Just had the pleasure of watching Chadwick International School headmaster Dr. Jorge Nelson via Cisco Global Education Forum.
Jorge is a passionate and forward-thinking educator. Like Songdo IBD, Jorge raised the bar for where education needs to be centered. I suggest you take a few minutes and go to the Cisco Education Forum website.
Found this in FT.com. Nice comments by Stan Gale of Gale International, too.
Aerotropolis
By Greg Lindsay
Published: February 25 2011 17:03 | Last updated: February 25 2011 17:03
Ten years ago, Stan Gale was a builder of New Jersey business parks. But in 2001 his fate began to change when he received a phone call from South Korea. The South Korean government had found Gale’s company on the internet, and they made him an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale International would borrow $35bn from Korea’s banks, partner with its biggest steel company and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston – only taller and denser – on a muddy, man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.
The proposed settlement, New Songdo, isn’t so much a Korean city as a western one, floating offshore. It was chartered as an “international business district” – a hub for companies working in China. To make US expatriates feel at home, its malls are modelled on those in Beverly Hills, and Jack Nicklaus designed the golf course. But its most salient feature is shrouded in perpetual haze, opposite a 12km bridge. On the far side is Incheon International Airport, which opened in 2001 on reclaimed land and instantly became one of the world’s busiest hubs.
“[The Koreans] tracked us down, wanted us to build a city in the ocean, and no one else was interested. What was going on here?” Gale said. “Their vision scared everyone else away. It wasn’t until I saw the airport that I understood where they wanted to go with this.” The answer: to China. The sales pitch to prospective tenants is simple: move here and you’re only a two-hour flight away from Shanghai or Beijing. You’re four hours away at most from cities you’ve never heard of, such as Changsha, which happens to be larger than Atlanta or Singapore. Nearly one billion people are a day trip away.
“China alone needs 500 cities the size of New Songdo,” Gale told me, and he hopes to break ground on the next one in Chongqing sometime this year. How many will be umbilically connected to the nearest airport? “All of them.”
To the jaundiced western eye, New Songdo and its clones might appear to be fantasies left over from the Bubble. But dismissing them as the product of Asia’s infatuation with all things mega misses the carefully calibrated machinery underneath. It’s a machine the rest of us ignore at our peril as we enter the next phase of globalisation – one marked by the shift from west to east and the trade routes up for grabs in between. The model for cities such as New Songdo even has a name, which Stan Gale pronounced with a flourish: “It’s an aerotropolis.”
It isn’t his word. The man who defined it is John Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has made a name for himself with his radical vision of the future: rather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, we will build this century’s cities around them. Why? Because people once chose to live in cities for the wealth of connections they offered socially, financially and intellectually. But in the era of globalisation, we choose cities that are drawing closer together themselves, linked by fibre-optic cables and jet aircraft. Stan Gale is simply taking this idea to its conclusion, building a network of instant cities joined by their airports.
Many aerotropoli will evolve out of the cities we already call home – only, their highways and byways will lead us to terminals instead of downtown. For instant cities such as New Songdo, Kasarda has drafted a set of blueprints replete with high-speed trains and six-lane highways connecting prefab neighbourhoods and business districts. They range in size from a few thousand residents to a few million. Aerotropoli designed according to Kasarda’s principles are already under way across China, India, the Middle East and Africa, and on the fringes of cities as desperate as Detroit and as old as Amsterdam. In Kasarda’s opinion, any city has the potential to be one, provided it is willing to build, demolish and rebuild around its airports at its tenants’ behest. The World Trade Center at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport boasts some of the highest office rents in the Netherlands. Detroit is borrowing its blueprints.
New Songdo is being built on reclaimed land in South Korea’s Yellow Sea, as an air hub for companies working in China. ‘China needs 500 cities this size,’ says its chief builder
Perhaps the purest example is Dubai, a city feverishly assembled, populated by highly stratified expatriates, and composed of enclaves that have less to do with each other than with like-minded communities thousands of miles away.
The idea of the aerotropolis represents the logic of globalisation made concrete in the form of cities. Whether we consider it to be good or simply inevitable, the global village holds these truths to be self-evident: that customers on the far side of the world may matter more than those next door; that the pace of business, and of life, will always move faster and cover more ground; and that we must pledge our allegiance if we want our iPhones, Amazon orders, Kenyan green beans and Valentine’s day roses at our doors tomorrow morning. If the airport is the mechanism making all of these things possible, Kasarda reasons, then everything else – our factories, offices, homes, schools – will be built accordingly. The aerotropolis, he promises, will be a new kind of city, one native to our era of instant gratification.
I first met Kasarda in his office, surrounded by model planes he had received as gifts from one foreign delegation or another. The only other place I’ve ever seen him in is an airport. He has flown more than three million miles in the past quarter of a century – and he is up in the air two months a year, flying far enough to circle the globe half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, Kasarda looked at the ascending trend lines of global trade and surmised that future growth depended on faster air travel. To that end, he devised a theory in which first factories then entire cities would form around greenfield airports, in order to wring a few extra hours from the day.
