Future Urban Utopias
Issue 38 - Feb 08

Asia’s rapid growth is enabling the construction of new urban centres, designed to meld the best of new technology, sustainable building and town planning theory.

Imagine a brand-new gleaming vibrant city, with rolling boulevards, beautiful open common spaces and gorgeous civic buildings. Imagine a human-centric urban landscape, planned for the people yet also devised with the express purpose of stimulating economic growth and performance. Today, Asian governments are not only improving their cities incrementally to achieve this goal, they are partnering with private enterprise to literally create them from the ground up.

New Songdo City
On an island 40 miles from Seoul lays the site which is to be the location of the world’s largest from-scratch “ubiquitous city.” So called because of the ubiquity of information technology, New Songdo International City Development is a joint venture between Gale Company, a major American developer and Posco E & C, Korea’s largest engineering and construction company. The city has been master-planned to include 50 mil sqf of office space, 10 mil sqf of retail space, 5 mil sqf of hotel space and 30 mil sqf of residential space.

Hoping that New Songdo will become a regional business hub to rival Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, the Korean government has zoned the 1,500 acre site as a free economic zone and bilingual city. This allows foreign companies to own land, manage public services such as schools and hospitals, and even avoid Korea’s infamous bureaucracy.

However, beyond merely aiming to create a great place to do business, the developers of New Songdo hope to build a great place to live. Kohn Pedersen Fox was taken on as masterplan architects and asked to create a modern, pedestrian-friendly urban environment with mixed-use facilities and the best of green design. James von Klemperer, Prinicipal, KPF, described the project as “an architect’s dream”, and leading design luminaries such as Daniel Liebskind have designed buildings for the city.

“It will be a place where people can live, work and enjoy many leisure and cultural activities – it’s a very impressive project,” says Ashok Raiji, a project manager involved in the development. Aware of the danger of creating an asinine, artificial urban construct, the developers also aim to replicate the neighborhood diversity that typically comes from years of growth in order to make the city as attractive as possible to future residents. About 40 percent of the city will be open space, well above that found in most major cities and the planners have borrowed recognisable features from other cities worldwide. The city will have its own 100-acre central park, an 18-hole golf course and Venetian-style canals running throughout for transportation and recreational uses.

Building a city from square one does not happen cheaply, and the overall cost is expected to exceed US$40 bil, with 25 percent of this representing government funded infrastructure projects. In November 2007, Songdo became the subject of Korea’s largest financing deal with a US$2.7 bil agreement with Shinhan Bank Consortium. At the time, John B. Hynes, III, CEO and Managing Partner, Gale International said, “Currently we have US$5 billion of construction underway in Songdo IBD, representing 45 separate buildings in 12 project areas. This financing will enable us to purchase the remaining 300 acres of land from the city and to jumpstart the next phase of our development activity.”

China – Dongtan City
If New Songdo was envisaged as being a high-tech but human friendly habitat, Dongtan Eco-city has set itself the challenge of being the world's first custom-built sustainable city. Located at the mouth of the Yantze on Chongming, China's third largest island, Dongtan's urban environs will cover one third of an 86 square kilometer site whilst conserving and preserving adjacent wetlands.

This project approaches China's landscape as the example of a dynamic urban environment from which others can learn from. In fact this is meant literally, the project will be the prototype for 400 or more similar Chinese cities over the next 30 years. China's population is set to near 1.5 bil by 2020, and with rapid economic development matching urbanisation, modernity is beginning to significantly take hold within both China's cities and rural areas. The aim for these new eco-cities is compactness, which then becomes the basis for a better quality, more sustainable and more successful urban society.

The Shanghai city authorities have partnered with the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation and London headquartered engineering and design firm Arup to plan the project, which began in 2005. The stated aim is to create a city that will be sustainable environmentally as well as socially, culturally and economically. Peter Head, Director, Arup, in an interview with The Guardian said, "It's a complete paradigm shift. It is to be three, four or five times an ecological improvement on anything that exists. China is trying to use ecological efficiency to detach resource use from economic growth, the traditional development path. It's a different way of thinking."

Dongtan will produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Hydrogen fuel cells will power public transport and a network of bicycle and pedestrian footpaths will help to lower vehicle emissions and noise. "It is what we call integrated urbanism, we look not just at the environment, but also at the social and economic aspects: employment opportunities, the way people work, the way people play, the way they move around the city" says Roger Wood, Arup's project coordinator for the Dongtan project. Arup are also looking to use the project as a testing field for the latest eco-technologies and planning principals, and plan to use lesson learned at Dongtan into the development and masterplans for three other eco-cities in China as well as master plans for cities in Russia, Britain and Saudi Arabia. The first demonstrator phase for Dongtan residents is scheduled for completion in 2010 and will house 10,000.

The developers also aim to replicate the neighborhood diversity that typically comes from years of growth in order to make the city as attractive as possible to future residents.

It is what we call integrated urbanism, we look not just at the environment, but also at the social and economic aspects: employment opportunities, the way people work, the way people play, the way they move around the city.

Dubai Waterfront
No talk of new cities in the pan-Asian region could be seriously considered without at least a brief mention of neighbouring developments in the booming Middle-East. Waterfront developments in the region include Bahrain's US$1 bil Financial Harbor in Mina Manama, and the US$1 bil Durrat Khaleej. Oman has the US$805 mil The Wave at Seeb and the US$15 bil Blue City. Qatar has the US$2.5 bil Pearl of the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia has the US $200 mil City Fanar in Al Khobar. However, these projects are dwarfed by Dubai Waterfront, the largest man-made development in the world worth US$27 bil.

Dubai Waterfront is an urban project with the lofty ambition of creating, on a blank canvas, an international destination for residents, international businesses, and tourists. Real estate developer Nakheel Properties is driving the project, located on the last undeveloped Persian Gulf Coastline in Dubai and measuring 81 square miles. Dubai Waterfront will consist of over 250 master-planned communities on man made islands and canals with a series of zones for mixed-use including commercial, residential, resort, and amenity areas. According to Nahkeel, "An estimated population of 1.7 million people by 2020 are expected to inhabit the site." The goal of the developer is to "Ensure that construction not only has the smallest possible negative impact on the environment, but actually enhances the environment above the original, pre-development status." Ground has just been broken on the US$11 bil 75-kilometre Arabian Canal, described by its developer Limitless as "The largest and most complex civil engineering project ever undertaken in the Middle East" has just got underway. The waterway will support the real estate projects on both of its banks as it flow's inland from Dubai Waterfront development and connect it to the Palm Jumeirah man-made island.

New city, new life
"The millions descending on Shanghai or Seoul depopulated the countryside and exceed the city's capacity, with only one or two cities funneling the shift," says Diana Balmori, principal of New York based landscape and urban design firm Balmori Associates. It seems that collaborations between governments, developers and designers are seeking to find a solution to the problems of Asia's increasing urbanisation. Whether these partnerships will achieve their stated goals remains to be seen, however, their endeavors to create a better urban environment can only yield positive results, even if it is only in the lessons learned for improving our existing cities .RFP

The millions descending on Shanghai or Seoul depopulated the countryside and exceed the city's capacity, with only one or two cities funneling the shift.

NOMINATE NOW

Subscribe Now

Sign Up for Ezine

Past Issues