South Korea is one of the most advanced developed countries. South Korea's industrialization, software and hardware products and services, technological advancements, and management styles are world-renowned concepts. It has also achieved many milestones in urbanization to provide a better life for its citizens. In this current global urban scenario, it is taking a grand leap forward to an even higher level in its development of Smart City structures. In this light, this book chapter discusses and explores South Korea's Songdo Smart City. The book chapter will give a 360-degree view of Songdo Smart City project—specifically with regards to planning, design, deployment of IoT technologies, focused on urban analytics. The chapter's major areas of focus will be looking into Songdo from the perspectives of its being (1) an Aerotropolis and (2) a Ubiquitous city. Songdo IBD is a new ubiquitous city built from scratch on 600 hectares of domesticated land along Incheon's seaside. With all the modern amenities and LEED-certified buildings, the Songdo Smart City will also survive in the future.
TopSmart Cities
According to the great urban planner Adam Greenfield, we are currently observing a rare crusade in the olden times of urbanism, then onwards large-scale multinational companies like IT/ITes had never before been so extremely involved with the building up of new urbanism principles (Greenfield, 2013; Townsend, 2013). The reason behind the high growth of urbanization is that urban places, if they have rich enough - consist of all sorts of amenities. These amenities include housing, medical, educational institutions, shopping malls, tourist destinations, parks, religious places, power sector, and other city infrastructures. In many cities, the lakes, mountains, museums, man-made bridges, and woodlands are attractive places for tourists. Of course, the in-built environments really make life pleasant for citizens. However, the sudden migration to cities from the countryside; the natural birthrate increase; the inadequacy in urban infrastructure; the lack of civic sense in the usage of public utilities in terms of water, power, gas, soil, and trees; bureaucratic issues; and so on are causing city life to be miserable. In order to solve these urban issues, the new urban phenomenon came in the form of “Smart Cities.” This phenomenon was initiated in practical form by the multinational company M/s. International Business Machines (IBM) as part of the “Smarter Planet” initiative in 2008. Of course, the inception of the smart cities concept emerged in the 1990s in the form of ‘digital cities.’ The data was in the form of ‘0’ and ‘1’s. Couclelis (2004) defined “Digital City is an all-inclusive of web-based demonstration or replica of several aspects a specific existing city across the world. Much more than being not only a technical but also practical issue, this digital city has many magnitudes that are related to social, cultural, political, ideological, financial and of course also theoretic”.