The rise of the instant city

By Ben Thompson

It must have been an interesting first site visit for Stan Gale, Chairman of US-based construction firm Gale International and the brains behind the ambitious New Songdo IBD development, when he originally came to Korea back in 2000. As the helicopter swooped down over the proposed site and his hosts gesticulated excitedly to where the megaproject was expected to take shape – residential units here, business district there, a huge recreational park in the centre flanked by a university campus, convention facilities and the country’s tallest building – one fact was inescapable: the parcel of land set aside for this grand vision was not actually land at all. It was an open expanse of water.

“We know that we can apply the experience to other city scale development projects and collapse our time-frame significantly.”

Indeed, the Koreans' proposal to borrow US$35 billion from the country's largest banks and its premier steel company, Posco E&C, and use it to build a new city -from the ground up - on 1500 acres of reclaimed tidal mudflats just south of Incheon, Korea's third-largest metropolitan area, was nothing if not intriguing. For one thing, it represented an unprecedented combined urban planning, civil engineering, construction and marketing challenge to create a new urban landscape in such a collapsed timeframe - a matter of years rather than decades; for another, it was an offer a number of other major international firms had already taken a pass on, believing the risks and hurdles involved were too great. Gale, though, saw the chance to establish his company on the international scene, and undeterred by the logistical difficulties inherent in creating something out of nothing - the urban planning equivalent of Genesis - he signed up.

"Stan gets a big kick out of that story," laughs Gale International EVP and Chief Marketing Officer Tom Murcott from the comfort of his New York office, before conceding that the reality was not quite as bleak as the firm's charismatic chairman jokingly likes to paint it. Korea, Murcott explains, was already in the throes of embarking on a bold economic and real-estate development plan to transform itself into the nexus of northeast Asian trade; and with an enviable position sandwiched between China and Japan (or, as Murcott puts it, "within a three-hour plane ride of one-third of the world's population") New Songdo had the potential to attract both Asians and other international workers wanting to live in a modern environment. "The opportunity was just too good to turn down," he says. "Stan understood the vision and believed that Korea was going to make the commitment necessary to transform its economy into a world leader."

Indeed, the hardest parts - attracting initial funding and getting political buy-in - had already been accomplished. Work on the huge land reclamation project (10,000 acres, of which 1500 was earmarked for Songdo) had begun a few years before in the late 1990s. Incheon International, the third busiest airport in Asia and consistently ranked one of the best in the world, had opened in 2000. And to help encourage further development, the Koreans agreed to construct a 12-km long, six-lane bridge connecting the city with the airport to make the location more attractive, build roads to ease access to Seoul, 64 km away, and install a comprehensive subway network that would connect directly to the new city. With attractive tax breaks and other favourable business conditions for partners and investors also on offer, much of the bureaucratic wrangling usually associated with such large-scale projects had largely been done: all Gale had to do was build it.

Working at speed

And incredibly, just five years after work started on initial construction, the city is already recognisable as a functioning urban landscape. The convention centre, a key feature of the project's business-oriented design, opened in 2009 and has already hosted numerous high-profile international events, while the city's centrepiece Central Park opened late last year. Korea's tallest building, the Northeast Asia Trade Tower - a 68-storey mixed-use that will house multinational companies due to relocate in the second half of 2011 - is complete, the five-star Sheraton Hotel is open, and a number of residential projects are already occupied, with more due to be completed soon. For Murcott, it's a significant achievement. "The speed at which it was accomplished is unprecedented, and if you could go there you'd be walking through a functioning city," he says. "You can go for a canal walk, take money out of the HSBC, go have a cup of coffee and then walk in the park or play some golf before jumping in a cab to be at the airport in 15 minutes or going to your apartment in our First World Towers where there's approximately 7500 people living. It's pretty amazing."

Already, a significant number of people call the city home. "There are about 18,000 people living and working in the city each day, and that doesn't include the thousands of construction workers also working on the development of the numerous projects that are still going up," Murcott continues. "We have about US$10 billion either under construction or up out of the ground, incorporating about 23 separate projects and 50 separate structures. So we're really a living, breathing city."

Of course, one of the best things about building a city from scratch on a greenfield site is that you are able to learn from the mistakes of the past - and cherry pick the successes you want to incorporate in your own vision for urban living. Songdo is no exception. Woven into the master plan is a rich set of features inspired by some of the greatest cities on Earth - including the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and stunning convention centre architecture redolent of the iconic Sydney Opera House.

