stocked the canal with fish yet. “It’s four days old!” he splutters, for-getting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh. As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasilia 50 years ago. Brasilia, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously over scale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more ridding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-Certified from the get-go, designed to emit third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300, 000 people during the day). It’s an “international business district” and an “aerotropolis”- as Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a “smart city,” studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its “Smarter Planet” religion. Being seriously ahead of the curve explains why Gale had such a hard time finding a tech partner this dream frustration. First in line was LG, one of Korea’s homegrown conglomerates. None of its ideas had made it past the prototype stage. Next up was Microsoft, which signed a deal giving it carte blanche to mold the city in its image. “Designing an entirely new city from the ground up provides an unique opportunity to create an ideal technological infrastructure,” Bill Gates boasted. But before her could even measures for drapes, Gale decifvded a plumber would be a better fit and threw Microsoft over for Cisco. Last spring, the networking giant became New Songdo’s exclusive supplier of digital plumbing. Mowwre than simply installing routers and switches-or even something so banal as citywide Wi-Fi-Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses. From the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching to every wall and fixture, it promises this city will “run on information.” Cisco’s control room will be New Songdo’s brain stem.
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