"The next era of human progress": what does the global epidemic of new cities hide? | towns

AAt 8:30 am each morning, an ad is broadcast by a speaker located at the ceiling of Kim Jong-won's apartment, barking the daily bulletin in a shrill voice. The disembodied broadcaster details the new parking measures, the problems related to the pneumatic waste disposal chute and various building maintenance work to be done that day.

"There is no way to turn it off," sighs Kim's wife, Jung-sim, as she prepares breakfast. "I hate technology but my husband is an early adopter. He must have everything first.

It's Kim's love for advanced technology that pushed him to move his family to the future, or his closest thing: Songdo, the "smart city" of South Korea, built on a plot of artificial land of 600 hectares dredged Yellow Sea near the airport of Incheon in Seoul. This is a place where garbage is automatically sucked up by underground pipes, where streetlights constantly monitor you and where your building knows how to send the elevator to greet you as soon as it detects the arrival of your car. Sensors in every street track traffic and send alerts to your phone when it's going to snow, while you can monitor children's playground on TV from the comfort of your couch.

The feature that Kim likes most is a small touch screen on the wall of the kitchen that allows him to track the electricity, water and gas consumption of his wife and it and, most importantly, to compare it average building statistics. A big smile emerges between bar graphs and graphics screens: for one more day, they are more energy efficient than all their neighbors.

From their living room window at the top of one of the city's new residential towers, you will discover a panorama of downtown Songdo. Central Park, a broad band of trees surrounding an ornamental lake, flanked by rows of glbad towers with vaguely fantastic silhouettes, is opposite an eight-lane highway. Identikit concrete buildings armies walk into the foggy distance that ends beyond a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. This is very similar to many other modern Asian cities, a place of generic rides rising above a network dominated by cars. Public life is mainly limited to the air-conditioned environments of shopping malls and private recreation clubs.

Created by the South Korean government in the late 1990s, while Incheon Airport was planned, Songdo represents a model that has been replicated numerous times around the world. Created as a joint venture with US developer Gale International – which has since sold its "City in a Box" kit to other countries, the Songdo International Business District was designed as a $ 40 billion hub for international companies, an example of sustainable urban planning and testing. ground for new technologies of the smart city.

Many cities emerge from the previously untouched desert and jungle, or land "salvaged" from the sea. Although the history of cities built from scratch is long, the scale of the Current epidemic exceeds all that we have seen before.

It is predicted that 2.5 billion people will settle in cities in the next 30 years and the trend shows no sign of stopping. New research has identified more than 100 examples, almost all in Asia and Africa.

This week, Guardian Cities meets the 90-year-old who built the Bulgarian city of Dimitrovgrad after the Second World War (many still live in the city) and visits the strange development of Bahria Town by promising the people of Karachi the chance to live in the city. be protected from terrorist attacks and violent crimes. We examine Hong Kong's plan to build artificial islands for 1.1 million people and examine Egypt's dream of conquering the Sahara. We remember past visions of future cities and ask ourselves if there is a good reason to create a city from scratch.

Nick Van Mead

It claims to have the highest concentration of green Leed certified buildings in the world, but it is still entirely based on a car, without even a train line to the nearest airport. To get to Seoul, just 30 km, takes an hour and a half by subway. Songdo may have an "integrated operations center" – a Big Brother control room where tons of data is routed in real time from thousands of sensors across the city – but the physical urban model Is no different from any other business district driven by cars. For all its energy-efficient labels, it's an expensive, exclusive and impersonal place.

The ultimate techno-eco-utopia?

Around the world, countless new cities like Songdo are in preparation. Hardly distinguishable, often designed and served by the same international consulting firms, these high-tech urban enclaves are born in Kenya, Kazakhstan. India is committed to building 100 smart cities, while Africa sees $ 100 billion injected into at least 20 projects. China, which has initiated 500 of its own smart city pilots, is currently convening a series of outposts as part of its Belt and Road initiative, from the dry port of Khorgos on the border with Kazakhstan, to Royal Albert Dock, East of London, reborn as the Asian. Business Park.

Saudi Arabia is committed to defeating them with Neom, a $ 500 billion megaproject touted as a response to Silicon Valley. Designed as a center for renewable energy, biotechnology, manufacturing, media and entertainment, it spans an area 33 times larger than New York City. He claims to be nothing less than "the most ambitious project in the world"; an incubator for "the next era of human progress".

The desire to escape from building cities from scratch is not new. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Garden City movement saw the birth of a generation of bucolic communities in response to the grime and overpopulation of rapidly industrializing cities, motivated by a powerful social reform campaign. Half a century later, the New Town movement developed these ideas, promising a new world full of modern and self-sufficient municipalities emerging from the ruins of the Second World War, and focused on building an inclusive and democratic society.

Now, in the first decades of a new millennium, the acceleration of world population growth and the feeling of imminent environmental armageddon has provoked an epidemic of planned cities of a very different kind. This time, they are designed by private multinational corporations like gated edge communities and tax-exempt free trade poles, all considered the ultimate techno-eco-utopia.

The need for urban expansion is clear: according to the United Nations, 68% of the world's population will live in cities by 2050, which would add 2.5 billion additional people to urban areas, the vast majority in Asia and Africa. All these newly created townspeople will need a place to live and work. Yet the vast majority of newly developed cities are not designed to accommodate the impending tidal wave of rural and urban migrants. They are instruments for attracting international investment and enriching the urban rich even more, while real estate has become the ultimate currency of the planet.

