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From South Korea to Malaysia, ‘smart cities’ turn to ghost towns
- peterburkimsher 7y agoWhat made Songdo and Forest City fail, but Shenzhen succeed? I think it's because Shenzhen put business first, and grew iteratively as people arrived. People want to move where the jobs are, not just to a fancy new IoT city.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSZ wasn’t really planned as a smart city, and it rose on its connection to HK at first in the 80s. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Ordos New Town (Kangbashi)?
- peterburkimsher 7y agoI guess that's my point: Shenzhen isn't a "smart city", it's an Special Economic Zone that happened to specialise in tech, for now. People will put up with whatever living conditions they can survive if it means they have a job. If the tech industry collapses, Shenzhen will probably just pivot to some other industry.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSEZ didn’t start out in tech (more about making cheap things for HK exporters), and it still has a lot outside of tech, it would be like the tech industry collapsing in SF, bad, but not fatal. China also has many artificial obscure tech industry city efforts, all as successful as you would image (ie, not st all).
- pcr910303 7y ago> What made Songdo and Forest City fail Nah, it didn't fail (unlike the impression that the article tries to give), please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20476405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20476405.
- Mengkudulangsat 7y agoForest City is a disaster politically. The current Malaysian government (who won the latest election) turned it into a land-grab / immigration issue. Without support at the federal level, I find it hard to imagine the project will succeed.
- jrd259 7y agoAnyone who had read Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities would predict what happens when you build isolated high rises, no matter how smart, with no actual connection to the urban life. The article also speaks of these cities as not intended for the rural poor migrating to the city. Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City examines (among other things) why the rural poor flock to cities: no matter how dismal the slum, it's still better than the farm, and it's at least possible for some entrepreneurs to get started. Smart cities that exclude the poor and working class can't thrive. Glaeser shows that cities are engines of economic growth, but this requires clean water and sanitary living for everyone, and only state intervention can provide that. Instead of building high tech playgrounds, cities should literally clean up their act. Getting clean water is not glamourous, and probably not lucrative to individual actors, but in the end it pays off.
- doitLP 7y agoI found Seeing Like A State even better at really elucidating the problems with planned cities. Some portions of it were heavily influenced by Jacob’s work and was completely eye-opening to me in many ways, not least of which is how most such large scale planned initiatives are doomed to failure at the outset by plans that don’t account for the real world.
- jrd259 7y agoGlaeser speaks approvingly of at least one planned city, namely Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris in the late 19th C.
- mycall 7y agoIf these large scale planned cities are doomed to failure, will they simply be completely abandoned in 20..40 years.. or will they be repurposed, perhaps surrounded by tent cities or shantytowns, and find a way forward?
- barry-cotter 7y agoThey’re no more doomed to failure than other planned cities like Milton Keynes[1] in the U.K., Pudong District[2] in Shanghai or Almere[3] in the Netherlands. Sometimes urban planning is done really well, as in Singapore or in the original planning of Manhattan. Sometimes it’s just a disaster, as in Dubai where there’s no municipal sewerage network and there aren’t really street names and addresses as normally understood are useless or non-existent. Sometimes governments let people who hate people design cities because they’re famous, like Le Corbusier and Brasilia. All of these cities work to different extents. They may have glaring problems but people live in them and there’s enough economic activity that they’re growing. Large scale planner cities are not doomed to failure. Some of them will be done well and thrive and some will be utter disasters, losing all the investors’ money and plentiful public funds. But given the pace of urbanisation in the developing world massive planned city building or expansion of the existing cities is inevitable. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudong [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almere
- JDiculous 7y agoThis article is trying really hard to push this dystopian narrative, using rhetoric like "big brother". But I've spent the last 3 months living in "planned cities" near Seoul (Ilsan and Gwanggyo) and have nothing but positive things to say. I'm 30 minutes to Seoul by public transport, literally don't need a car because everything is walkable, and there are many things to do (way more than the Washington DC suburb I grew up in). I didn't even know Ilsan was a planned city until I was told so. And isn't every city "planned" in some sense via zoning laws and such? Is Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan not a "planned" community? I've never seen an apartment with a daily loudspeaker announcement that can't be turned off, that's ridiculous and in no way a norm in South Korea. I much prefer the planned cities I've lived in here in Korea to the drab lifeless suburbs in America where you can't do anything without a car and the commercial areas are just giant chain stores/restaurants.
