Songdo IBD (International Business District) is a stark example of the complexities of master planning in the 21st century. Whilst its website cheers for a new economic day coming for this future city, it's hard to see the reality on the ground. It feels like the end of the Earth--if it can even be attributed to Earth. It is 100 million sq feet of seemingly unoccupied space (http://www.songdo.com/songdo-international-business-district/the-city/master-plan.aspx.) Of course, it is not nearly as vacant as I am claiming, but even if there are inhabitants, the sense is one of desolation. In person it is as beautiful as the mock-ups predicted due to a complete lack of humanity to sully it.

I really did take these pictures. If it looks like walking through a 3-D project proposal, that's exactly how it feels. At points. My sense was a great tension between the shiny newness, so surreal in its forwardness, and the abandonment more akin to ruins. Perhaps it was the searing 38C heat of a mid-summer day, but it felt like venturing around future ruins. Of course, it didn't help that some areas were abandoned. While a foot bridge in Central Park had two attendants polishing it, just a short walk away, unfinished bicycle and walking paths were overgrown. Tomorrow City, the showcase of the future, had gone empty.

Maybe when the trees grow more full Songdo will feel more hospitable, but for now, the only reprieve from the climate are the overbearing bridges. One of the few places where I actually encountered people was under one such bridge. A group of seniors were taking a rest in the only place that provided shade. An interesting juxtaposition, these elderly folks resting under a hyper-modern structure built on the very place where MacArthur first landed when they were young (there is a monument to this strange factoid.) The group seemed completely out-of-place. Like they had parachuted in from elsewhere. The Songdo Master plan does not purport the city to be a city for the elderly, but a place of cutting edge innovation for the (younger) entrepreneurial class. As the trees are still too young to provided reasonable shade, this group (the majority of the people in the park all together) were occupying a space in an unpredicted way. Sitting on the footings of the bridge rather than on the allotted benches a few metres away.

The dreams of New Towns

There is something compelling about a New Town in the abstract. It shares much with buying a new car. As ephemeral as the new car smell is, as quickly outmoded as the latest superfluous features are, they are enrapturing. They are impossibly alluring. It takes monkish piety to repress the lust for them. We know on paper they mean nothing. We know if questioned, we could never fully justify them. But we can't help ourselves. As it turns out, we don't reserve this craving of the new and supremely fresh for automobile purchases. And until just a few years ago, while we may have scoffed at the stupidity of buying an overpriced never-been-driven car, we saw no connection with our housing choices. After all, a car is just a car, but a house or an apartment, that's a home. A home is a different thing. A home is not meant to be shared. We don't want to think of these rooms sullied by pasts. It is appalling that our kitchens may have known better chefs, our dining rooms may have hosted better parties, our family rooms may have seen better holidays, our bedrooms may have had more salacious dalliances. If we think too much about it, if we allow ourselves even a moment to reflect, jealousy overwhelms us. A home can only have one family. Our family, to the exclusion of all others. Anyone else is a house guest. Anyone else has to knock. Sure, we may go on to sell those special, irreplaceable members of our family. We compartmentalize this as if that home, that certain home, no longer exists. This nostalgia pushes almost to believe the physical structure itself no longer exists. And while we know in a rational sense, yes, the structure is still there, we content ourselves in knowing the inhabitants are mere imposters living in a shadow version of the platonic form. We remember a house always remembers its first. As a child I remember a woman visiting my home. She appeared unannounced one day, as people on these kinds of visits usually do. She told my mother she had grown up as a child in my house. That this house, my house, was her house. There is only one reality when you're in early elementary school, and this woman's claim came as an affront to me. She explained that her family had planted the hazelnut tree that blocked the bathroom window from plain view. She explained that her parents had built the machine shed and the outbuildings near the rear of the orchard. And interestingly, she explained that hers had not been the first family in the house. She explained why the front door did not function as the front door, but more as decorative facade to be seen from the road far below, down the hill. She explained that post World War II a doctor had moved this little wartime bungalow to the top of the hill. An ostentatious move for an 800 square foot home. While the idea of my home as a roaming nomad excited me, her claim to a childhood in this home unnerved me. My home was her home. This was too intimate a claim for a youngster to manage. It seemed unnatural, or more accurately, sinful. While many of us grow out of this attachment to place in this way, we learn to live in more transient scenarios (rental properties and sublets), we can't deny this urge, this feeling. The desire to be the only one. It is with this understanding, maybe more empathy than sympathy, that maybe we can understand the romanticism of the New Town.