new sangdo is an artificial city built on a 1,500 acre man-made island in south korea and it has approximately 1,000 buildings already.
it is a prototype built by stan gale. he thinks there’s huge money to be made this way. he sees a developing market for cities. yeah, you read well, cities. they build them complete with an eco-friendly structure: after considering all the highlights and failures of the existing cities, they came up with a perfect model where bicycles and electric cars have right of way and priority parking and where the inescapable smog of other asian metropolis is non-existent. the whole thing is designed down to the most unheard of details: the distances between the key functions are limited to 12 1/2 minutes of walking, the maximum distance studies show we are willing to walk. there’s also a 25 km network of bike trails so that cycling is encouraged. also, a 30-minute bike ride will cover most of the city so there’ll be no long, discouraging pedaling.
cisco, the communication giant, is part of it as well. of course they are, they fitted the city with 20k units of telepresence, a 1 bn USD order. every school, office and home will have a telepresence screen, in order to limit the need to move. the plan says that they will cut down transport by 20%. still, insert all your big brother jokes here. apparently, people will have the right to choose if they want such devices in their homes. the entire city will be connected and this will hopefully lead to better managed resources (think sensor activated public lights to get the idea).
for many more amazing details with regard to this city of the future click here.
studies say that stan gale is right to say there’s huge money in building ready-made cities: the population boom will lead to 1.5 bn chinese people by 2030, so china will need approximately 500 instant cities to cope. india seemingly needs about 300 of them, too. he’s a businessman with a vision. he’s trying to cover all bases so he realized that a just-add-population city will be boring as fuck. so he plans to “import” creatives to help build the character of the new metropolis. this sounds appealing and incredibly sick at the same time. i’m sending in my resume…
