Slog - The Stranger's Blog

Line Out

The Music Blog

« Seattle in the New York Times ... | Text Message from Berlin »

Monday, July 18, 2005

Meanwhile, in South Korea

Posted by on July 18 at 12:55 PM

Developers are hard at work on an entirely for-profit, ready-made city, which would cover 1,500 acres on a landfill island 40 miles from Seoul. The “self-sufficient global destination city,” which wouldn’t be bound by Korea’s restrictive labor and tax policies, will be connected to the mainland by a six-mile bridge, and will feature architectural styles from around the world (according to one article, the designers “are particularly proud of its Venetian-style canals”), a Central Park, dense areas like London and Manhattan, and garden districts like Savannah, Georgia - “simulating the effects of history” to create the illusion of hundreds of years of civic development. Previous attempts to build cities from scratch (like Brasilia, Brazil, built in the 1960s and now considered one of the least people-friendly cities in the world) have been largely unsuccessful.