According to a Savills study, real estate is now a more valuable badet clbad than all stocks, stocks, and securitized debt securities, with a total value of US $ 40 million. about $ 228 billion. This represents three and a half times the world's GDP, or 40 times the value of any gold ever mined. Once we dug to extract value from the land, the spiky glbad towers of these new urban enclaves are today's reverse mine shafts, with equally damaging side effects.

This new breed of cities takes different forms, ranging from government initiatives to public-private partnerships to completely private businesses. Many of them are being used to revive the economies of developing countries, with master plans carefully calibrated to attract foreign investors and treasure seeking to sink their funds into something tangible. They provide rich countries with a powerful means to expand their strategic influence abroad, with the construction of new cities as a form of "debt trap diplomacy", forcing host countries to make incredibly expensive deals. They are presented as a panacea for the world's urban ills, solving overcrowding, congestion and pollution; yet most often, they are proving to be catalysts for land dispossession, environmental degradation and social inequalities.

At the southern tip of Malaysia, on a series of four artificial islands, one of the promised Elysium is sprouting sand. Launched in 2014, Forest City is a $ 100 billion joint venture between the Chinese developer Country Garden and the Sultan Johor. It is planned to house 700,000 people by 2050.

Forest City has been touted as an "iconic urban area" of Singapore, a "new Shenzhen" where the "concepts of safety, convenience, environmental protection and intelligent intelligence are embedded in all corners of life ". It includes luxury apartment towers, hotels, offices, shopping malls and an international school, all covered with a lush green cover and surrounded by a "virtual electric fence" .

The apartments are prohibitively expensive for most Malaysians, but are a boon for Chinese investors who have been flown in and taken into a spaceship-like shopping arcade to marvel at the gigantic model. from the fashionable world of Avatar. At the end of the tour, cashiers accept advance payments by credit card before tourists get back on the bus.

This self-proclaimed "eco-city" is built on 162 m 3 of sand transported, which has already had adverse effects on the surrounding marine environment. The pavement constructed to facilitate land reclamation for the cutting islands in the Tanjung Kupang seagrbad beds, a valuable habitat that helps stabilize the seabed and protect coastal erosion, while the mangroves have been trampled to make room to the prefabrication factories of the project.

Rehabilitation started without the required environmental impact badessment, and local fishermen have already felt the effects of this phenomenon. They complain about the reduction of catches due to the destruction of their fragile ecosystem. The emerging island community, meanwhile, is not so much a city as a ghostly duty free resort, a haunted montage of Photoshop essentially devoid of full-time residents.

A similar story unfolds thousands of kilometers from the west coast of Africa, where "an investment opportunity of unprecedented scale" is touted on a parcel of sand dredged in the air. 39 Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Lagos. Eko Atlantic is another public-private partnership, this time negotiated between the state government and the Chagoury Group, an influential Nigerian economic empire, with engineering expertise provided by the China Communications Construction Company – a conglomerate owned by the state that seems to have cornered the market. by plotting land from the ocean, being responsible for the dredging of Forest City as well as terraforming disputed islands of the South China Sea.

Eko Atlantic is protected by its own marine defense barrier consisting of 100,000 five-tonne concrete blocks, dubbed the "Great Wall of Lagos", making it a secure private island for a few, protected from climate disasters at the expense of others. It is an elevated atoll for the rich Nigerian elite, while the poor remain in low-lying coastal slums whose exposure to deadly floods and coastal erosion has only increased since the construction of the dam.

As stated by the environmental activist Nnimmo Bbadey, the project "is contrary to everything we would like to do if we take climate change seriously and we depletion of resources ". As if to reinforce Donald Trump's image as a spokesman for climate denial, the US Embbady has recently announced plans to move to a secure five-hectare compound.

Computer-generated glamorous visions of Lagos' new exclusive appendix sparked a thirst for equally futuristic and climate-unfriendly projects across the continent, as countries strive to provide a housing solution of 1.3 billion additional people who should add to the African population. by 2050. Ghana unveiled its plans for Hope City – Hope is the acronym for Home, Office, People and Environment – a $ 10 billion fantasy that would house the tallest building in the world. ;Africa.

Eko Atlantic, Lagos, Nigeria

He was joined by the new Tanzanian town of Kigamboni in Dar es Salaam, the Tatu city of Kenya in Nairobi, the vision city of Rwanda in Kigali and the Senegal projects concerning the $ 2 billion city of Diamniadio Lake City (designed by Bad Consultant), which follow the "cookie-cutter" approach of high-tech, automotive-based hubs, rarely planned with existing populations in mind.

As Rachel Keeton and Michelle Provoost of the International Institute of New Cities say in their new book, Building a City in Africa: "New Cities Become High-Quality Service Islands, While Many African Cities Exist continue to suffer from an unreliable electricity supply. access to drinking water and other inefficient municipal services. Due to limited access to mortgages and other housing finance models, the true African middle clbad can not afford to live in these new cities. "

Despite the evidence of half-built, almost empty utopias around the world, the alluring dream of building new cities from scratch shows no sign of an imminent end. The city's manufacturing, as well as the innumerable planning, engineering and technical services that accompany it, is a booming industry, and businesses are firmly committed to recycling their ideas, no matter what. the local context.

Back in Songdo – whose developers proudly list the exotic destinations where their ideas have since been deployed – an innovation center showcases the latest parking violation sensors and crime-fighting streetlights, all bearing the u -City. Why "u", I ask? "It means ubiquitous," says the company representative. "In the end, we want our kind of city to be everywhere."

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, follow our best stories or subscribe to our weekly newsletter