The city of Songdo, 65 km southwest of Seoul, was built from scratch and is considered a model city in the field of smart cities. The project, which has the overall name Songdo International Business District, with its completion aims to be not only the headquarters of important businesses and universities, and a normal-smart city. Its population composition? As stated “with the completion of the city in 2015, 65,000 people and 300,000 workers will live there”. A normal city for 65,000 bosses and executives, that is. Let us assume that the workers after building the city will be “hired”, as a gift, as servants? Something like that…
A city like that could not but have its big owners: The city-project belongs to 61% to Gale International (real estate company based in New York), 30% to Posco (multinational steel company based in south korea) while 9% is in the ownership of the real estate subsidiary of the well-known – and cursed by all kinds of greek patriots – Morgan Stanley. The international financial houses have more serious things to do than to take a look at the ‘suffering greek state’, don’t they?
Rorre Margorp
cyborg #01 – 10/2014