“Despite all the talk of the service economy, of healthcare and software as our national industries, the western world’s is still a goods economy,” Kasarda said. “A large and growing proportion of these goods move internationally, as a consequence of trade and modern supply chains. All of this passes through a physical ‘internet’, the network of hubs and planes for trading and transporting goods – and people – almost as quickly as the internet itself. And it’s arguably more important – the web can’t move your box from Amazon.”
The aerotropolis, Kasarda says, is the “urban incarnation of this physical internet; the primacy of air transport makes airports and their hinterlands the places to see how it functions – and to observe the consequences”. They may turn out to be mini-Manhattans like New Songdo or SimCities in the mould of Dubai – effectively an airline with an emirate attached – but they are the first cities in which what’s on the ground is beside the point.
. . .
Humanity is officially an urban species – more than half of us live in cities. The percentage is even higher in the developed world, but Africa and Asia are catching up. The number of city dwellers is expected to almost double by 2050 to more than six billion – our current global population. The number of megacities (those with a population of 10 million or more) will have increased from two in 1950 to 27 by 2025, housing 450 million people between them. China might well need 500 new cities the size of New Songdo, and another 100 cities of one million residents or more.
We have always chosen to live in cities for the wealth of networks they create – the elaborate webs of kinship and commerce. That promise hasn’t changed since the agora and acropolis, but the size and scope of cities have. Cities grew by shrinking the distances within and between them, using technology to expand their grids and cover more ground.
John Kasarda likens the history of cities to a rising tide of breaking waves. Ocean harbours were swept away by river ports, which yielded to railway terminals, which were in turn exploded by highways and suburbia. Transportation is destiny. The fifth wave is now here.
Joel Garreau, the futurist and author of Edge City, declared, “Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time.” When the state of the art is shoe leather and donkeys, the result is the hilly paths of Jerusalem. When it’s men on horseback and sailing ships, it’s the ports of Lisbon, Hong Kong, or Boston, and the canals of Venice and Amsterdam. The birth of the railway produced Kansas City, Omaha, and the stockyards of Chicago. And the mass production of the Model T led first to Los Angeles and later to Levittown, Long Island.
Today, the modern combination on the ground is the car and internet, yielding Garreau’s “edge cities”, which are everywhere and nowhere within America, and have since cropped up in Bangalore and beyond. Canary Wharf, Delhi’s Gurgaon and the suburbs of northern Virginia more closely resemble each other than their neighbours. Soaring above them all are jet aircraft – first put into service 60 years ago – collapsing the distance between Dallas and Dubai as effortlessly as the internet nodes connecting them.
But as transport and communication costs fall, and movement and accessibility become easier, cities have become less dense and contiguous and grown more dispersed, networked, fluid. In the internet age, this fluidity promised that those of us who make our living with computers could live anywhere. No one has preached this vision more fervently than the technologist George Gilder, whose utopia of the “telecosm” and infinite bandwidth has us scattering back into the countryside to live like gentlemen farmers, with Facebook serving as the village green.
But total dispersal hasn’t come to pass, and it won’t, no matter how much bandwidth we’re able to route through our iPhones. In fact, the same technologies that were supposed to disaggregate us have only made concentration more useful. We’re becoming more urban at precisely the moment our outlook is growing more global. We keep an eye on the street and a mobile phone to our ears, somehow managing to be in both places at once. The same thing is happening at a macro level, too. The Los Angeles hinterlands, for example, aren’t California’s Central Valley or the high Mojave Desert but the outlands of Seoul, Hong Kong and Mexico City, connected via mobile phones, social networks and satellite offices. The product of the jet age and the internet age is our current instant age, simultaneously favouring both aggregation and dispersal.
This is where John Kasarda comes in. With the aerotropolis, he attempts to answer the question of what the cities of this age should look like. What will their shape and purpose be when the state of the art at the time of their birth is ubiquitous WiFi and jumbo jets? Will they resemble Dubai, which is busy reinventing itself as the Middle East’s entrepôt, Africa’s aerial gateway and a luxury shopping mecca for middle class Chinese? Or will they look more like converging cities of the Pearl River Delta, where a single factory (Foxconn’s) could leverage Hong Kong’s airport to supply every Apple iPad or iPhone in the world?
Implicit in such thinking is a zero-sum world of exponential population increase and cut-throat competition for resources and profits. Kasarda’s vision evokes everything we find terrifying about globalisation – a civilisation cast in quick-drying cement, packed with worker drones. But even if you accept his logic, you have to ask: who are these cities for? The companies that profit from marginally leaner operations? The autocratic leaders who are jockeying to land them? Or the planners, architects and sages given carte blanche to raise islands from oceans and plant tarmac in desert?
Will we consciously choose to live in cities built in globalisation’s image – machines for living linked in great chains? Kasarda believes that we will, that we should, and that we’ll suffer the consequences if we don’t, because these debates have already been settled (one way or another) in places like China and Dubai, which have staked everything on the global triumphing over the local.
