbucks asks patrons to separate their trash from hot liquids—not trashing unused coffee with the paper waste—soggy paper is hard to re-cycle.
I also support Korean manufacturers like Hyundai and Kia Motors. I see them striving to produce the next generation of green and sustainable cars: Outside the hybrids, eCars, and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV), the materials now used in the assembly of the vehicles are increasingly eco-friendly along with a bold program for the recycling of obsolete cars and trucks.
On a broader scale, I’ve been involved in new urban communities like South Korea’s Songdo International Business District—envisioned as a “city of the future” and intended to meet strict environmental building standards amid providing world-class amenities.
My days are also impacted by life in Belmar. The vision of Continuum Partners LLC., a Denver-based real estate development company, for Belmar was born from the belief that there is a connection between long-term, sustained property value, high-quality urban design, and the principles of smart-growth. At its core Belmar strives to offer a balance between a Live, Work, and Play lifestyle.
Between my Korea experiences with projects like Songdo IBD and those in America like Belmar, I see new urban communities—looking to link quality of living and sustainability—facing a number of challenges. Beyond huge development costs, the vision for these communities not only centers on providing a high quality of living amid green tech rooftop solar arrays and LEED-certified buildings that pass US energy-efficiency standards, but for the developers and businesses financial considerations matter, too.
With groundbreaking in October 2002 and most of the construction completed by 2008, Belmar developer Continuum CEO Mark Falcone has sought to maintain a balance between promised deliverables to the public and local governing bodies, and fiscal realities. As Falcone notes, “The key factor which allowed us to manage through all the changing dynamics of the market was the zoning and a highly responsive City [Lakewood, Colorado]. Those factors gave us the flexibility to respond to evolving market realities as they emerged without altering the essential character of the place.”
When questioned on how Belmar adapted, the Denver developer further explained: “As the economy eroded we had to shift to less ambitious development phases. We focused on heavily pre-leased developments and sacrificed density to keep things moving. We also sold land directly to users or other builders. A land sale to Target in early 2010 and KB Home in early 2011, for example.”
That said, I’m drawn to a question—Have high profile new urbanism communities like Belmar met their early vision and expectations? Several key areas deserve reviewing. They include:
Green—Plan to reality. Beyond core values of ecological sustainability, Belmar relied partially on a $200 million green bond for funding the development. (Belmar only ended up using only $8 million of the bond allocation.) Still, Belmar had an incentive to ensure its renewable energy program was implemented and green building practices were followed. Two key programs stand out in Belmar—Solar and LEEDs. According to Belmar officials, the roof top solar farm and sustainability gets the most attention—renewable energy being a popular topic. That said, the developers are perhaps prouder of their LEED’s initiative. In 2002-2003, with construction underway for one of America’s first LEED Silver Certification buildings, Belmar gained national attention. In particular, Belmar was unique since it was a mixed-use structure. Sitting in a conference room on the second floor of the three-story LEED building, I found the heat/AC vents of interest—their floor location similar to a water drain, but pushing out warm air on a chilly Denver morning.
Over the next few years of new construction, retailer Target exceeded expectations and met Silver LEEDs standards. Along with the Whole Foods building and interior, in all, four of Belmar’s structures are LEEDs certified.
Housing—Plan to reality. Belmar apartments are currently divided into two groups. The first grouping are those more near the core of the project and spread out into about seven buildings. Currently, these units are over 95% occupied. A 300 unit building to the south of the project is approximately 97% occupied. Belmar upscale condominium units are 100% sold.
Commercial Leasing—Plan to reality As of the end of October 2011, Belmar office space is 96.4 % occupied and 100% leased. The key tenant is The Integer Group, one of the world’s largest promotional, retail, and shopper marketing agencies, and a member of Omnicom Group Inc. Their Belmar offices alone employ over 500 people.
Retail—Plan to reality. As of the end of October 2011, Belmar retail space was 91% occupied and 92.3% leased. Key tenants include: Target, Whole Foods, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Nordstrom Rack, along with a mix of national and local stores, shops, and services. In particular, the Ohio Center for Broadcasting, Denver and Paul Mitchell, the School adds to the community’s diverse appeal.
Services, Amenities and Community events—Plan to reality. Many in the Denver area find Belmar’s restaurants (PF Chang’s, Ted’s, The Rock, Baker Street) trendy, with shopping and parking convenient. The ice skating rink is a seasonal highlight. (I’m fond of the “skating with Santa” holiday promotion on Saturdays leading up to Christmas.) Furthermore, Summer Sundays also see a thriving Farmer’s Market, and a flourishing local art scene. I have also heard there is interest among locals for a community garden. Count me in on the latter.
Overall, Belmar has made good on its promises and pledges. Still, sustaining the vision over time, like building a sustainable community, will require the embrace and support of local residents, merchants, commercial tenants, and consumers. I see the local art scene and plans for the community garden as very encouraging. Moreover, it seems that visitors to Belmar appreciate the community’s new urbanism focus and in some cases envy a life style where one can live and walk to work.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to share my impressions of Korea, Songdo, and Belmar—and wait for the day when in America I will not have to dump my excess coffee in with the recyclables or maybe take a spin around the local community in a EV.
Don Southerton is a consultant, marketing strategist, and researcher for top Korean-based corporations with global business, along with major western firms that have ventures in Korea and Asia Pacific.
Southerton frequently comments in the media on topics including the Korean car market, Green technology, and global business.
