
From South Korea to Malaysia, ‘smart cities’ turn to ghost towns - HillaryBriss
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3019142/south-korea-malaysia-smart-cities-hailed-answer
======
pcr910303
South 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.

~~~
novok
When you look at songdo, it looks like a small section of greater seoul in
general.

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Songdo-dong,+Yeonsu-
gu,+In...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Songdo-dong,+Yeonsu-
gu,+Incheon,+South+Korea/@37.3961117,126.6343272,10z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x357b7624aaf774f7:0x1c27c0012f442511!8m2!3d37.3839118!4d126.6438546)

Also why do people trust the government when it only became a democracy about
30 years ago, and things like this happened?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Struggle#Torture_and_deat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Struggle#Torture_and_death_of_Park_Jong-
chol)

~~~
pcr910303
> Also why do people trust the government when it only became a democracy
> about 30 years ago, and things like this happened?

Considering that the country's entire history span about 70 years (excluding
the provisional government; the provisional government is exactly 100 yrs old
in 2019), 30 years is a long time.

Presidents are elected with direct election; a direct consequence from the
Park Jong-chol incident you have mentioned, and 1987 is the year of South
Korea's 'real' democracy.

People have the power to impeach presidents with peaceful protests[0][1] and
people are proud of it.

South Korea's democracy is highly trusted in the country, IMHO.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Park_Geun-
hye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Park_Geun-hye) [1]
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39227342](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
asia-39227342)

~~~
Nasrudith
Really the impeachment alone makes it very trustworthy regardless of its past.
If petty abuse of power gets one removed from the highest office then
accountability is maintained.

Not without flaws of course (election of dynastics in a democracy is generally
a warning sign of power being used to self-perpetuate).

------
jrd259
Anyone 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
I 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.

~~~
mycall
If 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
They’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)

~~~
Nasrudith
I have noticed that the main failing of planned cities seems to be the
megalomania and misguided sense of organization trying to decide how it will
be used specifically - often out of some misguided ideal of efficiency instead
of leaving it to the people to decide. It brings to mind having a single
restuarant outside every cul de sac and expecting residents to go only for the
nearest restaurant.

Sanity calls for embracing the non-deteminism. Wall Street wasn't intended as
a world financial center but that is what it wound up as.

I suspect a "modular garden" approach works best as a balance of setting up
infastructure and zoning for purposes to be filled on demand. Japan at least
has apparently had luck with building train/subway line loops, selling land to
developers and renting out retail spaces in and near stations.

------
JDiculous
This 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
I 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
It sounds like you’re describing The Matrix. Are you sure you’re not living in
a giant simulation?

~~~
chrislipa
No. Are you?

------
sho_hn
I 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)

------
em-bee
none 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
Stories 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.

------
peterburkimsher
What 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
SZ 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
I 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
SEZ 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).

------
pcurve
Video 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)

------
molteanu
This 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)

------
romanovcode
> 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
ok, 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
Tech 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.

------
boyadjian
"But many are prohibitively expensive and catalysts for land dispossession and
social inequality" : Is it really a problem ? It is simply like that.

------
dmh2000
I didn't see much evidence in the article about 'ghost towns'. it may be true
but the article didn't back it up.

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Jataman606
You cant even read text on this website without js enabled, wth is wrong with
people

------
raheemm
This article reads almost like a hatchet job.