The city will also feature public and private international schools, and a new hospital. An opera house, concert hall, museum and aquarium will be developed, all adding to the cultural fabric of a new international city. For outdoor recreation, a Jack Nicklaus championship golf course - one of only 25 in the world - was completed earlier this year. When it is finished in 2015, Songdo will be home to 65,000 residents and it is estimated that around 300,000 people will commute in daily as either office workers or students. As out-of-the-box solutions go, Gale International is delivering on its promise and then some.

Sustainable living

But the speed at which the city is being built is not the only impressive aspect of the construction. Songdo's green credentials are equally eye-catching. Of the 1500 acres, around 40 percent will be dedicated to green space, parkland and golf courses, while the city will be easily travelled by foot and mass transit. The impressive open space will do wonders for storm water retention and reduction of the so-called 'urban heat island' effect, where a metropolitan area is significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. The whole city is based on LEED green building standards and over 120 buildings will seek such certification, making it the largest private LEED development in the world. The development is also among the first urban areas to seek Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighbourhood Development (LEED-ND) certification, and other green design features include green roofs, LED lighting, co-generation, a state-of-the-art waste management system, low-VOC materials, an expanded mass transit service, native landscaping and an ambitious target to recycle 75 percent of the waste generated in the construction process.

It wasn't always this way, however. David Moore, Gale International's EVP for Construction, Korean liaison and its sustainability champion, explains how the firm decided to redesign the masterplan with sustainability in mind following an epiphany from Stan Gale himself. "In the original design, we were not looking for LEED certification," he says. "But Stan recognised that the green agenda was the right way to go, not only from an altruistic point of view, but also from a commercial point of view as well. If you can't legitimately claim a green agenda, then I think that the marketing team are going to be pretty frustrated."

As such, the team had to go back in and redesign certain elements in order to meet the new standards it was setting for itself, as well as achieve those all-important certification requirements. "This mainly involved changes to the quality of the curtain wall and to the mechanical and electrical systems," explains Moore. "That's where most of the energy is lost or used, and so we concentrated on the heating and ventilating to try and improve on our energy usage."

Indeed, environmental responsibility is now core to the concept of successful cities of the future, adds Murcott. But Gale also recognises the role of technology in enabling such advances, and as such the firm has teamed up with technology giant Cisco to provide much of the state-of-the-art IT plumbing Songdo will need to both minimise its impact on the environment and become a truly 21st century city. "We believe that a smart, sustainable city will have at its core a technology infrastructure that will enable a better life experience for the citizens, allow for more efficient city management and operations, while creating a significant return on investment for the local economy which the development will serve," he explains. "We want to figure out a way to actually wire the entire city to make it the most technologically advanced destination in the world."

Alongside state-of-the-art telecommunications and broadband connectivity in every home, such systems will also include smart meters that let the consumer know exactly what he or she is spending on resources such as power and water - and what the environmental cost of their energy use decisions actually are. "One of the key things we're starting to introduce through our technology partnership with Cisco is to be able to communicate back to the household exactly how their actions affect the cost of monthly bills," explains Moore. "When people click up the temperature a couple of degrees, then it's going to be interesting to know how much more that's going to cost them - and whether they change their behaviour accordingly."

Challenging times

As you would expect in a project of this size with such an aggressive timescale, it hasn't always been easy, and Moore admits that the sheer logistics of the project have proved to be a major challenge in the build to date. "Two years ago we were spending US$50 million a month on construction," he says. "That's a lot of labour and a lot of materials, and logistically we had to bring them into a new, reclaimed area - despite the fact that the basic infrastructure wasn't in place at that time."

To help it manage the process, Gale employed a highly structured approach to project management. "We had a hierarchy of management control," says Moore. "We used local companies, but those local companies had international partners to guide them through the construction management process. There's no international contractors in Korea, but there was a level of international competence in the construction management teams that we drew on."

The firm also benefited from the strong relationship it had developed with the Korean authorities, and Moore believes that increased collaboration between both public and private sectors is a model that offers significant advantages - provided both parties are willing to work for the undoubted rewards on offer. "I would say that without that win-win mentality, it's impossible to deliver a realistic project that is going to be both viable and attractive," he says. "It's always going to be tough to align the requirements of local, politically motivated authorities with the needs of your technology partners, your lenders, your design team and the people that you're selling to - which in itself includes the differing requirements for commercial space, retail space, office space and also apartments. You have to understand the situation that your partners are in and that way you can align the magnets in a positive and negative direction."

It's certainly an approach that worked for Gale, enabling it to successfully work through any potential issues and manage the construction programme effectively. "Our biggest challenge has really been programming: how do you develop a phased approach to bringing both people and activities into the city so that it becomes vibrant and thriving from day one?" says Murcott. "Because we've got such a good relationship with all our partners, we're really able to concentrate on that side of things and manage that process really well. So now we're working with the city on district cogeneration and on an advanced pneumatic waste system that eliminates the need for traditional refuse collection."