- chrislipa 7y agoI live in Songdo (the city featured in the article), and I think I have to concur with their dystopian tone. This place felt “fake” or “manufactured” to me in some sense that I couldn’t put my finger on even before I knew that it’s a planned city. Like too much infrastructure built and the people never came to inhabit it. Not quite a ghost town, but in that direction. I have to say that getting around without a car is rather nice in daily life, but the public transportation around town was disappointing. And it’s odd that it takes 45 minutes longer to get to the Incheon airport from my Songdo apartment than from downtown Seoul, despite being much closer.
- joejerryronnie 7y agoIt sounds like you’re describing The Matrix. Are you sure you’re not living in a giant simulation?
- chrislipa 7y agoNo. Are you?
- pcurve 7y agoVideo of Songdo mentioned in the article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TNGowdxUOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TNGowdxUOQ penthouse pictures of one of these high rises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRrfHJmFaTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRrfHJmFaTc
- pcr910303 7y agoSouth Korean here. (I live in Seoul, Kangnam.) This article contains so much mis-information about Songdo, that I would like to point out. > where lamp posts are always watching you CCTVs are very, very common in South Korea. This isn't something special to Songdo, and CCTVs are the number-one reason that South Korea has the 5th highest rate of people that think walking around in the dark is safe. Nobody thinks that CCTVs are surveillance; people believe the government in general. > small touch screen display on his kitchen wall that allows him to keep track of his and his wife’s consumption of electricity, water and gas and, most important, compare it against the average statistics for the building. This is super-common in Seoul, it's not something special in Songdo or such. > It claims to have the highest concentration of green Leed-certified buildings in the world, yet it is still entirely car-based, with not even a train line to the nearby airport. One thing to keep in mind is that South Korea generally (especially Seoul) is a very public-transport friendly, with a pretty-high 40% percentage of all transport (user's own car takes 39% of all transport). The time when Songdo was planned, the high public-transport percentage was considered a 'bad-thing'. People tried to model the 'America Way', and that's why Songdo was constructed with an emphasis on car-based transport. This plan was reverted years ago, and Songdo is currently constructing four subway routes. > From South Korea to Malaysia, ‘smart cities’ turn to ghost towns Songdo is not a ghost town, that is just plain wrong. It was one of the most successful cities in South Korea. It's population is rapidly increasing every year, with a competitive rate of 4855:1 to move in Songdo. Also, unlike the article's explanation, a big fraction of Songdo population comes from provinces other than Seoul (which is something similar to rural areas in the US). Overall, this article is overly emphasizing things that are nothing to Koreans but can be seen negatively to Americans; the explanation about Songdo are plain-wrong; and I just can't see what this article is trying to say.
- nemonemo 7y agoI agree with your general points: this article over-emphasizes negative aspects of a few people and the picture it paints is not representative of overall planned cities, even Songdo. Just one nit: 4855:1 came from an article in 2007 about the initial applications for an office-tel (basically a high-rise building with offices and apartments). After 12 years, I believe Songdo has a new problem of too many ongoing housing projects and not enough people to fill the apartments to be built.
- sho_hn 7y agoI live in South Korea and write drone ground control software as a hobby. Songdo is the city I go to on the weekends to test my latest changes because it's outside the Seoul no-fly zone and has a largely deserted central park I can fly in. I wouldn't say it otherwise feels anything like a ghost town, though - just less dense and more spacious than Seoul. With kids, it'd be attractive. Edit: Here's some old alpha screenshots of my app flying over Songdo and me: https://m.imgur.com/a/dK21yca https://m.imgur.com/a/dK21yca
- boyadjian 7y ago"But many are prohibitively expensive and catalysts for land dispossession and social inequality" : Is it really a problem ? It is simply like that.