Belmar Solar Array Fact Sheet
The Belmar Solar Array began operating in late summer 2008.
The Belmar Solar Array consists of approximately 8,370 panels and is 125,000 square feet in area.
The Belmar Solar Array is a 1.75 mega watt system generating approximately 2.3 million kilowatt hours of electrical energy per year.
The Solar Array power lights in the three structured parking garages on which the panels are mounted. (Technically, the power generated by the solar arrays is routed back to the local XCEL Energy grid, and XCEL sells power back to the Belmar project at a reduced rate.)
Cisco has partnered with Sondgo, a city of the future on the west coast of South Korea. Together they share a vision for smart communities. This video series highlights that vision.
My article in Forbes… In a follow-up article, I plan to look at expectations and reality, plus why Green cars have a role in new urbanism.
New Urbanism: Comparing Songdo, South Korea to Belmar, USA
Songdo, South Korea Master Plan
Guest Post By Don Southerton
I’m a baby boomer. I grew up in a small town of 6,000 in northeastern Pennsylvania—a county seat surrounded by dairy farms. We walked to the elementary school, the neighborhood store for a loaf of bread and maybe a soda, and weekly shopping trips downtown–3 blocks from home. Most backyards displayed gardens with long rows of vegetables, some yards cultivated grape vines, raspberry bushes, or an apple tree. Seasonally, we ate tomatoes, cucumbers and green beans in the summer, then squash, sweet corn, and apples in the fall. Fresh eggs and milk came from local producers. People canned goods for the winter, and most home menus followed the seasons. Long before sustainability, environmentalism, and new urbanism, small town America was rooted in comparable notions.
…Jump forward a few decades; I now live in Belmar, a new urbanism community on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado. New urbanism represents a design movement that promotes walkable neighborhoods where residents live, work, dine, and shop. The communities embrace energy-efficient buildings, smart growth, transit-oriented development, sustainability, and quality of living.
…For Belmar, the developers converted a former 1960s era dying mall into a mixed-use community of 23 city blocks. The community incorporates LEED’s green standards, along with solar farms on the roofs of parking structures, and outdoor street lighting that conforms to the International Dark-Sky Association and limits light pollution. Retail stores like Belmar’s Target were built to meet LEED certification, while corporations including The Integer Group, an international advertising agency, embrace the community’s sustainability and green policies.
What perhaps is most interesting is that my desire to live in Belmar was highly influenced by another high profile new urbanism project—this one on the western coast of South Korea—Songdo International Business District (IBD), a joint venture of New York-based real estate developer Gale International and the engineering and construction arm of South Korea’s steel producer Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO). The urban development is a master planned mixed-use community that set out and conform to rigid international standards for design, sustainability, and, most importantly, an unparalleled quality of life.
…A model for new urbanism, the developer’s vision for Songdo IBD went beyond Green, sustainability, and quality of life with western-style amenities to attract international visitors, residents, and business firms to South Korea. This in turn would pave the way for Koreans to interact more closely with foreigners, and create good jobs for the Korean people.
In both cases the developers set out to transform and reshape communities. For Songdo IBD, the city-size project is built upon reclaimed land and mudflats. For Belmar, it was a greyfield transformation of an aged and dated mall. In both cases, we find extensive master planning, large scale construction, mixed-use development, cultural amenities, and a pedestrian and transit oriented lifestyle with less dependency on automobiles—although I’d like to see the Belmar add some clean energy LPG or electric recharging stations.
….That said, living in Belmar my task at hand is now to look deeper into how closely the developers’ goals and visions for the respective U.S and Korean communities manifests over time. I plan to share my cultural research in future writings. Meanwhile, frequent visits to South Korea and Songdo IBD, along with daily strolls through Belmar will provide first hand impressions of 21st century new urbanism—amid memories on my youth growing up in small town America.
Don Southerton is a consultant, marketing strategist, and researcher for top Korean-based corporations with global business, along with major western firms that have ventures in Korea and Asia Pacific.
Southerton frequently comments in the media on topics including the Korean car market, Green technology, and global business. His work, Chemulpo to Songdo IBD, Korea’s International Gateway was released in August 2009 at the gala opening of the Songdo IBD and the Incheon Global Fair.
Great article in JoongAng Ilbo on Songdo International Business District (IBD) and Gale International Chairman Stan Gale. In the article, Stan points out the strategic position of the Incheon International Airport and Songdo IBD play in the new emerging global commerce communities (aerotropolis) that center around major hub airports. http://media.joinsmsn.com/article/925/5220925.html?ctg
개발 주역 스탠 게일 회장
스탠 게일 회장 ( Stan Gale, Chairman)
“2001년 당시로서는 바닷물만 가득한 곳에 국제도시를 개발해 달라는 한국 정부의 요청을 받았을 때 ‘너무 위험한 발상’이라고 생각했습니다.”
송도국제도시의 핵심인 국제업무단지는 미국 동부 보스턴에 본사를 둔 게일 인터내셔널이 개발을 맡고 있다. 이 회사 스탠 게일(61) 회장은 “우여곡절도 많았지만 이제 ‘상전벽해(桑田碧海)’라는 소리를 듣게 되니 보람과 책임감을 함께 느낀다”고 말했다. 그는 최근 미국에서 출간된 에어로트로폴리스(공항도시)서문에 ‘가장 이상적인 공항도시를 개발해 낸 장본인’으로 서술되기도 했다.
