Cities have their songs — Waterloo Sunset, Empire State of Mind, the Girl from Ipanema. Songdo has Gangnam Style. Psy, South Korea’s bubblegum pop star, filmed the video for his unlikely global hit in the city that is rising from marshland 35 miles southwest of Seoul. I’m standing in the underground car park where he had a dance-off with the man in a canary yellow suit, before humping in a lift. It wasn’t subtle — but it was fun. And it has put Songdo on the map.
“The billions of people who have seen that video have seen Songdo,” says Stan Gale, the boss of Gale International, the firm that is building Songdo. He is not averse to performing a mean Gangnam horse-riding dance routine himself, cracking an imaginary whip above his head. “Hey, sexy laydeez! Whup, whup, whup, whup, whup, GANGNAM STYLE!”
It’s not just the dancing that marks Gale out as a property salesman like no other. The fast-talking New Yorker thinks bigger than the average bricks’n’mortar fella. He doesn’t flog mere houses, flats, offices or factories. He sells them all and chucks in roads, railways, parks, lakes, canals, theatres, country clubs, golf courses — you name it. He is the world’s first new-cities builder.
He wants his firm to become the Ikea of cities, selling flat-pack “towns-to-go” to customers all over the world as easily as the Swedish giant sells Billy bookcases to new homeowners. “Billions of people all over the world are moving to new cities. Urbanisation is a new industry,” he grins, shoving an exhausted tangle of black hair off his brow. “It costs tens of billions of dollars to build a new city. That’s some pretty significant business.”
Gale is starting big. At 5.7 sq km, with 100m sq ft of buildings, a population of more than 300,000 (day) and 70,000 (night), Songdo is the largest privately funded, single real-estate venture in history. Gale International and the Korean steel giant Posco spent £1bn buying the land. Gale and his local partners are raising more than £20bn to complete the city.
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It is more than half-built, with 13,700 homes and 10,000 more under construction, and nine giant office blocks. So far, 33,000 residents have moved in. Another 50,000 people commute to Songdo daily. When it is finished, around 2018, Songdo will be the size of central Glasgow. Gale is planning 20 more cities like it.
It’s easy to dismiss the 63-year-old as a developer with delusions of urban grandeur that belong to a time before the financial crisis, when work on Songdo began. Critics point out that the development is years behind schedule and may end up like most planned cities — a dull failure. But the signs are he’s on to something.
He has already made his first sale after Songdo. Meixi Lake, a new 6.5 sq km urban centre for 200,000 people near Changsha, the capital of Hunan province in China, has been master-planned by Gale and his architect partners, Kohn Pedersen Fox. Gale has sold the design to the local municipal government and a Chinese developer, Franshion, is now building it.
He reaches for the vast presentation box containing the plans. “See! City in a box!” he laughs. What does he charge for a city building manual? “Twelve million dollars. Not bad for a new home for 200,000 people, don’t you think?” Gale is now working on his third deal: Songdo 2.0, an extension to Songdo that will double its size. “We’re real excited about it.” So are British engineering firms. Arup is working on Songdo and WS Atkins is building Meixi Lake and two other new cities in China. The firms stand to make hundreds of millions of pounds per project.
Is Gale right? Are cities really a new asset class? Is there a futures market in urbanism?
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Yes, says McKinsey Global Institute, the leading new-cities consultancy. It predicts that more than 100 new cities will emerge in the next decade alone. Dozens are already under way (see opposite). Overall, China needs several hundred new Songdo-size cities to cope with an urban population that will reach 1bn by 2030. India needs 300 to house transplanted farm workers. African cities are so dysfunctional that dozens of new hubs are needed. McKinsey’s Richard Dobbs estimates the economic benefit of new-city building worldwide will be “300 times that of Britain’s industrial revolution”.
