In his Prescient novel Invisible Cities, the Italian writer Italo Calvino imagined a conversation between explorer Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Khan. Polo details the fantastic cities he encountered on his travels, among them “a city of water [where] a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other.” To a visitor, the city of Songdo IBD might appear equally miraculous — a city where the wonders of technology meet with the furthest reaches of the human imagination to create a place of unlimited possibility.
Humanity has long been transfixed by visions of the future: from the perky flying cars ofThe Jetsons to the rain-soaked dystopia of Blade Runner. However, in Songdo — rather than daydreaming about what might be possible far in the future — we can witness how the latest technology has allowed its imagineers to build a city of the future today.