-처음부터 송도국제도시를 공항도시로 개발할 생각이었나.
“송도가 당시에는 갯벌에 불과했지만 인천국제공항과 인천대교·경제자유구역이라는 비전을 보고 뛰어들었다. 송도 개발의 핵심은 중국 및 아시아 지역에 거점을 두고 있는 다국적 기업들의 ‘니즈’를 충족시키는 것이다. 따라서 인천공항을 중심으로 글로벌 비즈니스에 필요한 모든 요소들을 적재적소에 배치하는 마스터플랜 아래 최첨단·친환경 공법을 적용해 왔다.”
-외국 기업들은 송도의 에어로트로폴리스 및 콤팩트·스마트시티의 개념에 대해 어떤 반응인가.
“에어로트로폴리스는 아직 해외에서도 생소하지만 e커머스를 통한 글로벌 무역이 대세를 이루면서 기업들의 수요가 크게 높아지고 있다. 외국 기업들은 송도가 최첨단 IT기술과 최고 수준의 정주(定住)환경을 갖춘 데다 동일 공간에 국제공항이 확보돼 글로벌 기업도시로 클 것으로 확신하고 있다.”
-최근 기업유치 등 가시적인 성과가 나타나고 있는데.
＂해외에서 먼저 송도의 가치를 알고 시스코 등 최첨단 기업들도 입주하고 있다. 국내 대기업들의 투자도 송도의 비전이 인정받은 결과다. 2016년 최종 완공까지 최선을 다할 것이다.”
(Thanks goes to Steven Bammel for sharing this news item.)
Found this in FT.com. Nice comments by Stan Gale of Gale International, too.
Aerotropolis
By Greg Lindsay
Published: February 25 2011 17:03 | Last updated: February 25 2011 17:03
Ten years ago, Stan Gale was a builder of New Jersey business parks. But in 2001 his fate began to change when he received a phone call from South Korea. The South Korean government had found Gale’s company on the internet, and they made him an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale International would borrow $35bn from Korea’s banks, partner with its biggest steel company and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston – only taller and denser – on a muddy, man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.
The proposed settlement, New Songdo, isn’t so much a Korean city as a western one, floating offshore. It was chartered as an “international business district” – a hub for companies working in China. To make US expatriates feel at home, its malls are modelled on those in Beverly Hills, and Jack Nicklaus designed the golf course. But its most salient feature is shrouded in perpetual haze, opposite a 12km bridge. On the far side is Incheon International Airport, which opened in 2001 on reclaimed land and instantly became one of the world’s busiest hubs.
“[The Koreans] tracked us down, wanted us to build a city in the ocean, and no one else was interested. What was going on here?” Gale said. “Their vision scared everyone else away. It wasn’t until I saw the airport that I understood where they wanted to go with this.” The answer: to China. The sales pitch to prospective tenants is simple: move here and you’re only a two-hour flight away from Shanghai or Beijing. You’re four hours away at most from cities you’ve never heard of, such as Changsha, which happens to be larger than Atlanta or Singapore. Nearly one billion people are a day trip away.
“China alone needs 500 cities the size of New Songdo,” Gale told me, and he hopes to break ground on the next one in Chongqing sometime this year. How many will be umbilically connected to the nearest airport? “All of them.”
To the jaundiced western eye, New Songdo and its clones might appear to be fantasies left over from the Bubble. But dismissing them as the product of Asia’s infatuation with all things mega misses the carefully calibrated machinery underneath. It’s a machine the rest of us ignore at our peril as we enter the next phase of globalisation – one marked by the shift from west to east and the trade routes up for grabs in between. The model for cities such as New Songdo even has a name, which Stan Gale pronounced with a flourish: “It’s an aerotropolis.”
It isn’t his word. The man who defined it is John Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has made a name for himself with his radical vision of the future: rather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, we will build this century’s cities around them. Why? Because people once chose to live in cities for the wealth of connections they offered socially, financially and intellectually. But in the era of globalisation, we choose cities that are drawing closer together themselves, linked by fibre-optic cables and jet aircraft. Stan Gale is simply taking this idea to its conclusion, building a network of instant cities joined by their airports.
Many aerotropoli will evolve out of the cities we already call home – only, their highways and byways will lead us to terminals instead of downtown. For instant cities such as New Songdo, Kasarda has drafted a set of blueprints replete with high-speed trains and six-lane highways connecting prefab neighbourhoods and business districts. They range in size from a few thousand residents to a few million. Aerotropoli designed according to Kasarda’s principles are already under way across China, India, the Middle East and Africa, and on the fringes of cities as desperate as Detroit and as old as Amsterdam. In Kasarda’s opinion, any city has the potential to be one, provided it is willing to build, demolish and rebuild around its airports at its tenants’ behest. The World Trade Center at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport boasts some of the highest office rents in the Netherlands. Detroit is borrowing its blueprints.
New Songdo is being built on reclaimed land in South Korea’s Yellow Sea, as an air hub for companies working in China. ‘China needs 500 cities this size,’ says its chief builder
Perhaps the purest example is Dubai, a city feverishly assembled, populated by highly stratified expatriates, and composed of enclaves that have less to do with each other than with like-minded communities thousands of miles away.
