Bold Songdo ~ BBC on Korea's Green Smart City

The BBC's Lucy Williamson reports in their Tomorrow's Cities series asking Just how smart is Songdo? the new city 40 km from Seoul...

"On the technological front, a brand new city offers the chance to build some futuristic hardware. Songdo has been designed with sensors to monitor temperature, energy use and traffic flow. These sensors can -- in theory -- alert you, personally, when your bus is due. Or let the local authority know about any problems. A lot of these innovations are designed with the environment in mind -- charging stations for electric cars, for example, or a water-recycling system that prevents clean drinking water being used to flush office toilets. The waste disposal system is also impressive -- or it would be if you could see it. Because there are no rubbish trucks trawling the streets or vast bins dotted around blocks of flats. Instead, all household waste is sucked directly from individual kitchens through a vast underground network of tunnels, to waste processing centres, where it's automatically sorted, deodorised and treated to be kinder to the environment."

I've been paying attention to the Songdo development for years now since hearing about it from the Gale International developers here in Boston. And it's exciting to see how many things they've gotten right, including the district waste scheme, close links with airport and some transit, and interwoven greenspace. But I fear they're missing some key dimensions of what make for vibrant innovation hubs, the subject of our MIT CityScience workshop this coming Fall 2013.

Daylighting ~ Re-Discovering Urban Waterways

Great piece by Dot Earthling Andy Revkin and colleague Jean Chung in the NYTimes on Peeling Back Pavement to Expose Watery Havens about Daylighting, the uncovering of waterways buried under roads and urban accretions. Revkin spotlights cases in the US, in Korea, and elsewhere. There's also an accompanying video piece, In Seoul, An Ancient Stream Restored: New Life for the Cheonggyecheon. Among the compelling results...

"We’ve basically gone from a car-oriented city to a human-oriented city," said Lee In-keun, Seoul’s assistant mayor for infrastructure, who has been invited to places as distant as Los Angeles to describe the project to other urban planners. Some 90,000 pedestrians visit the stream banks on an average day. What is more, a new analysis by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that replacing a highway in Seoul with a walkable greenway caused nearby homes to sell at a premium after years of going for bargain prices by comparison with outlying properties. Efforts to recover urban waterways are nonetheless fraught with challenges, like convincing local business owners wedded to existing streetscapes that economic benefits can come from a green makeover. Yet today the visitors to the Cheonggyecheon’s banks include merchants from some of the thousands of nearby shops who were among the project’s biggest opponents early on."

I'm especially interested in both these cases of re-discovery and renewal as well as examples where foresightful people did it right in the first place. San Antonio's River Walk, for instance, is a beautiful example where instead of channeling and covering, they created an urban greenway -- by design -- back in the 1930s... And Utrecht, perhaps my favorite Dutch city, has a delightful Oudegracht flowing through its core...