Smart New World

Abstract

New Songdo City is one of the first smart cities built from scratch. It attracts scholarly attention primarily for its economic and political logics as a digital solution to planetary urbanization. Yet this emphasis on a progressive convergence towards a utopian Smart New World distracts us from the specific spatialization – in this case of South Korean middle class – that may ultimately signal a key role in the social legibility, desire, and renegotiation of hegemonic ways of seeing. This paper engages with the complex symptoms of related spatiotemporal logics in a triangulation of actors – the state, the city, the corporation – and their operationalization in the netting of cultural and historical conditioning. This provides a new plain on which to interrogate the powerful confluence of new technologies, urban textures and collective imaginations in everyday practices. For what is really at stake is a refiguration of spaces that thrives on interwoven and conflicting constellations rather than binary distinctions. The research draws on combined insights from relevant literature on New Songdo City and our own morphological and ethnographic studies over four years as part of the Collaborative Research Center “Re-Figuration of Spaces” at Technische Universität Berlin. Relating interdisciplinary findings on urban practice with hegemonic ways of seeing points to a shifting significance of the underlying spatial figures as a complex symptom of social change and unfolds new views on the quality of urban space.