The idea of the aerotropolis represents the logic of globalisation made concrete in the form of cities. Whether we consider it to be good or simply inevitable, the global village holds these truths to be self-evident: that customers on the far side of the world may matter more than those next door; that the pace of business, and of life, will always move faster and cover more ground; and that we must pledge our allegiance if we want our iPhones, Amazon orders, Kenyan green beans and Valentine’s day roses at our doors tomorrow morning. If the airport is the mechanism making all of these things possible, Kasarda reasons, then everything else – our factories, offices, homes, schools – will be built accordingly. The aerotropolis, he promises, will be a new kind of city, one native to our era of instant gratification.
I first met Kasarda in his office, surrounded by model planes he had received as gifts from one foreign delegation or another. The only other place I’ve ever seen him in is an airport. He has flown more than three million miles in the past quarter of a century – and he is up in the air two months a year, flying far enough to circle the globe half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, Kasarda looked at the ascending trend lines of global trade and surmised that future growth depended on faster air travel. To that end, he devised a theory in which first factories then entire cities would form around greenfield airports, in order to wring a few extra hours from the day.
“Despite all the talk of the service economy, of healthcare and software as our national industries, the western world’s is still a goods economy,” Kasarda said. “A large and growing proportion of these goods move internationally, as a consequence of trade and modern supply chains. All of this passes through a physical ‘internet’, the network of hubs and planes for trading and transporting goods – and people – almost as quickly as the internet itself. And it’s arguably more important – the web can’t move your box from Amazon.”
The aerotropolis, Kasarda says, is the “urban incarnation of this physical internet; the primacy of air transport makes airports and their hinterlands the places to see how it functions – and to observe the consequences”. They may turn out to be mini-Manhattans like New Songdo or SimCities in the mould of Dubai – effectively an airline with an emirate attached – but they are the first cities in which what’s on the ground is beside the point.
. . .
Humanity is officially an urban species – more than half of us live in cities. The percentage is even higher in the developed world, but Africa and Asia are catching up. The number of city dwellers is expected to almost double by 2050 to more than six billion – our current global population. The number of megacities (those with a population of 10 million or more) will have increased from two in 1950 to 27 by 2025, housing 450 million people between them. China might well need 500 new cities the size of New Songdo, and another 100 cities of one million residents or more.
We have always chosen to live in cities for the wealth of networks they create – the elaborate webs of kinship and commerce. That promise hasn’t changed since the agora and acropolis, but the size and scope of cities have. Cities grew by shrinking the distances within and between them, using technology to expand their grids and cover more ground.
John Kasarda likens the history of cities to a rising tide of breaking waves. Ocean harbours were swept away by river ports, which yielded to railway terminals, which were in turn exploded by highways and suburbia. Transportation is destiny. The fifth wave is now here.
Joel Garreau, the futurist and author of Edge City, declared, “Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time.” When the state of the art is shoe leather and donkeys, the result is the hilly paths of Jerusalem. When it’s men on horseback and sailing ships, it’s the ports of Lisbon, Hong Kong, or Boston, and the canals of Venice and Amsterdam. The birth of the railway produced Kansas City, Omaha, and the stockyards of Chicago. And the mass production of the Model T led first to Los Angeles and later to Levittown, Long Island.
Today, the modern combination on the ground is the car and internet, yielding Garreau’s “edge cities”, which are everywhere and nowhere within America, and have since cropped up in Bangalore and beyond. Canary Wharf, Delhi’s Gurgaon and the suburbs of northern Virginia more closely resemble each other than their neighbours. Soaring above them all are jet aircraft – first put into service 60 years ago – collapsing the distance between Dallas and Dubai as effortlessly as the internet nodes connecting them.
But as transport and communication costs fall, and movement and accessibility become easier, cities have become less dense and contiguous and grown more dispersed, networked, fluid. In the internet age, this fluidity promised that those of us who make our living with computers could live anywhere. No one has preached this vision more fervently than the technologist George Gilder, whose utopia of the “telecosm” and infinite bandwidth has us scattering back into the countryside to live like gentlemen farmers, with Facebook serving as the village green.
But total dispersal hasn’t come to pass, and it won’t, no matter how much bandwidth we’re able to route through our iPhones. In fact, the same technologies that were supposed to disaggregate us have only made concentration more useful. We’re becoming more urban at precisely the moment our outlook is growing more global. We keep an eye on the street and a mobile phone to our ears, somehow managing to be in both places at once. The same thing is happening at a macro level, too. The Los Angeles hinterlands, for example, aren’t California’s Central Valley or the high Mojave Desert but the outlands of Seoul, Hong Kong and Mexico City, connected via mobile phones, social networks and satellite offices. The product of the jet age and the internet age is our current instant age, simultaneously favouring both aggregation and dispersal.
This is where John Kasarda comes in. With the aerotropolis, he attempts to answer the question of what the cities of this age should look like. What will their shape and purpose be when the state of the art at the time of their birth is ubiquitous WiFi and jumbo jets? Will they resemble Dubai, which is busy reinventing itself as the Middle East’s entrepôt, Africa’s aerial gateway and a luxury shopping mecca for middle class Chinese? Or will they look more like converging cities of the Pearl River Delta, where a single factory (Foxconn’s) could leverage Hong Kong’s airport to supply every Apple iPad or iPhone in the world?
Implicit in such thinking is a zero-sum world of exponential population increase and cut-throat competition for resources and profits. Kasarda’s vision evokes everything we find terrifying about globalisation – a civilisation cast in quick-drying cement, packed with worker drones. But even if you accept his logic, you have to ask: who are these cities for? The companies that profit from marginally leaner operations? The autocratic leaders who are jockeying to land them? Or the planners, architects and sages given carte blanche to raise islands from oceans and plant tarmac in desert?
