ABSTRACT
So much has been said about Songdo City in recent years in both academic and practitioner circles. International media has also taken part in inflating the reputation of Songdo City, hailed initially as an eco-city, then as a ubiquitous city (or U-city) and now a smart city (Kim 2010, Shin et al. forthcoming, Shwayri 2013). The New York Times went even further to dub it “Korea’s High-Tech Utopia” (O’Connell 2005). Sometimes its own promotional material puts all these together and simply refers to Songdo as an eco-friendly ubiquitous smart city (IFEZ Authority 2007). Governments elsewhere see Songdo as a reference for their own mega-projects to create a brand new city from scratch (see El Telégrafo 2012 for an example of the construction of Yachay City in Ecuador). However, Songdo has come to cater exclusively for the needs of domestic and global investors as well as the rich who have financial resources to grab upmarket real estate properties. It may indeed be an urban utopia, built on a reclaimed tabula rasa and promoted by the state, merging together technological innovation, fixed assets investment, real estate speculation and financialization, for the exclusive use of the rich and powerful.