China is building an aerotropolis wherever it deems strategic: as outposts in oil-rich Angola and Sudan and in the copper belt of Zambia; in Pakistan, to complement the deep-water port at Gwadar, and most of all in western China, where more than 100 new airports are under construction. The goal is to put one within driving distance of 80 per cent of its population by 2020.
The UN World Tourism Organisation expects the annual number of Chinese tourists abroad to triple by 2020 to 115 million; already, more are leaving to see the world than foreigners are arriving to see China. Where are they heading? I found one clue in Dubai recently, where my hotel was overrun with families toting shopping bags. Tourism from China to the United Arab Emirates has soared since the emirates landed on China’s “approved destination” list in autumn 2009. The number of Chinese visiting Dubai soared 57 per cent in the first half of last year, totalling 81,900 in all.
They’re heading next to the high street near you. Despite a decade’s worth of high oil prices and terrorism fears, we have never flown as far or in greater numbers than we do right now. As recently as 1999, Ryanair had no website, and it was impossible to take a non-stop flight from New York to New Delhi or Beijing. The world may or may not have flattened since then, but there’s a lot less changing planes.
In the end, we won’t stop flying, for the simple reason that quitting now would run counter to our human impulse to roam. Will you be the one to tell 100 million Chinese tourists (and another 100 million Indians) that they will have to stay home?
This is an edited extract from ‘Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next’, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, published by Penguin, £14.99
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Flight of fancy?
Someone smart came up with the title of John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay’s book. Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next is an astute blend of the intriguing, the beguiling and the faintly menacing, writes Pilita Clark. But is it true? Are we really heading for a world where we build our cities around our airports instead of the other way round? That depends on who “we” are. And how we define an aerotropolis.
On his website (www.aerotropolis.com), John Kasarda, a US academic who has been putting the economic case for the concept for years, uses a diagram to explain how such a city would look. It shows an airport surrounded by clusters of air transport-related businesses, convention centres, exhibition halls, hotels, malls and homes. These are fed by “aerolanes” or “aerotrains”, pumping in passengers and goods.
By this definition, Schiphol airport, Dallas-Fort Worth, Dubai and many others already share aerotropolistic traits. Even Heathrow has a few. But Heathrow is also a good example of the limits to this vision. It has beenbanned from building a third runway and it took longer to obtain planning permission for terminal five than it took Beijing airport to build its vast new terminal three. The idea that approval would ever be given to flatten swathes of its surrounding suburbs to make way for an aerotropolis is impossible to imagine. The same can be said for dozens of the world’s best-known airports. And yet the model has been embraced in India, China, the Philippines and South Korea.
So if the idea of an aerotropolis is not the way you want to live next, relax if you live in a crowded part of North America or Europe. And stay away from emerging rivals hoping that airport cities will help them become the developed world of tomorrow.
A close Korean friend called and shared that the February 26, 2011 Wall Street Journal Saturday edition looked at Songdo IBD among with other top centers of global commerce. Nice to see Songdo IBD in the news.
Songdo International Business District
Cities in the Sky
Welcome to the world of the ‘aerotropolis.’
To arrive at midnight at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport, as I did recently, is to glimpse the pulsing, non-stop flow of the new global economy. The airport, which runs full-tilt 24/7, is packed at all hours. Nigerian traders bound for Guangzhou mix with Chinese laborers needed in Khartoum, Indian merchants headed to clinch a deal in Nairobi, and United Nations staff en route to Kabul.
Dubai’s recent financial woes have forced the tiny Gulf state to scrap or scale back some of its more outlandish development schemes, including The World, an artificial archipelago shaped roughly like a world map. But one project has not flagged: the new concourse for Terminal 3. With construction continuing around the clock, the annex to what is already the world’s largest building is desperately needed to accommodate the fleet of 90 Airbus A380s ordered by Emirates, Dubai’s government-owned airline.
Lighting a cigarette in his modest airport office during a meeting two weeks ago, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates, laughed as he recalled the widespread doubts that Emirates could pay for—and fill—its superjumbo jets. But it can, and it has, and despite the downturn, Dubai has stuck to its plans to develop the world’s largest airline from the world’s busiest hub. In public statements, Sheikh Ahmed has equated the future of Dubai with the future of Emirates, calling his country’s mammoth airport the center of a new Silk Road connecting China to the Middle East, India and Africa.
Getty ImagesPassengers at the Dubai airport
Thanks to the jet engine, Dubai has been able to transform itself from a backwater into a perfectly positioned hub for half of the planet’s population. It now has more in common with Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangalore than with Saudi Arabia next door. It is a textbook example of an aerotropolis, which can be narrowly defined as a city planned around its airport or, more broadly, as a city less connected to its land-bound neighbors than to its peers thousands of miles away. The ideal aerotropolis is an amalgam of made-to-order office parks, convention hotels, cargo complexes and even factories, which in some cases line the runways. It is a pure node in a global network whose fast-moving packets are people and goods instead of data. And it is the future of the global city.
