Envisioning the Ubquitious City

The author and publication venue for this title could not be confirmed. The entry below describes the subject the title names, with sourced material on the u-city programme; the citation should be completed by anyone who knows the original.

Subject

The ubiquitous city, or u-city, is the South Korean planning programme of the 2000s that set out to build cities with computation embedded in their infrastructure from the ground up, rather than retrofitted onto existing urban fabric.

The Programme

The u-city concept was formalised in Korean national policy in the mid-2000s and given legislative form in the Ubiquitous City Construction Act of 2008. Its premise was that if a city is built new, the sensing, networking and service layers can be laid alongside water, power and transport rather than added later — producing integrated services for traffic, utilities, security, waste, healthcare and administration.

The flagship was Songdo International Business District, built on reclaimed land near Incheon from 2003, developed by Gale International with Cisco supplying the network layer. Songdo was designed for around 300,000 residents, with pneumatic waste collection replacing refuse trucks, ubiquitous sensing, and telepresence screens in apartments. Around twenty other Korean u-city projects followed.

Dong-Hee Shin's work provides the standard academic account and the standard critique.

What Was Learned

The u-city programme is now most useful as evidence, and the evidence is mixed in an instructive way.

• Infrastructure was the easy part. The technical layers were built largely as specified. What did not follow was the anticipated demand: many services went unused, and the assumption that residents would want integrated municipal computing proved weaker than the assumption that they would want somewhere affordable to live.
• Technology-led planning inverts the usual order. Shin and others argue the programme was driven by supply — construction firms, network vendors and national industrial policy — rather than by identified needs, and that citizen participation was largely absent from the design process.
• New cities are slow to become places. Songdo filled far more slowly than projected and was widely described in its first decade as under-occupied. What a built environment cannot supply on delivery is precisely what Tuan identifies as the making of place: accumulated attention, habit and duration.
• Vendor dependency is structural. A city whose services run on one company's platform has a relationship with that company unlike any other municipal contract, and unlike any that existing procurement law anticipated.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The u-city is the built form of the argument Everyware and Galloway were making in theory at the same moment — and it demonstrates their central point from the other direction. Adam Greenfield's later Against the Smart City (2013) uses Songdo as its principal case, arguing that the smart city is a vendor product whose customer is a government rather than a resident.

Related Reading

• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
• Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City
• Senseable City Lab
• Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access
• Space and Place
• Digitally Mediated Urban Space