“From an infrastructure perspective, we could lay the very latest connectivity technology into the ground before construction,” says Tom Murcott of real estate developer Gale International, which is building the Songdo International Business District. Partnering with Cisco, Gale has spun out a separate company called u-Life Solutions that will provide the internet-of-things backbone for Songdo’s buildings. “This will allow the occupants to control their air conditioning, their televisions, even their elevators,” Murcott says. “Cisco also built an HD telepresence system that we have installed in 14,000 residential units, which citizens can use to interact with city administrators, shopkeepers or healthcare workers.”
To run services such as waste disposal, engineers designed a system that uses pipes to suck rubbish from homes into processing centres that sort the material and recycle it. “In 2016, there will mass implementation of all these services, and new ones being prototyped by SparkLabs, a Korean hardware incubator whom we are working with,” Murcott says. “Songdo has this ‘living lab’ aspect — there’s a pioneering spirit in the people who move here.”