This may come as a surprise to Americans, many of whom have had it with both flying and globalization and would prefer a life that’s slower and more local. In the wake of the financial crisis, the bywords for the future have often been caution and sustainability. But there is no resisting the relentless, ongoing expansion of the world economy, and the aerotropolis—fast, efficient, far-reaching and filled with generic “world-class” architecture—embodies it. In places like Dubai, China, India and parts of Africa, cities are being built from scratch around air travel, the better to plug into the global trade lanes overhead.
At present more than half of humanity lives in cities. The percentage is higher in the developed world—four in five Americans live in downtowns or suburbia. China’s rate is half that, and India has not yet begun to urbanize in a serious way, with only 29% of its people in cities. Between now and 2030, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates, India must build a new Chicago every year to absorb the millions of villagers streaming from the countryside in search of work. While the number of city dwellers world-wide will nearly double in 40 years to more than six billion people, the size of cities’ footprints is expected to increase twice as fast.
This hasn’t been lost on Paul Romer, the Stanford University economist overseeing the development of an instant city in Honduras. He proposes building “charter cities” in impoverished states with new laws, new infrastructure and foreign investors—free trade zones elevated to the realm of social experiment. Mr. Romer sold Honduran President Porfirio Lobo on the idea in November and has stayed on as an adviser. Last month, the Honduran Congress voted to amend the country’s constitution to allow the pilot project to proceed.
In making his case to the Honduran public, Mr. Romer pitched the city as an aerotropolis. “Honduras could be the hub that brings Central America and Latin America into the world-wide network of air traffic,” he wrote. “Central America will eventually have a major hub. It’s a question of where, not if.” Without air connections to the outside world, his charter city will stagnate. “If you’re going to take the next step from assembling garments to assembling iPads,” he told me, “you’ve got to have a major airport, or you’ll never beat Shenzhen.”
Every aerotropolis is locked in competition with every other one, just as every financial center is jostling for position in the new multi-polar international order. The principle is the same: Everyone wants to be the hub; no one wants to be the spokes. This has made the aerotropolis ripe for experimentation when it comes to governance, whether it’s simple tax-free zones, the charter cities Mr. Romer proposes, or the “state capitalism” practiced by Dubai or Singapore. (The word “aerotropolis,” I should note, was coined by John Kasarda, a business professor at the University of North Carolina and my co-author on the forthcoming book of that title. He is currently working on projects in Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Panama, and has served as a consultant in the past in Detroit, Memphis, Tenn., Dubai, Chongqing and Hyderabad.)
The basic aim of an aerotropolis is to disrupt local incumbents and monopolies using the long arm of air travel. It allows Indian hospitals to entice American heart patients for top-notch surgery at rock-bottom prices. It lets factories move out to the far reaches of western China to manufacture the iPad for lower wages while absorbing millions of urban migrants. Detroit’s leaders are even building an aerotropolis in a Hail Mary bid for Chinese investment.
Floating above it all, meanwhile, are the globe-trotting executives chasing emerging markets. They are the denizens not only of Dubai and Singapore but of new business districts such as the Zuidas on the southern edge of Amsterdam, which was designed to be eight minutes from the airport by train and is home to the Netherlands’ biggest financial service firms.
The World in Flight
2.4 billion Air travelers in 2010
3.3 billion Projected air travelers in 2014
9.4% Projected average annual growth in international passenger demand in the Middle East, 2010-2014
4.9% Projected average annual growth in international passenger demand in North America, 2010-14
31 million Metric tons of international cargo traffic in 2010
38 million Projected metric tons of international cargo traffic in 201
Kohn Pedersen Fox AssociatesNEW GEOGRAPHY New Songdo is a 20-minute drive from Incheon International Airport, over a 13-mile bridge. The airport is a 3½-hour flight from one-third of the world’s population
The aerotropolis is the city that state capitalism built. In Dubai, Emirates is a wholly owned subsidiary of “Dubai Inc.” An uncle of the country’s ruler, Sheikh Ahmed is not only chairman of Emirates airline; he also oversees the airports, the civil aviation authority and the Supreme Fiscal Committee. From its beginning 25 years ago, the airline was seen as a strategic arm of the state, paying no taxes while importing the foreign labor that built the place.
Using its airline, Dubai feverishly assembled a population from elsewhere—Indian entrepreneurs, British bankers, Russians buying condos with suitcases of cash—thus creating the ethnic enclaves and gated communities that define the place. Americans outsource low-cost production to Chinese workers; in Dubai that labor (and the inequality it creates) is in-sourced. Emirates proved to be the enabler for Dubai Inc.’s competing developers, who wildly overbuilt at their ruler’s behest.
