Making cities global: the new city development of Songdo,Yujiapu and Lingang

Looking at the South Korean case of New Songdo City and comparing it with two Chinese cities, the Yujiapu Financial District and Lingang New City, this study examines practices of city building in Northeast Asia not simply from an ambitious urban design aspect, but more critically from the planning patterns and emphatic discourses employed in these developments. Designed by top-down decisions to reach the ocean coast from the centres of the metropolitan region, New Songdo City drew upon the Global City paradigm that employs comprehensive modernist urban plans, while city developers aspired it to be a strategically positioned, new urban gate to its metropolitan region. Similar ambitions feed the creation of Yujiapu and Lingang and are coloured by a competitive developmental agenda of catching up the West on the one hand and surpassing regional rival cities on the other hand. These South Korean and Chinese examples stand as emblematic instances of how the currency of global city development is now articulated through popular planning discourses like ecologically conscious and technologically advanced urbanism. Framed as Green City Development, the three new cities reveal narrowly tailored global themes of sustainability and intelligence that address the current modes of imagining urban space in Northeast Asia.