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Pleased to see Songdo’s NEATT ( The North East Asia Trade Tower) open. I recall over the years peeking out from floor after floor as construction moved ever upward. Last time i was in the Tower it was a chilly February morning hosting BBC Click.
As a longtime supporter of the Songdo project, we always have seen the Songdo International District ( the core of the greater Songdo FEZ which NY-based Gale International has developed) as a Hub for East Asia business…neat idea the area could be hub for eventually N-S commerce.
A few years back I was invited to participate in some activities sponsored by Gangwon province in northeastern South Korea, the traditional boundaries of which were split by the division of the peninsula. Officials were hoping that a reconnection of the east coast rail line would give the province an economic shot in the arm.
On the west side of the peninsula, officials have also been eyeing inter-Korean integration and the economic benefits that it could bring. According to a newspaper story passed along by Tom Murcott of Gale International, the developer of the Songdo “smart city,” back in 2008 local officials pushed for a traffic network expansion plan that would connect Incheon International Airport to Gangwha and Gaeseong Industrial Park as part of the Gangwha development plan. That integration would seem to make sense, especially if the October 2007 North-South summit vision of redeveloping Haeju ever came to pass.
With President Park’s renewed emphasis on unification, Incheon officials are dusting off the old plans. According to the report in the Incheon-based Kiho Ilbo, Incheon City has announced it will push ahead with the construction of an expressway from Yeongjong to Haeju of North Korea, the so-called “West Sea Unification Expressway.” Incheon City estimates KRW2.7 trillion of project costs will have to be spent on the 112km-long expressway.
Presumably the city doesn’t have that kind of cash laying around, and one would think that the national government might have something to say about opening up direct transportation links with the North, so don’t hold your breath. Nevertheless, it’s a reminder that local officials have their own eyes fixed on North-South possibilities, and if North-South relations calm, Incheon and Songdo would be ideally placed to become the hub of North-South exchange.
I attended this year’s President Cup in Dublin, Ohio with my friends at Gale International. They are developers of the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, which will be hosting the 2015 Cup. We have high expectations for the event in two years.
Don Southerton at 2013 President’s Cup Songdo Booth
The Details
The Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, located in the Songdo International Business District (IBD), Incheon, Korea, has been selected as the host the 2015 President’s Cup.
The Incheon City skyline is visible from Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, site of the 2015 Presidents Cup.
July 31, 2013
AKRON, OHIO – At Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, where Jack Nicklaus is tonight receiving the Ambassador of Golf Award, Nicklaus joined PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem to announce that Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, located in the Songdo International Business District (IBD), Incheon, Korea, has been selected as the host course and Incheon City as the host city for The Presidents Cup 2015 when the event makes its first trip to Asia.
Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, which is located 40 miles west of Seoul in the country’s largest economic development zone, celebrated its opening in September 2010 with the Champions Tour’s first official money/official victory event held in Asia. The course hosted the Songdo Championship in 2010 and 2011, and the 2012 Korea Women’s Open on the KLPGA Tour.
Mayor Song Young-Gil of Incheon City expressed his excitement and was delighted with his city being selected as the host city of The Presidents Cup 2015. “We are extremely pleased and honored to be the first city in Asia to be selected as host of The Presidents Cup,” said Mayor Song. “Along with the upcoming 2014 Asian Games, Incheon City has certainly put itself on the global stage as a choice destination for major international events, and we look forward to welcoming participants, sponsors and dignitaries from around the world to our great city and country.
“Incheon City will work closely with the PGA TOUR, Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea and others to make The Presidents Cup 2015 a resounding success.”
Finchem said, “Just over three years ago, we announced The Presidents Cup would be played at Muirfield Village Golf Club in 2013. Today, we further strengthen Jack Nicklaus’ commitment and connection to The Presidents Cup with the announcement that the course he designed at Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea will in 2015 host the event for its first foray into Asia. Like Muirfield Village, Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea is Jack’s vision and an impressive venue in its own right. We are thrilled to take The Presidents Cup there, which is not only a milestone in the event’s history, but also a significant step in further elevating the game of golf in Korea.”
Nicklaus said, “We’re very honored and proud that Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea has been selected for The Presidents Cup 2015. We have always felt strongly about JNGC Korea as a host venue because of its location in the Songdo International Business District, its proximity to the Incheon International Airport, the quality hotels nearby, and the club’s proximity to a large population area. The facility itself also makes for an ideal location to host The Presidents Cup. We’re very pleased that the PGA TOUR felt the same after evaluating its options throughout Korea.
“Everyone has worked extremely hard to get us to today. I want to extend my congratulations to Mayor Song Young-Gil and the host City of Incheon; the membership and staff at Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, as well as the development team from Gale International, especially Stan Gale. I would also like to recognize Chairman Roy Ryu, who has been instrumental in bringing The Presidents Cup to Korea. His vision and leadership were critical throughout the entire selection process. In the end, we’re delighted that the PGA TOUR selected the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea. We think they will present a great event. This will be a tremendous opportunity to showcase on a world stage the beauty of Korea and the country’s passion for the game of golf. Having been fortunate to be involved in several Presidents Cup matches in the past, I know how uniquely special this event is and how it represents to a global audience all that is great about the game of golf.”
Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea features a par-72, 7,413-yard Signature Golf Course designed by the Golden Bear, and offers world-class amenities, including an award-winning, 60,000-square-foot clubhouse. For The Presidents Cup 2015, the course has undergone some minor renovations and the holes rerouted to accommodate hospitality and the match-play format. Songdo IBD is a joint undertaking by Gale International, POSCO E&C, and Incheon City and a model of international collaboration. Songdo IBD is globally recognized as the world’s foremost smart, sustainable city-scale development. In 2012, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) selected a site in Songdo as the home for the GCF Secretariat. It is believed that many of the sustainable infrastructure and technological innovations being pioneered in Songdo will be applied to GCF-funded projects in developing nations.
“To build a truly global city, we engaged the world’s leading design, architecture, engineering and technology firms,” said Stan Gale, chairman of Gale International and Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea. “Working closely with our partner POSCO E&C, we selected Nicklaus Design to create a sporting venue worthy of hosting professional golf’s most prestigious international events. As a direct result of Jack’s consistent leadership and hands-on oversight, the JNGC Korea was selected as The Presidents Cup 2015 host location. The PGA TOUR’s decision is emblematic of Incheon City’s global appeal and a reinforcement of the importance of the great game of golf in the Republic of Korea and Greater Asia.”
Previous international venues for The Presidents Cup include: The Royal Melbourne Golf Club in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (1998, 2011); The Links at Fancourt, George, South Africa (2003); and The Royal Montreal Golf Club in Montreal, Quebec, Canada (2007). Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Prince William County, Va., hosted The Presidents Cup in 1994, 1996, 2000 and 2005, and TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, Calif., was the host site in 2009. Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, will host The Presidents Cup the first week in October.
In 2011, K.J. Choi, K.T. Kim and Y.E. Yang competed in The Presidents Cup, marking the first time more than one South Korean qualified for the International Team in event history.
In February I hosted BBC World Service journalist Gareth Mitchell in Korea. This is second in Gareth’s well done series on Korea, emerging technology, and Songdo International Business District.
This episode interviews Wim Elfrink Chief Global Strategist for Cisco. The interview took place in Songdo IBD via Cisco’s TelePresence. Here is the audio link.
BTW Hard to top Cisco’s TP technology. Below is photo of me working with teachers via TP in Songdo IBD in 2009. I was in Irvine, California, the teachers in Incheon, South Korea 🙂
Since researching and then authoring a book on Songdo International Business District (IBD), I have watched the Incheon project and similar new urban communities face a number of challenges. Beyond huge development costs, the vision for these communities requires not only providing but also sustaining a high quality of living.
With regard to Songdo IBD, the community rises from reclaimed land on the western coast of South Korea. More significantly, the project embraces high standards for design, sustainability and, most importantly, an unparalleled lifestyle. Specifically the developer boldly set out to transform and reshape the model for urban communities.
That said, with regard to Songdo and other new urban projects I have been drawn to a question, “Have high profile new urbanism communities met their early visions and expectations?”
Although like with similar project that were stalled by the global recession, Songdo now is back on its growth plan. Gazing out from Songdo’s North East Trade Tower’s 68th floor observation area on a cold February morning, I could see the city more than 50% complete. When completed in 2017, Songdo IBD will be home to 65, 000 residents with about 27,000 people already residing within the project. Equally encouraging, the halls of Chadwick International School Korea now ring with the sound of children, many of whom are carrying laptops. Enrollment over the next few years is expected to grow from the current 700 students to 1200.
NEATT ( on right)
Looking at Songdo IBD, several areas deserve review…
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and Sustainability – Today, Songdo IBD boasts 13.7 million square feet of LEED-certified space. Along with continued plans to meet LEEDs standards in new construction, the project’s sustainability features a state of art cogeneration plant for electricity with waste heat collected and used in warm buildings with the city. Somewhat of a surprise, and in conjunction with a robust recycling program, Songdo also has the world’s largest pneumatic waste collection system with garbage from across the city directed into a network of large underground pipes, which carry the waste to central facilities. This eliminates the need for the fleet of garbage trucks seen making morning collections in most cities and results in the reduction in traffic, related noise and vehicular pollution. Visiting the collection center, one quickly appreciates the city-wide complexity in the consolidating process and management of the waste.
Green and Open Space Per the Master Plan, 40% of Songdo IBD has been designated to be open space. Looking down from the NEATT observation floor, and in contrast with the high urban density one finds across much of the greater Seoul region, the strong commitment to providing open and green space is apparent from the 100 acre Central Park to canals to walk and bike pathways.
Smart Cities One final dimension of Songdo IBD meeting its vision is the project’s strategic partnership with and commitment from Cisco to become a leading example of a smart and connected city. For example, along with technology to link and share data across an integrated network, buildings and residents will be able to better, fine tune energy demands and monitor and control apartment lights and temperature. In all, there will be constant IP connectivity across Songdo IBD.
Expectations Overall, Songdo IBD is making good on its promises and pledges. As expected with any project the size and scale of Songdo IBD, I see some adaptation to new trends. One modification from the early vision of the project is a shift from offering traditional commercial office development to university campuses and biotech research centers– a more knowledge-based focus and community. Of course, sustaining the vision over time will require continued support of government, institutions, businesses, and residents. However, I expect that visitors to Songdo (Korean and foreigners) will appreciate the community’s new urbanism focus and envy a life style in which one can live, walk to work and stroll through Central Park.
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.”