Determined to prevent the world from connecting through Dubai, its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi eventually followed suit, starting its own airline by royal decree in 2003 and eventually supplying it with $51 billion worth of aircraft. That was the precursor to its plan to lure franchise branches of the Guggenheim Museum, the Louvre and New York University, along with an entirely new section of the city in which to put them. Qatar’s rulers have done much the same in Doha, bulking up Qatar Airways and building a new airport ahead of its winning bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
For its part, Saudi Arabia has gone so far as to build six “economic cities” from scratch in the empty desert. The aim is to house and create work for one-third of the 13 million Saudis under the age of 20—a largely uneducated work force. Each of these cities in the middle of nowhere will have its own air hub to recruit foreign investment. Like Mr. Romer’s instant city, they are social experiments, filled with California-style communities where men and women, foreigners and Saudis will mix.
The ultimate state capitalist and player in this game is, of course, China. For all the attention paid to its high-speed railways, the Chinese state is spending as much if not more to build 100 new airports by 2020, with new cities to match.
In the western city of Chongqing, huge swaths of countryside have been paved in preparation for the arrival of China’s electronics manufacturers, which are pulling up stakes along the coast. Led by Hewlett-Packard and Foxconn, the maker of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, Chongqing aspires to produce nearly half the world’s laptops by 2015, all of which will leave the city by air.
As a matter of policy, this strategy is a response to the millions of peasants leaving their farms for the city in search of work. China is building aerotropolises as a means to funnel growth away from the coast. It’s even building them in strategic spots as far away as Angola, Zambia, Sudan and Pakistan in order to airlift the labor required for extracting natural resources.
The aerotropolis is also attracting private developers. In India, where the government hopes to fund a half trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure with public-private partnerships, airports are at the top of most companies’ wish lists. GMR, one of India’s largest industrial conglomerates, built a new airport in Hyderabad and a new international terminal in Delhi in exchange for land to develop around both. A private consortium—including the government of Singapore—is building new airports and cities near Ludhiana and Durgapur, in an attempt to create India’s answers to the FedEx and UPS cargo hubs in Memphis and Louisville, Ky. Not so long ago, those cities were Southern Rust Belt towns. They have been saved by companies like Amazon and Zappos, which set up shop around the air hubs in exchange for vast swaths of land on which to locate their mammoth warehouses.
Zuma PressREADY FOR TAKEOFF | Attendants on an Emirates Airbus 380 in Beijing. Dubai has positioned itself as a major airport hub.
Outside Seoul in South Korea, Songdo International Business District bills itself as the world’s smartest, greenest city and the most expensive privately financed real-estate project in history, with a price tag of $35 billion. It was originally commissioned by South Korea’s government to be a magnet for attracting foreign direct investment. The American developer Stan Gale was hired to a build an instant city the size of downtown Boston on a man-made island connected to Seoul’s airport via a 13-mile-long bridge.
What was imagined as a hub for Western expatriates—not a Korean city, but a mini-Manhattan floating off the coast of South Korea, complete with a “Central Park”—has been settled instead by families from Seoul. The city won’t be finished until 2015, at the earliest, but Mr. Gale is convinced that he’s “cracked the code” of urbanism and aims to sell 20 more just like it to mayors across China. Chongqing and Changsha have already expressed an interest.
The aerotropolis arrives at a moment when urban centers seemingly have started to rule the world. Just 100 cities account for nearly one-third of the global economy. “If the 20th century was the era of nations,” South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pronounced at New Songdo’s christening in 2009, “the 21st century is the era of cities.”
In places like China, India, and Dubai, the aerotropolis is the strategy being adopted to challenge the existing economic and political order. Rather than “machines for living” (in Le Corbusier’s famously bloodless formulation), these cities are competitive engines, designed to lure talent and investment or simply to park a growing and restive population. The recent uprisings in the Middle East have driven home the need to create housing and jobs at all costs.
These fast-growing air-based cities are already shaking things up. Emirates’ rise in Dubai has set off alarms in London, Paris and Frankfurt, where the chief executives of flagship air carriers worry that they are being cut out of new trade flows. Canada even triggered a nasty diplomatic spat with the United Arab Emirates over its refusal to let Emirates fly to Calgary and Vancouver.
The aerotropolis is tailor-made for today’s world, in which no nation reliably dominates and every nation must fight for its place in the global economy. It is at once a new model of urbanism and the newest weapon in the widening competition for wealth and security.
—Greg Lindsay is co-author, with John Kasarda, of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.”
An Evening with Dr. Chung Un-chan, former South Korea Prime Minister
On January 26, 2011, the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IRPS) sponsored a lecture by Dr. Chung Un-chan. A former president of Seoul National University and Prime Minister of South Korea, Dr. Chung’s career bridges both academia and government.
The well-attended lecture shared to students, faculty, and distinguished guests, Dr. Chung’s timely thoughts and views on U.S. -Korean relations, while offering suggestions for strengthening future ties into the 21st Century. Dr. Chung stressed the need for both nations to be More Open, More Confident, and More Compassionate. Highlights of his lecture included the importance of education, study abroad, and first-hand experience of other cultures.