Will we consciously choose to live in cities built in globalisation’s image – machines for living linked in great chains? Kasarda believes that we will, that we should, and that we’ll suffer the consequences if we don’t, because these debates have already been settled (one way or another) in places like China and Dubai, which have staked everything on the global triumphing over the local.
China is building an aerotropolis wherever it deems strategic: as outposts in oil-rich Angola and Sudan and in the copper belt of Zambia; in Pakistan, to complement the deep-water port at Gwadar, and most of all in western China, where more than 100 new airports are under construction. The goal is to put one within driving distance of 80 per cent of its population by 2020.
The UN World Tourism Organisation expects the annual number of Chinese tourists abroad to triple by 2020 to 115 million; already, more are leaving to see the world than foreigners are arriving to see China. Where are they heading? I found one clue in Dubai recently, where my hotel was overrun with families toting shopping bags. Tourism from China to the United Arab Emirates has soared since the emirates landed on China’s “approved destination” list in autumn 2009. The number of Chinese visiting Dubai soared 57 per cent in the first half of last year, totalling 81,900 in all.
They’re heading next to the high street near you. Despite a decade’s worth of high oil prices and terrorism fears, we have never flown as far or in greater numbers than we do right now. As recently as 1999, Ryanair had no website, and it was impossible to take a non-stop flight from New York to New Delhi or Beijing. The world may or may not have flattened since then, but there’s a lot less changing planes.
In the end, we won’t stop flying, for the simple reason that quitting now would run counter to our human impulse to roam. Will you be the one to tell 100 million Chinese tourists (and another 100 million Indians) that they will have to stay home?
This is an edited extract from ‘Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next’, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, published by Penguin, £14.99
…………………………………………..
Flight of fancy?
Someone smart came up with the title of John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay’s book. Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next is an astute blend of the intriguing, the beguiling and the faintly menacing, writes Pilita Clark. But is it true? Are we really heading for a world where we build our cities around our airports instead of the other way round? That depends on who “we” are. And how we define an aerotropolis.
On his website (www.aerotropolis.com), John Kasarda, a US academic who has been putting the economic case for the concept for years, uses a diagram to explain how such a city would look. It shows an airport surrounded by clusters of air transport-related businesses, convention centres, exhibition halls, hotels, malls and homes. These are fed by “aerolanes” or “aerotrains”, pumping in passengers and goods.
By this definition, Schiphol airport, Dallas-Fort Worth, Dubai and many others already share aerotropolistic traits. Even Heathrow has a few. But Heathrow is also a good example of the limits to this vision. It has beenbanned from building a third runway and it took longer to obtain planning permission for terminal five than it took Beijing airport to build its vast new terminal three. The idea that approval would ever be given to flatten swathes of its surrounding suburbs to make way for an aerotropolis is impossible to imagine. The same can be said for dozens of the world’s best-known airports. And yet the model has been embraced in India, China, the Philippines and South Korea.
So if the idea of an aerotropolis is not the way you want to live next, relax if you live in a crowded part of North America or Europe. And stay away from emerging rivals hoping that airport cities will help them become the developed world of tomorrow.
A close Korean friend called and shared that the February 26, 2011 Wall Street Journal Saturday edition looked at Songdo IBD among with other top centers of global commerce. Nice to see Songdo IBD in the news.
Songdo International Business District
Cities in the Sky
Welcome to the world of the ‘aerotropolis.’
To arrive at midnight at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport, as I did recently, is to glimpse the pulsing, non-stop flow of the new global economy. The airport, which runs full-tilt 24/7, is packed at all hours. Nigerian traders bound for Guangzhou mix with Chinese laborers needed in Khartoum, Indian merchants headed to clinch a deal in Nairobi, and United Nations staff en route to Kabul.
Dubai’s recent financial woes have forced the tiny Gulf state to scrap or scale back some of its more outlandish development schemes, including The World, an artificial archipelago shaped roughly like a world map. But one project has not flagged: the new concourse for Terminal 3. With construction continuing around the clock, the annex to what is already the world’s largest building is desperately needed to accommodate the fleet of 90 Airbus A380s ordered by Emirates, Dubai’s government-owned airline.
Lighting a cigarette in his modest airport office during a meeting two weeks ago, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates, laughed as he recalled the widespread doubts that Emirates could pay for—and fill—its superjumbo jets. But it can, and it has, and despite the downturn, Dubai has stuck to its plans to develop the world’s largest airline from the world’s busiest hub. In public statements, Sheikh Ahmed has equated the future of Dubai with the future of Emirates, calling his country’s mammoth airport the center of a new Silk Road connecting China to the Middle East, India and Africa.
Getty ImagesPassengers at the Dubai airport
Thanks to the jet engine, Dubai has been able to transform itself from a backwater into a perfectly positioned hub for half of the planet’s population. It now has more in common with Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangalore than with Saudi Arabia next door. It is a textbook example of an aerotropolis, which can be narrowly defined as a city planned around its airport or, more broadly, as a city less connected to its land-bound neighbors than to its peers thousands of miles away. The ideal aerotropolis is an amalgam of made-to-order office parks, convention hotels, cargo complexes and even factories, which in some cases line the runways. It is a pure node in a global network whose fast-moving packets are people and goods instead of data. And it is the future of the global city.