- Jataman606 7y agoYou cant even read text on this website without js enabled, wth is wrong with people
- molteanu 7y agoThis is an identical article taken from The Guardian. The Guardian piece was also submitted a few days ago around here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20409450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20409450
- em-bee 7y agonone of the problems that i can see have anything to do with the cities being smart, but rather with bad planning, maybe overplanning, and other issues. so the question is, how to build a smart city the right way? for starters, i don't think starting from scratch is a good idea, as that leads to overplanning and making predictions that don't pan out. better to pick an existing quarter and modernize that. we have been modernizing cities for centuries, and we'll obviously continue to do so, so any future smart cities (if they are created) will all be based on existing cities, because it's not like we can just leave all our current cities behind and build new ones right next to them. building a smart city from scratch is like a city-planners dream: let's build the ultimate city, and make it smart too. what we really should be doing is to ask: how can we use smart city technology to enrich our peoples lives where they are now?
- Bartweiss 7y agoStories like this focus on technology, but I think the more accurate narrative is that top-down, pre-planned design urban design is just a bad idea that comes around roughly once a generation. It never works, but it appeals to people so much that they ignore the mistakes of the past. Le Corbusier died in 1965, so it's about time for another iteration. For architects, green field development is a chance to realize their dreams without constraint. For analysts and intellectuals, it's a chance to properly test theories and get clean, measurable data. For politicians, it's a way to receive full credit for a project and avoid the backlash from disrupting existing cities. For urban reformers who are burned out on the slow, uneven process of updating ancient cities, starting from scratch is a chance to improve things cheaply and escape dependency issues. For contractors and technologists, it's a chance to sell profitable end-to-end services. But for everyone who lives there, it sucks. The same way Joel Spolsky reminds us that the warts on old software often serve real purposes, old cities are full of concessions to climate, travel patterns, consumer needs, and general sanity. Lucio Costa might want symmetry, lack of sprawl, and clear traffic lanes, but the people stuck living in the piloto of Brasilia want memorable layouts, walkable streets, and gradual expansion. The silliest thing about most sci-fi cities is that they're all gleaming spires and high-tech grandeur. As you say, the cities of the future will grow from the cities and towns of the present. Any vision worth attempting needs to leave room for the people and the history already there.
- Proven 7y agoMany of those places are either feel good hyped up "concept investments" or fascist hellholes where you're monitored and nudged to behave one way. I'd rather live in a low tech "stupid" town without government surveillance that is actually sustainable (and doesn't depend on various government programs, tax breaks and similar handouts).
- romanovcode 7y ago> Every morning, at 8.30am, an announcement is piped though a speaker in the ceiling of Kim Jong-won’s flat, barking the daily bulletin in a high-pitched voice. The disembodied broadcaster details new parking measures, issues with the pneumatic waste disposal chute and various building maintenance jobs to be carried out that day. “There’s no way of turning it off,” sighs Kim’s wife. Jesus, this is straight from 1984. Why would someone agree to live in place like that
- cookieswumchorr 7y agook, we're tech people here, how can there be no way to turn it off? I mean, its in your home and can at least be covered, disconnected from a power source etc. In 1984 the issue was that if you did that, they would sooner or later find out and come for you, but I honestly don't believe its so bad in modern SK
- Bartweiss 7y agoTech nothing - if I couldn't get to the power I'd tape an acoustic tile to the thing and drape the whole mess with a blanket. There's a reason most fire alarms in the US go off when disturbed, and are loud enough to cause hearing damage in an empty room; that's what it takes to fight the inevitable unplugging and silencing attempts aimed at a major safety device. But the next line is "I hate technology but my husband is an early adopter. He has to have everything first.”, so I'm pretty sure the problem with taking a hammer to the speaker is marital rather than political. This isn't 1984, it's a lesson in how bad design aggravates social friction and personal disagreements.
- pessimizer 7y agoMake the alternatives worse, or remove the alternatives altogether e.g. remove the off switch. Most tech started removing off switches around 15 years ago anyway.
- benjaminbrodie 7y agoI mean, there's no way to turn off Windows 10 update either. The motivation is presumably the same in both cases, i.e. to reduce need for tech support
- raheemm 7y agoThis article reads almost like a hatchet job.
- dmh2000 7y agoI didn't see much evidence in the article about 'ghost towns'. it may be true but the article didn't back it up.