Dr. Chung Un-chan
Following the lecture, I was invited to attend a diner with Dr. Chung hosted by IRPS Dean Peter Cowhey. In attendance was Professor emeritus Larry Krause, Professor Stephan Haggard, Professor You, Jong-sung, Professor Gordon Hansen, and Dr. Byong Mok Kim, M.D.
Professor Larry Krause, Dr. Chung, Dr. Kim Byong Mok
I also had the opportunity to share with Dr. Chung a copy of Chemulpo to Songdo IBD. A number of UCSD IRPS graduate students had assisted in the crafted of the book, including Professor You, Jong-sung.
Chemulpo to Songdo IBD book with author Don Southerton
Over the course of three hours, discussions covered a wide range of Korea-facing topics, including KORUS FTA, the Six Way talks, North Korea’s recent aggression against South Korea, China-Korea-U.S. relations, North Korea refuges, the future role of U.S. military forces in South Korea, and North-South unification.
During the diner I had a wonderful opportunity to speak at length with Dr. Chung on issues and concerns that impact Korea-facing global business. I was also asked by Dean Cowhey to share with Dr. Chung and the distinguished faculty my experiences and the challenges working with global Korea-based Groups and international firms entering the Korea market.
That said, one point I raised to Dr. Chung and group was concerns by many of my clients over North Korea acts of aggression against South Korea and the constant saber rattling. Dr. Chung acknowledged such concern and noted that one outcome of the recent incidents was a huge shift in younger Korean’s views of the North—most now less tolerant of the North in light of the December 2010 shelling of civilians. Moreover, Dr. Chung and the others scholars felt the recent aggression had greatly strengthened U.S.-South Korean relations; with America reaffirming it’s support of South Korea.
Although North Korea continues to perplex even those with deep insights into the regime, I feel that the consensus is that the status quo will continue in North Korea and the peninsula into the near future.
One final point I raised to Dr. Chung stressed the challenges to entering the South Korean market. Dr. Chung’s answer was quite frank—he felt Korea was already a “very open market.” He pointed out that language and communications were issues, but added that when compared to Japan, China, and other nations, Korea was very open to trade, business, and commerce. Moreover, Dr. Chung noted than when he was Prime Minister he oversaw the elimination of hundreds of regulations.
On a personal note, I found Dr. Chung very approachable and taking a real interest in questions posed to him by the IRPS facility and guests.
By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor This video does an awesome job showcasing Songdo IBD –a smart connected community. Cisco, too, has embraced Songdo IBD and its potential.
In this second video, Dr. Jorge Nelson hosts an informative vodcast about International School Songdo’s 21st century model for education– a key aspect being smart city technology.
By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor Green and sustainability are key aspects of Songdo IBD. A vision of the community is to provide a model for Korea and the world. I found this SERI (Samsung Economic Research Institute) report on Korea Green relevant.
Korea’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent in the next decade will be supported by plans to promote “low carbon green living” through support systems, changes in lifestyle, and public awareness. Korea is now pursuing policies but the public response has been less than desired. Some measures, such as the energy consumption label system, can be improved for increased public awareness and participation and greater institutional assistance.
Korea, which had no obligation to set an emissions reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol, has voluntarily and aggressively pursued green growth policies at home and, to encourage international participation in tackling climate change, adopted the toughest of internationally recommended standards. Specifically, the government is targeting a 30 percent reduction in Korea’s “business as usual” (BAU) emissions by 2020, the highest level recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for developing countries.1
IMPORTANCE OF GREEN LIVING In the short term, Korea is not in a strong position to dramatically slash greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the industrial sector, as its energy consumption and GHG emissions have risen alongside robust economic growth, and its core industries are mainly of the energy-intensive secondary type. On the other hand, the cost of reducing emissions is relatively low for transportation, commercial, and household sectors compared with the industrial sector. Consequently, making lifestyle changes can make a big difference in reducing energy consumption and GHG emissions in the short term.
To reduce GHG emissions from the transportation, commercial, and residential sectors, it is important to expand the scope of green living. The Korean government has pursued comprehensive and systematic measures in cooperation with the private sector and in connection with national campaigns at relevant government ministries to champion green living. Moreover, the government plans to strengthen incentives to encourage voluntary participation by individuals such as points-for-cash systems, and also to create a support system to enable a systematic pursuit of green living. By raising awareness that green living can be economically beneficial to individuals as well as ease the effect of climate change, the government aims to encourage Koreans to actively contribute to green growth through their daily lifestyles. Therefore, it has become all the more important for the government to instill habits of conservation and green living.
CONDITIONS FOR GREEN LIFESTYLES AND POLICY INITIATIVES Conditions for Proliferation of Green Lifestyles According to the government’s five-year plan on green growth (2009–2013), Koreans gained a heightened awareness about the severity of the energy crisis and climate change after the government’s vision on low carbon green growth was released in 2008. However, the plan said that green living was not yet put into practice sufficiently, and there are not enough concrete action programs despite the various ministries’ campaigns for green living.2 The challenges that need to be overcome include the gap between public awareness and practice of green lifestyles, the absence of a support system on green consumption, the lack of participation in community campaigns, widespread NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) attitudes, and the lack of school curricula on the environment. However, the spread among companies of a green living movement and a well-being culture increased attention on the LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) culture, and greater need for education on climate change following the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in 2009 could all positively affect the spread of the green lifestyle movement.