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But how can one developer, even one as epically ambitious as Gale, become the go-to guy for “insta-cities”? “S-l-o-w-l-y,” he drawls. From the early days when he got down and dirty managing dump trucks to today’s emerging spit’n’shine Songdo cityscape, he has been trying “this” and tweaking “that” to discover the flat-pack formula that will work anywhere where there is land, demand and cash. And the trick is? “Get pretty, get smart and go green,” he grins. “Look around.”
I board the Michuhol III, a boat that plies the length of the lake that dominates Songdo’s 100-acre Central Park, based on its Manhattan namesake. Even through South Korea’s summer heat haze, I can appreciate the pretty bit. The tapered 68-storey Northeast Asia Trade Tower, a cross between the iconic World Financial Centre in Shanghai and the Freedom Tower in New York, pierces the gloom like a giant hypodermic. At 1,001ft, about the same height as the Shard, it’s Korea’s tallest skyscraper. Another pair of skyscrapers lurch precariously from side to side. They are called the Dancing — or the Drunken, as Gale prefers — Ladies. Next to them is the G-Tower, which has a giant triangular cut-out that creates a terrace, 29 storeys above Central Park.
The buildings not only look good, they do good. Sitting in his penthouse in one of Songdo’s snazzy First World tower blocks, Gale explains that the glass in the windows helps to retain heat in winter and generates solar power to run the air conditioning in summer. Most buildings have green — planted — roofs to collect water and reduce heat in summer. Anything that can be recycled is. All the water, from summer rain to flushes from the toilets, is cleaned and reused for irrigation and cooling. The heat generated by the local power stations is used to pump hot water to buildings. All refuse is sucked from buildings and streets down giant vacuum pipes to a central waste depot. “There are no garbage trucks here,” says Gale. Even the land Songdo is built on has been recycled — 53 sq km reclaimed from the Yellow Sea near the site of General Douglas MacArthur’s Korean War landing of September 1950.
The city is green — literally. Almost half is parkland. One downtown park is given over to allotments, so residents can grow cabbage to make the local fermented staple, kimchi. The lakes and waterways use salt, not fresh, water, pumped in from the sea. Salt water is not only freely available, it does not freeze in Korea’s harsh winter, helping to keep temperatures a little higher, reducing heating costs.
Songdo has been master-planned to be green, too. Key services — transport, shops, parks and arts centres — are no more than 12.5 minutes on foot from each other. “That’s the maximum time studies show most city folk will walk,” says Gale, who walks and cycles everywhere at a furious pace. There are more than 30km of cycle paths.
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Gale is also using technology to cut the number of journeys residents need to make, further reducing the city’s environmental footprint. With US tech giant Cisco, he is plumbing every square inch of the city, even residents’ cars, with wifi, fibre optics and TelePresence screens that offer video communication almost as good as face-to-face meetings. Residents use TelePresence to do things at home that they used to have to go out to do, including working, exercising, buying food and chatting to the children’s teachers. “Fast-forward five years and you’re not going to know who you met in person and who you met through the TelePresence. It’s time to have a Star Trek experience,” says John Chambers, Cisco’s global CEO, who sees Songdo as a showcase for what he calls “the connected city”. Movements of people and cars are tracked to save energy. Street lights in Songdo will soon illuminate only when a car or a pedestrian approaches.
All the hi-tech green initiatives can seem like overkill to Europeans but they are vital, Gale insists. Unplanned urbanisation in China is already causing so much pollution across Asia you can see — and taste — it. China accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and over the next 20 years its CO2 emissions will grow by an amount roughly equal to America’s total emissions today.
“We cannot continue as we are. If all the new cities being built in this region turn out to be megacities with eight-lane highways, the consequence will be dire,” says Gale. All his efficiency measures are designed to cut energy use and carbon emission in Songdo by about one-third of a “normal” city of its size. But, he says: “We’re on our way to a 50% reduction.”