This may come as a surprise to Americans, many of whom have had it with both flying and globalization and would prefer a life that’s slower and more local. In the wake of the financial crisis, the bywords for the future have often been caution and sustainability. But there is no resisting the relentless, ongoing expansion of the world economy, and the aerotropolis—fast, efficient, far-reaching and filled with generic “world-class” architecture—embodies it. In places like Dubai, China, India and parts of Africa, cities are being built from scratch around air travel, the better to plug into the global trade lanes overhead.
At present more than half of humanity lives in cities. The percentage is higher in the developed world—four in five Americans live in downtowns or suburbia. China’s rate is half that, and India has not yet begun to urbanize in a serious way, with only 29% of its people in cities. Between now and 2030, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates, India must build a new Chicago every year to absorb the millions of villagers streaming from the countryside in search of work. While the number of city dwellers world-wide will nearly double in 40 years to more than six billion people, the size of cities’ footprints is expected to increase twice as fast.
This hasn’t been lost on Paul Romer, the Stanford University economist overseeing the development of an instant city in Honduras. He proposes building “charter cities” in impoverished states with new laws, new infrastructure and foreign investors—free trade zones elevated to the realm of social experiment. Mr. Romer sold Honduran President Porfirio Lobo on the idea in November and has stayed on as an adviser. Last month, the Honduran Congress voted to amend the country’s constitution to allow the pilot project to proceed.
In making his case to the Honduran public, Mr. Romer pitched the city as an aerotropolis. “Honduras could be the hub that brings Central America and Latin America into the world-wide network of air traffic,” he wrote. “Central America will eventually have a major hub. It’s a question of where, not if.” Without air connections to the outside world, his charter city will stagnate. “If you’re going to take the next step from assembling garments to assembling iPads,” he told me, “you’ve got to have a major airport, or you’ll never beat Shenzhen.”
Every aerotropolis is locked in competition with every other one, just as every financial center is jostling for position in the new multi-polar international order. The principle is the same: Everyone wants to be the hub; no one wants to be the spokes. This has made the aerotropolis ripe for experimentation when it comes to governance, whether it’s simple tax-free zones, the charter cities Mr. Romer proposes, or the “state capitalism” practiced by Dubai or Singapore. (The word “aerotropolis,” I should note, was coined by John Kasarda, a business professor at the University of North Carolina and my co-author on the forthcoming book of that title. He is currently working on projects in Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Panama, and has served as a consultant in the past in Detroit, Memphis, Tenn., Dubai, Chongqing and Hyderabad.)
The basic aim of an aerotropolis is to disrupt local incumbents and monopolies using the long arm of air travel. It allows Indian hospitals to entice American heart patients for top-notch surgery at rock-bottom prices. It lets factories move out to the far reaches of western China to manufacture the iPad for lower wages while absorbing millions of urban migrants. Detroit’s leaders are even building an aerotropolis in a Hail Mary bid for Chinese investment.
Floating above it all, meanwhile, are the globe-trotting executives chasing emerging markets. They are the denizens not only of Dubai and Singapore but of new business districts such as the Zuidas on the southern edge of Amsterdam, which was designed to be eight minutes from the airport by train and is home to the Netherlands’ biggest financial service firms.
The World in Flight
2.4 billion Air travelers in 2010
3.3 billion Projected air travelers in 2014
9.4% Projected average annual growth in international passenger demand in the Middle East, 2010-2014
4.9% Projected average annual growth in international passenger demand in North America, 2010-14
31 million Metric tons of international cargo traffic in 2010
38 million Projected metric tons of international cargo traffic in 201
Kohn Pedersen Fox AssociatesNEW GEOGRAPHY New Songdo is a 20-minute drive from Incheon International Airport, over a 13-mile bridge. The airport is a 3½-hour flight from one-third of the world’s population
The aerotropolis is the city that state capitalism built. In Dubai, Emirates is a wholly owned subsidiary of “Dubai Inc.” An uncle of the country’s ruler, Sheikh Ahmed is not only chairman of Emirates airline; he also oversees the airports, the civil aviation authority and the Supreme Fiscal Committee. From its beginning 25 years ago, the airline was seen as a strategic arm of the state, paying no taxes while importing the foreign labor that built the place.
Using its airline, Dubai feverishly assembled a population from elsewhere—Indian entrepreneurs, British bankers, Russians buying condos with suitcases of cash—thus creating the ethnic enclaves and gated communities that define the place. Americans outsource low-cost production to Chinese workers; in Dubai that labor (and the inequality it creates) is in-sourced. Emirates proved to be the enabler for Dubai Inc.’s competing developers, who wildly overbuilt at their ruler’s behest.
Determined to prevent the world from connecting through Dubai, its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi eventually followed suit, starting its own airline by royal decree in 2003 and eventually supplying it with $51 billion worth of aircraft. That was the precursor to its plan to lure franchise branches of the Guggenheim Museum, the Louvre and New York University, along with an entirely new section of the city in which to put them. Qatar’s rulers have done much the same in Doha, bulking up Qatar Airways and building a new airport ahead of its winning bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
For its part, Saudi Arabia has gone so far as to build six “economic cities” from scratch in the empty desert. The aim is to house and create work for one-third of the 13 million Saudis under the age of 20—a largely uneducated work force. Each of these cities in the middle of nowhere will have its own air hub to recruit foreign investment. Like Mr. Romer’s instant city, they are social experiments, filled with California-style communities where men and women, foreigners and Saudis will mix.