Green Living Policy Initiatives The government recently announced a plan to promote low carbon, green living as a way to achieve a green revolution in life through fundamental changes in lifestyle and public awareness. As part of a strategy to pursue low carbon green living, the government has already started a nationwide enlightenment campaign called “Green Start Movement,” which encourages the reduction of GHG emissions in the non-industrial sector through voluntary participation and practice. It has also launched a campaign called “Green Energy Family Movement” in which businesses, non-government organizations, local governments, public institutions, and the public participate voluntarily.
In July 2009, a new Carbon Point System3 was introduced as an incentive for energy conservation. It calculates the amount of electricity, gas, water, and waste material people save in GHG equivalents and rewards points that can be cashed in. An increasing number of households are expected to join the program, contributing to the spread of the green living movement.
Moreover, a Carbon Cash-Back System4 has been introduced. It offers points to consumers who purchase certified low-carbon products that emit less carbon while being produced or in use. Consumers who visit stores practicing the reduction of GHG will also receive points as an incentive.
It is projected that various policies with stronger incentives for green living such as Carbon Labeling and Green Store Certification System will emerge. Therefore, it is expected that consumers will have a wider choice of environment-friendly products and producers will participate in the new consumption trend.
Nurturing industries related to environment-friendly homes and buildings is also high on the government green action agenda. The government plans to offer various incentives to buildings that adopt its green standards on thickness of walls, windows and doors, and heights of ceilings and make the criteria mandatory for contractors who build more than twenty-home complexes. The construction-related initiatives expand the government’s green strategy beyond the past focus on transportation (e.g. promoting the use of bikes and early commercialization of electric vehicles). A dramatic transformation in basic lifestyles and related industries is expected.
WAYS TO ESTABLISH GREEN LIFESTYLES So far, this paper has looked at the reasons the Korean government emphasizes the importance of living green and why it focuses on policies for green growth and lifestyle.
Considering the government’s reduction goals and the condition of the industry, Koreans may be asked to make a steeper reduction than the government-proposed 10 percent reduction of GHG emissions in daily lifestyles to achieve the reduction target by 2020. To do so will require changes in conventional lifestyles and public awareness. This paper suggests ways to change public perception, improve participation, and provide institutional assistance so that government strategies can be more effective.
Strengthening Green Education It is necessary to create and distribute a textbook that explains the purpose, meaning, and economic and social repercussions of low carbon green growth so that young students can fully understand the concept and severity of climate change at an early age.
Although educational material regarding green growth will be included in elementary school curriculum, the government needs to make a more concrete and systematic plan. In the first phase, the government needs to create and distribute a textbook aimed at elementary and pre-school children. To produce meaningful educational results, it is desirable to focus efforts to target lower-grades (first to third grades).
Texts should be organized with varied content so that children can understand the means to reduce GHG emissions in schools, homes, and communities; help the environment; and contribute to green growth. On a gradual basis, such education should be extended to secondary schools and, in the mid- to long-term, lead to the creation of textbooks that fit various ages and classes.
Moreover, the government needs to consider designating pilot schools for pursuing green education in which various activities help children experience the phenomenon of low carbon green growth and understand its importance. In the pilot schools, activities such as writing green diaries, publishing green newspapers, and holding green discussions should be performed with creativity.
In the short-term, the government needs to start creating a green environment and establishing a soft infrastructure through pilot schools for green education. In the mid- to long-term, it needs to include green education in school curricula to expand nationwide. Rather than pursuing green education in all schools, it is more effective to designate schools that operate a pilot program, find problems, and devise ways to improve.
The government can also consider establishing a close network with the media and businesses to gain a wealth of experience and to compensate for the shortage of budgetary and human resources. It can also consider visiting industrial sites and inviting experts as one-day green teachers.
Establishing Networks and Strengthening the Role of Local Regions To achieve the national vision of low carbon green growth, it is important to promulgate the importance of promotion and participation, as well as that of physical infrastructure. Therefore, it is necessary for the government to take advantage of human networks to lay the foundation for a low-carbon society.
The Green Start Network5 movement takes a top-down approach in which the government takes the lead in nurturing green leaders, launching campaigns to reduce GHG emissions, and conducting various events. However, public response to participating in the movement has been tepid; changes in perception have been slow. Small-scale networks such as regional communities can be effective and practical in establishing and spreading the culture and standards necessary for low-carbon lifestyle by using social networks. Therefore, it is desirable for the government to improve the operational approach of the Green Start Network in a way that private companies and subordinate groups can participate voluntarily and establish small-scale networks to start action for achieving low-carbon society. In other words, the government needs to introduce bottom-up methods in the Green Start Network and expand the scope of projects.
