Promises of Urbanism: New Songdo City and the Power of Infrastructure

All around the world, new cities are popping up. Magically, they all closely resemble each other. They claim a cosmopolitan vibe that one typically associates with the big metropoles such as New York City, Buenos Aires, or Paris. These cities have become prototypical for 21st-century urbanism. They claim to be smarter and ecologically superior, seemingly providing a city-level answer to urging global problems like climate change. This account draws on critical urbanism to critically investigate the promises of model cities. I point out how these high-tech utopias are engineered in ways that render them logically feasible, drawing on the lively example of New Songdo City, South Korea. The powerful, formulaic logic of logistics does not only shape Songdo's physical transportation and communication networks but also its political structures and economic unfoldings. Infrastructure becomes a medium of what Easterling (2014) calls "extrastatecraft"; spatial infrastructure dictates and polices behaviors, thus becomes a medium of polity.