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Developers and dictators have been creating purpose-built, hi-tech cities for years. Most turn out to be stale visions of a future that has never arrived. They have the same “international architecture”, branded restaurants, and celebrity-designed golf course. Whatever guise digital homes take, few of us, it turns out, really want internet-enabled fridges or Big Brother in our living room. Is Songdo really that better?
“Yes,” says Vicky Jeon, who was born in Korea and studied in Sussex before moving to Songdo and setting up a family-reading cafe called Boomily. “I majored in art. I’m very sensitive to how things look. This city is elegant.” The parks and waterways are certainly a welcome contrast to the grey concrete blocks that suffocate Seoul.
The tech seems pretty useful, too. Over iced tea at Starbucks on Central Park Mall 2 on Central Boulevard, Insook Eon, who moved to Songdo in 2012, says she saves 10-20% on her energy bills, compared with those in her old home in Seoul. “I can control everything remotely, turning heating and cooling up and down, checking the front door is locked. My friends in Seoul are so envious of my hi-tech home, they tease me. They call me ‘Madame Songdo’, a lady of leisure.”
Her neighbour, Sung-Jin Kim, who moved to Songdo last year to found his tech start-up, SmartValue Partners, agrees. “Technology usually harms cities, with factories or cars. Here, it makes life better,” he says.
Fair enough. But isn’t all the tech creepy? The synapses of Songdo’s brain extend into every home. TelePresence boxes sit on top of every TV set like latter-day Big Brother cameras. “No. I feel safe,” says Jeon. But isn’t it weird to have cameras in her apartment? Doesn’t she fear that Cisco or, worse, the government is monitoring her every move? “As long as they cannot see me naked, I don’t care,” Jeon laughs. The cameras are switched on and off by homeowners, Cisco points out.
Bricks’n’clicks, however whizzy, don’t make a city. People do. And there aren’t enough in Songdo yet. At night, the streets are so empty that BMW and Mercedes film ads for their latest high-speed models. The same goes for businesses. Songdo has attracted the UN-created Green Climate Fund and an outpost of the World Bank. But apart from Daewoo, Korean giants such as LG, Hyundai and Kia, not to mention foreign-based multinationals, have stayed away.
“We need more people and more businesses,” says Chul Park, who is head of IT at the local international school, Chadwick, one of the biggest backers of the Songdo project. Its hi-tech campus cost £100m to build. “Songdo does not feel real yet,” he adds.
Gale’s financial team feel the same way. The global downturn has made finance scarce and slowed demand for retail and office space. While Songdo’s apartments have sold well, only about half of the commercial space is let. Gale International has been able to recoup the equity it put into the project but it hasn’t banked any profits — yet. “The pace has slowed. We are not talking about the usual 10-15% return on investment,” Gale concedes. “I’m not the richest man in the world. Ask my lawyer!”
But he is undeterred. “There’s still four years to go to completion and the world economy is picking up fast.” Interest is strong. “I’ve had so many mayors from China alone, asking for tours of Songdo because they want to see the model, that I’ve had to start saying no. I wasn’t getting any work done. Time out!”
When Songdo is finally finished, what will it be? A “metropolis now” that will help solve the urbanisation and climate-change crisis? Or a big white Asian elephant?
I decide to ask Stuart Read, who moved from Reading to Songdo with his Korean wife in 2010 and now teaches English. He says Gale’s dreams of creating Korea’s Hong Kong or Dubai “haven’t happened yet and probably won’t”, but insists: “The place is popular with Koreans and I’m sure the model will work in places where there is strong foreign investment, like India or China. Gale may end up making more money outside Korea than in it.”
Bokyu Seo, who runs ChiMac, the best fish’n’chip shop in Songdo, is so convinced that the city building experiment will work when it’s finished and that Gale’s proposed Songdo 2.0 extension will go ahead that he is making the first I♥ Songdo T-shirts. “If I put Psy’s face on it, it’s sure to be a success,” he says. “Songdo style!”