The ultimate state capitalist and player in this game is, of course, China. For all the attention paid to its high-speed railways, the Chinese state is spending as much if not more to build 100 new airports by 2020, with new cities to match.
In the western city of Chongqing, huge swaths of countryside have been paved in preparation for the arrival of China’s electronics manufacturers, which are pulling up stakes along the coast. Led by Hewlett-Packard and Foxconn, the maker of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, Chongqing aspires to produce nearly half the world’s laptops by 2015, all of which will leave the city by air.
As a matter of policy, this strategy is a response to the millions of peasants leaving their farms for the city in search of work. China is building aerotropolises as a means to funnel growth away from the coast. It’s even building them in strategic spots as far away as Angola, Zambia, Sudan and Pakistan in order to airlift the labor required for extracting natural resources.
The aerotropolis is also attracting private developers. In India, where the government hopes to fund a half trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure with public-private partnerships, airports are at the top of most companies’ wish lists. GMR, one of India’s largest industrial conglomerates, built a new airport in Hyderabad and a new international terminal in Delhi in exchange for land to develop around both. A private consortium—including the government of Singapore—is building new airports and cities near Ludhiana and Durgapur, in an attempt to create India’s answers to the FedEx and UPS cargo hubs in Memphis and Louisville, Ky. Not so long ago, those cities were Southern Rust Belt towns. They have been saved by companies like Amazon and Zappos, which set up shop around the air hubs in exchange for vast swaths of land on which to locate their mammoth warehouses.
Zuma PressREADY FOR TAKEOFF | Attendants on an Emirates Airbus 380 in Beijing. Dubai has positioned itself as a major airport hub.
Outside Seoul in South Korea, Songdo International Business District bills itself as the world’s smartest, greenest city and the most expensive privately financed real-estate project in history, with a price tag of $35 billion. It was originally commissioned by South Korea’s government to be a magnet for attracting foreign direct investment. The American developer Stan Gale was hired to a build an instant city the size of downtown Boston on a man-made island connected to Seoul’s airport via a 13-mile-long bridge.
What was imagined as a hub for Western expatriates—not a Korean city, but a mini-Manhattan floating off the coast of South Korea, complete with a “Central Park”—has been settled instead by families from Seoul. The city won’t be finished until 2015, at the earliest, but Mr. Gale is convinced that he’s “cracked the code” of urbanism and aims to sell 20 more just like it to mayors across China. Chongqing and Changsha have already expressed an interest.
The aerotropolis arrives at a moment when urban centers seemingly have started to rule the world. Just 100 cities account for nearly one-third of the global economy. “If the 20th century was the era of nations,” South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pronounced at New Songdo’s christening in 2009, “the 21st century is the era of cities.”
In places like China, India, and Dubai, the aerotropolis is the strategy being adopted to challenge the existing economic and political order. Rather than “machines for living” (in Le Corbusier’s famously bloodless formulation), these cities are competitive engines, designed to lure talent and investment or simply to park a growing and restive population. The recent uprisings in the Middle East have driven home the need to create housing and jobs at all costs.
These fast-growing air-based cities are already shaking things up. Emirates’ rise in Dubai has set off alarms in London, Paris and Frankfurt, where the chief executives of flagship air carriers worry that they are being cut out of new trade flows. Canada even triggered a nasty diplomatic spat with the United Arab Emirates over its refusal to let Emirates fly to Calgary and Vancouver.
The aerotropolis is tailor-made for today’s world, in which no nation reliably dominates and every nation must fight for its place in the global economy. It is at once a new model of urbanism and the newest weapon in the widening competition for wealth and security.
—Greg Lindsay is co-author, with John Kasarda, of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.”
By Dr. Jorge Nelson, Headmaster Something very special is happening on this world-class campus, Chadwick International.
There is an intense focus on a Quality of Learning for students built on the legacy of Chadwick School’s goals of Academic Excellence and Exemplary Character, Chadwick’s five core values of Honesty, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness and Compassion as well as 21st Century Competencies of Worldview, Emotional intelligence, Academics in balance, Creativity and Technology. The synergy of the twin goals of the Chadwick Mission, the five Core Values, and 21st Century Competencies will set our students well on the way to realize Margaret Chadwick’s call for action to “…do something constructive for humanity…” and to do it as first class global citizens.
In 1937, Mrs. Chadwick stated, “Experience is the best of all schools. School curriculum should consist of experiences.” State-of-the-Art Information and Communications Technologies and the aspiration to become an International Baccalaureate World School are at the heart of Chadwick International’s visionary, collaborative, and experiential learning environments. This confluence combined with taking the 75 year old legacy of Chadwick School to an international level will make Chadwick International one of the finest schools anywhere. Quality of Learning is why students will thrive and excel at Chadwick International and we welcome you to join us as we follow Mrs. Chadwick’s vision to “…habituate children to the ways of living that are satisfying and worthwhile.”
By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor and Chief Blogger
Songdo IBD’s master plan recognized that world class education was vital. In turn, International School Songdo (ISS) was built to set a new standard for education–embracing true 21st century pedagogy and Classroom 2.0 mindset. Today that vision is reality, the school and its staff sharing this vision with educators globally. In fact, the school is in the fore front of virtual/ web based learning–strongly supported by Cisco and Cisco Webex technology.
