Integrating Technology in an Instant City

Developers claim the city will "run on information".

"As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there's a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It's an "international business district" and an 'aerotropolis' -- a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it's supposed to be a 'smart city,' studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its 'Smarter Planet' religion."