More work ahead

Much remains to be done, but the Gale International team is already starting to see the fruits of its labours as interest in its 'instant city' approach continues to rise. According to a study by investment bank CIBC World Markets, governments are expected to spend US$35 trillion on public works projects during the next 20 years - and it's a potential market that Murcott is anxious to tap into. "Almost every week we host a delegation from somewhere in Asia, South America or the Middle East," he says. "People are coming over and looking at our city as a model for how things could be done in their own regions, in their own municipalities."

And while cities of a million-plus people are popping up across the developing world, the foremost market for the prototype is China, where a massive demographic shift from rural to urban already is underway and hundreds of new cities are required. "China has a significant amount of opportunity for us," says Murcott. "The demographics are right, the socio-political environment is right, and if you can make sure that from a national, provincial and municipal level everyone is aligned behind the need and committed to provide the infrastructure to develop a greenfield city from scratch, then it can certainly be done - as Songdo is proving."

Indeed, Murcott believes that the experience gained on the project has actually enabled the team to become even more efficient. "As good as Songdo was, we believe we can bring this concept to market faster, better and more efficiently than we have in Songdo," he explains. "We recently did a masterplan for a city in central China, and whereas the master planning process in Songdo took us about two-and-a-half years -going through the initial planning phase, working out the logistical challenges, the infrastructural challenges, then finalising the design - the second time we did it that process only took us six months. Because we know we've already done this very successfully once before, we know that we can apply this experience to other city-scale development projects and collapse our timeframe significantly."

For Murcott and his team, the 'instant city' approach has been hugely liberating - much more so than if they had been forced to retrofit an existing urban landscape, with all the legacy infrastructure challenges associated with that. Nonetheless, he's aware that there's more to a city than just concrete and steel; to be a true success, a city must have heart, too. "The energy of the city is built around the amenities that one puts into it, and a greenfield development allows you to very effectively programme those amenities," he concludes. "If it's done correctly, then it creates a vibrant city from the start. No matter what you call it, this approach does give you certain advantages and we've certainly been able to take advantage of that."

Moore agrees, and suggests that building a sustainable city is about much more than merely furthering the green agenda. "You know what true sustainability means? It means creating something that is viable," he says. "That's a major part of how to develop new cities: you have to make them viable, whether that be environmentally, socially, practically or financially. And what makes the investment most viable is the quality of life and Songdo's commitment to become an international business hub; that will create the most value."

THE SONGDO IBD MASTER PLAN

• The 68-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower will stand as Korea's tallest building and most advanced corporate centre.
• The architecturally stunning Songdo Convensia, operating as Incheon's primary convention center, is Korea's largest column-free interior space.
• 600 acres of open space including a 100-acre Central Park will provide a beautiful place of refuge and relaxation for those who live and work in the city.
• The Incheon Arts Centre will offer a cultural complex housing a concert hall, opera house, museum of Asian contemporary art, a music conservatory, design school, artist in residence housing, and a library.
• The Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, co-developed with Kitson Partners, features an 18-hole championship golf course, a full clubhouse and a fitness centre situated on a 228-acre site which will also include luxury villas and condominiums.
• Public and private schools including theChadwick International Schoolfor kindergarten students through to high school, provide a state-of-the-art learning environment and international perspectives to prepare them for leading post-secondary schools around the world.
• Songdo International City Hospital is planned to boast the latest in medical diagnosis and treatment technologies. Partners such as 3M andMicrosoft will also participate in the development of this world-class healthcare facility.

KEEPING PEOPLE MOVING

Songdo IBD will support mobility needs with efficient transportation systems: short-haul flights access to other major Asian finance centres; express bus networks that facilitate access to the airport as well as to surrounding smaller cities; and linkage to the existing Incheon subway system, the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit (SMRT), which will provide connections to the national railroad network.

Other significant infrastructure investments include the 12.2-km Incheon Bridge connecting Songdo IBD to Incheon International Airport via a short 15-minute trip, completed in October 2009; Songdo IBD will be linked by highway to Seoul, just 40 miles away; while plans are also in place to upgrade the road network to the Greater Gyeonggi province, downtown Seoul and areas south of the Han River in Gangnam.

Within the city itself, the Incheon subway line will be extended through Songdo with several stops servicing Songdo IBD. This in turn will link to all the major business and residential areas of the Seoul Metropolitan areas, as well as the AREX Express train to Incheon International Airport.