Songdo Under Construction, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. March 1 is the inaugural celebration of Future Day , and it's got me thinking about urban futures again. On my futurist bookshself at the moment: Aerotropolis , by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay. It's a business book, really: breathless descriptions of fabulous capitalists and the globetrotting edge cities they build. I'm reading it because South Korea's Songdo is a poster child for this vision of the future. At 7 miles from Incheon International Airport, this massive development on land reclaimed from tidal flats is supposed to represent the city of the future--a networked hub with near-immediate access to most of Asia, hard-wired for ubiquitous computing, and constructed for minimal levels of car pollution (although building a new city from scratch surely caused some pollution!). Songdo will join other poster-cities for globalization, including Dubai and Shanghai. As Kasarda and Lindsay poin...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.