This new video, hosted by ISS headmaster Dr. Jorge Nelson, shares ISS’s vision.
By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor and Chief Blogger
Songdo IBD and Cisco are a great fit. I support both. This Economic Timesarticle shares “Why” Cisco is investing heavy in the project.
Technoholik: Can Delhi ever be an Incheon? 23 Oct 2009, 0544 hrs IST, Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan, ET Bureau
When the folks at Cisco called up last month, inviting me to cover a conference on ‘Sustainable Cities of the Future’ in Incheon, South Korea, I was a bit confused. Firstly, why in the world was a company that mainly makes routers and switches hosting an urban issues conference mainly for Mayoral delegations from around the world?
Secondly, why did they think Technoholik would be interested? Well, it seems that Cisco sees itself as an “infrastructure” company and they want to expand the definition of that word – which brings roads, bridges, buildings and electricity to mind – to include IT as a fundamental component. I was still skeptical, but when they assured me that there would actually be live demos, it seemed like it could make interesting viewing for our television show on ET NOW.
Cisco had chosen Seoul’s twin city as the showcase since Incheon was rebuilding itself for the 2014 Asian Games (it incidentally pipped Delhi in the final round of voting). On arriving at Incheon airport, which serves as Seoul’s international airport as well, my mind began to race. How did the city that I had just arrived from, even think that it stood a chance?
The already modern city of Incheon wasn’t just upgrading – it was building an entire new district called Songdo , largely reclaimed from the sea, as part of a new Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) to take advantage of its imminent fame as Asian Games host.
The advantage of building from scratch of course, is that they can incorporate the kind of futuristic tech that folks like Cisco are hoping will be a part of every major city in the near future. We’re not talking about flying cars. But if your traffic lights and electric grid are on a network, while your automobile number plates have smart tags embedded, cities can save power by switching off street lights when no cars are on certain parts of the road. Plumbing and gas lines can be maintained better with sensors while energy consumption can be monitored and optimised .
Lets take buildings as another example. At the construction stage itself along with laying ducts for electricity and gas, builders of the future will lay network cables and sensors into the steel and concrete itself. One such developer in Songdo, GALE International , actually had a ‘wired’ building up and running, which was entirely IP-enabled .
The resident could control every light switch, door, security camera, window shade and appliance from a set of touchscreen panels in the house. This wasn’t just for convenience – the main draw was the ability to see how much energy the apartment was consuming (and more importantly , wasting) so that adjustments could be made by allowing natural light and heat using window shades, switching off parts of the central AC, and turning off unused power sources. This was being done both for individual dwellings and for common areas of the building.
The “media room” of course had a videoconferencing unit (Cisco’s high-end “TelePresence” system, what else!) built into the large-screen home theatre. The interesting thing was that one could access various services via the large LCD TV in a sort of “municipal app store” way. One could dial in and videochat with the local police department , the school, civic services, supermarkets or just browse the interactive options they offered.
Cisco in fact hopes to convince cities that such an approach could actually generate additional revenue apart from providing basic services more efficiently. You can see this futuristic building and some more examples of urban tech from Incheon on the Technoholik show this weekend! In fact my two days in Incheon seemed even more of a mirage of sorts, these past few weeks, as I scanned the papers and our lack of preparedness for the Commonwealth Games dominated the headlines. But a glimmer of hope came from one of those headlines when I read that Sam Pitroda had been appointed advisor of Cabinet Rank to the Prime Minister on, get this, Infrastructure, Innovation and Information! Our wired future hopefully, ain’t that far away!
By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor and Chief Blogger
Songdo IBD continues to draw much attention. Its Green and eco-friendly technology interests many. For example this Joongang Ilbo article shares some of the city’s eco-friendly features.
The article notes among other cutting edge technologies the city’s automatic garbage gathering system.
Songdo International Business Complex has been chosen for the LEED-ND pilot project, an environmental grading system for buildings run by the U.S. Green Building Council. It is the highest environmental certification available for a building, and the entire city of 5.72 million square meters has been selected, reflecting its eco-friendly construction. Songdo is the largest single LEED-ND pilot project outside North America.
To receive the LEED-ND certificate, which no city has ever received before, Songdo International City will compete with other cities.
When graded according to the LEED system, Songdo International City hopes to rank at silver. For individual buildings in Songdo, the Northeast Asia Trade Tower, a landmark of the city, is also aiming for silver. If it succeeds in that goal, it will be the first and only building to do so in Korea.
The U-Life Complex building, which will serve as the Asian headquarters of Gale International Korea, is aiming for the highest level: platinum.
Meanwhile, Korea’s first eco friendly seawater “road” connecting the center of a city directly to the sea, is now under construction. The canal, to be built through Songdo’s 400,000-square-meter Central Park, will pump seawater into the city, a first for Korea.
The seawater will fill a 4.8-kilometer canal starting at the western water treatment plant in the business complex. Filling it up with seawater instead of fresh water minimizes the environmental disturbance due to the ultimate discharge into the Yellow Sea, while a double filtration system eliminates the need for chemical purifiers.
Automatic garbage collection will make use of underground conveyers inside pipelines, with automatic sorting, compression and dehydration – no garbage trucks required. If people follow the guidelines to dispose of their trash, the entire system can run cleanly and efficiently, contributing to a more pleasant city life.
The pipeline network will cost 390 billion won to build and will be finished by 2020, when it will be the largest of its kind in Korea.