So far, projects have been confined to action program contests, establishment of experience centers, and promotional activities. By establishing small-scale networks at the city and township levels, the government can consider providing education for reducing GHG emissions, evaluating the amount of emissions, and using the results in public relations and educational activities.
Operating green community centers and automated bicycle rental system are among the fastest ways to spread green living. Two cases in point: the city of London installed the London Green Homes community center to provide information on reducing GHG at home as well as tailored home remodeling services; and the city of Paris commissioned the installment and operation of a bike rental system to JCDecaux, outdoor advertising company. Paris is reaping profits without investment costs.
Provision of Information on Energy Costs Delivering information on energy costs to consumers can act as an incentive to save energy and help reduce energy consumption in households and businesses. In that respect, a labeling system can be an effective means to help consumers choose what products to buy by simplifying the products’ often complex environmental impact and manufacturing technology. The government is providing information and inducing consumers to choose products through Energy Consumption Efficiency Grade Label and Carbon Label.
Under the current Energy Consumption Efficiency Grade Label, manufacturers are required to attach 1st Grade (low consumption) to 5th Grade (high consumption) efficiency labels on consumer electronics, lighting equipment, cars, and other manufactured goods that consume lots of energy. If products fall below the minimum energy efficiency standards, manufacturers are banned from production, sales, and fined up to a maximum of ₩20 million (approximately $17,000). Since July 2009, carbon dioxide emissions per hour are included in the label.
Likewise, the United States has various measures to improve energy efficiency such as Energy Guide Label, Energy Efficiency Standard, Federal Energy Management Program, and Energy Star Program. The US Energy Guide Label6 gives estimated electricity cost of using products, encouraging consumers to save energy voluntarily.
It would be more effective if Korea’s energy consumption labels provided information on energy costs rather than, as at present, list various complex and incomprehensible figures. The Korean government should also provide such information on energy costs more broadly in other labeling systems.
Keywords green growth, green lifestyle, green education, energy label, energy consumption, GHG emissions
Notes
1. The IPCC recommended emissions reduction targets of 15–30 percent of BAU projections for Korea and other non-Annex I countries.
2. Noksaekso˘ngjang 5kaenyo˘ngyehoek (2009~2013) [Five-Year Green Growth Plan (2009–2013)], ROK Presidential Committee on Green Growth, July 2009, p. 321, .
3. Compared with the average usage of electricity and water for the past two years, saved energy is converted into GHG emissions by using GHG coefficient (1kwh = 424 g CO2), and points are offered accordingly. The ROK Ministry of Environment has stated that 10 g of CO2 equals one point, which is around ₩3 (roughly $0.0026).
4. Under the Carbon Cash-Back System, allied manufacturers and retailers offer consumers a certain percentage of sales prices as “carbon points,” and consumers use accumulated points to purchase products, participate in public programs, and use public transportation. A pilot program has been in operation since May 2009, and it is expected that the program will begin in earnest from 2010.
5. Green Start Network is a public—private partnership whereby members from all walks of life participate to practice Green Start Movement, which started in October 2008 to reduce GHG emissions in non-industrial sectors. Fifty-five organizations and groups such as the Ministry of Environment, civic groups, and economist circles are developing action programs for reducing GHG emissions and pursuing educational and promotional activities. It is composed of national, regional, and business networks.
6. The US Federal Trade Commission requires manufacturers to attach labels that describe the energy cost and efficiency of thirteen products such as air conditioners, refrigerators, boilers, and washing machines. The US Department of Energy bans the production and sales of twenty products such as motors, refrigerators, air conditioners, boilers, and lamps that fall below the minimum energy efficiency standard.
DO Gunwoo is a research fellow at SERI. His current research fo-cuses on environmental economics, public finance, and climate change. He was previously a deputy director at the ROK Ministry of Finance and Economy and visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University. He holds a PhD in Economics from Korea University. Contact: dokorea@seri.org.
As the holidays approach, you may wish to greet your Korean colleagues with: Sae hae bok man i ba deu say yo! (Season’s Greetings)
(I will modify the Romanization for easier pronunciation). Hint: Break the greeting into: sae hae bok—mah ne—bah deu say yo
In South Korea, the government recognizes Christmas December 25 as a public holiday. Christians, who make up about 30% of the population, celebrate the occasion as a religious holiday.
Like in the West, both Christians and non-Christians may engage in some holiday customs such as gift-giving, sending Christmas cards, and setting up decorated trees in their homes.
Each year I see more signs of commercialism in Korea with stores and buildings displaying Christmas decorations and offering holiday sales. What may surprise some is that public and company Christmas trees and decoration stay up way past the holiday. In fact, many stay in place to the Lunar New Year.
Sae hae bok man i ba deu say yo! works well and is a common seasonal greeting. For those wanting to wish someone Merry Christmas use Sung tan jul chuk ha.
If you have a specific holiday question, please feel to contact us by email.
On behalf of myself and Songdo IBD CityTalk, have a happy holiday season!
