South Korea’s First Eco-Development
Nissa Rhee brings us this report from Songdo, South Korea's first eco-development.
What if you had the chance to build a green city from scratch?
That's an opportunity a U.S.-based developer got a few years ago. Gale International was hired to create South Korea's first eco-development, within the existing city of Incheon. The development is slated to be finished in 2014. But some ecologists say the city-within-a-city is far from green.
As part of our ongoing Chicago Matters series, Nissa Rhee takes us to the west coast of South Korea to report on Songdo.
Construction Noise
That's the sound of cranes constructing what some say is one of the world's greenest cities. Songdo. The project is 35 miles west of South Korea's bustling capital of Seoul, and is on the Yellow Sea coast.
Songdo officially opened last month, and has already received global attention for its sustainable design elements. But what exactly makes this new city green?
MOORE: I think the first thing is that at the beginning of the day, I can walk to work.
That's David Moore, the head of sustainability for Gale International at Songdo. We're standing on the 55th floor of a building still under construction.
From here, we can see the entire development laid out. Much of it is still yellow mud, with carved-in roads offering a framework for future construction. Silver, Western-style buildings are scattered here and there. And not so far off, a perfectly straight coastline marks the end of Songdo and the beginning of the sea.
MOORE: I can walk around the city. It's a very walkable city. You know, you can use the telephone quite easily, but it's nice to personally go and visit someone and then have lunch maybe at a local restaurant. And again, you just have to walk there. It's so easy.
But it's not just the fact that you don't have to drive to places, that makes Songdo green. Every building in the development will be LEED certified. That means they will meet environmentally sustainable construction standards outlined by the U.S. Green Building Council.
For example, in Songdo all the showers and faucets will use 30 percent less water. Instead of garbage trucks, people will throw their waste into pneumatic tubes that will transport it to a collection center. And 16 miles of bike trails will loop through the area. Moore says that the reason they decided to pursue an eco-friendly design in Songdo was in part due to demand.
MOORE: We're finding now that people are requiring a better environment to live in. So if we're going to sell our offices and our apartment buildings, we've got to provide what people are going to look for in the future.
The 15,000 acre development will include apartment buildings, offices, a convention center, a school, and a golf club when completed. Forty percent of the development will be green space, including a 1,000 acre Central Park. To conserve fresh water, a sea water canal cuts through the park. Residents and visitors can take solar-powered boats for a cruise down the canal.
Last year, Songdo was named a winner of the Urban Land Institute's "Sustainable Cities Award," along with the city of Chicago. The judges highlighted the technological advances that Songdo had made in eco-friendly growth.
But critics say there's a great irony here. The development is destroying natural landscapes to create a manufactured green city.
MOORES: This has got to be one of the grandest cases of green wash that you find anywhere in the world at this time.
Nial Moores is the director of Birds Korea, and he's been working to protect birds here for 11 years. Up until recently, all of Songdo was coastal wetlands. But the area has now been filled in with earth in a process called reclamation.
Sound of Bugs and Children
On a cool autumn evening, we take a hike up the foothills of Mount Cheongnyang to get a better view of Songdo.
RHEE: Right now, it's a lot of bright lights. You can see the buildings rising up over the bridge there. What did this area look like the first time you saw it?
MOORES: I first came here about 8 or 9 years ago. And although the hotels in the foreground they were there. That's where I would stay. The rest of the landscape behind that was just open tidal flats. It was absolutely phenomenal. Here from the steps of the war memorial with your telescope you could scan this incredible landscape, pick out flocks of the globally vulnerable Saunders's Gulls, maybe even pick out black-faced spoonbills.
Moores says that is no longer the case. The reclamation of the last few years has taken a large toll on the wildlife in the area.
MORRES: One globally threatened species called the relic gull, used to be very regular here in winter. That has already been lost. Other species like the Chinese egret. That has shown a marked decline. We anticipate that we will lose almost all of the shorebirds that depend on this internationally important wetland. It's also signaling that whole ecosystems are disappearing.
Reclamation in South Korea has been a concern of ecologists for years. A group at U.C. Berkeley's Department of Environmental Planning has called Korea's "record of wetland destruction ... among the worst of all the developed nations in the world." In June, they publicly offered to help the Korean government preserve the remaining wetlands surrounding Songdo. If the government refuses, the group says they will expose what they call "Korea's dishonest use of environmental terminology to disguise environmental destruction."
The developer, however, is mindful of these issues and is making efforts to mitigate the damage done to wildlife. David Moore of Gale told me that they have set aside land adjacent to the development for the birds.
MOORE: Actually one of the endangered species that we identified was the Saunders's Gull. That species has only about 20,000 members and they migrate here in the early summer and nest here. And the development will allow for those birds to continue to do that. Of course the exact location might chance a little bit. But we're confident the Saunders's Gulls are still going to come here.
Songdo is slated to be complete in 2014. By that time, Gale expects 65,000 people will live in Songdo and 300,000 will work there.
Kim Jong-Yup worked on the development as a member of the Incheon government for three years. He is now Vice President of the Eco-plan Research Center in Seoul. Kim thinks that if Songdo was conceived today -- and not over a decade ago -- environmental planners would have demanded that the area remain as wetlands. Instead of building a development, they might have encouraged eco-tourism as a way to make money.
But while its location might not be ideal, both Kim and the Korean government have called Songdo the blueprint for future developments in the country.
KIM: I saw the people in Songdo are very happy. Everybody from the children to the old man they love the Songdo's parks.
And everyday Koreans seem to agree. The first apartment building opened in Songdo in January of this year. For each unit available, 400 people applied.
For Chicago Public Radio, I'm Nissa Rhee reporting in Songdo, South Korea.