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Though promoted as a smart city and global financial hub, the Songdo Free Economic Zone in South Korea has instead materialised as a speculative enclave—underpopulated, infrastructurally fragmented, and socially exclusionary. Drawing on critical urban theory, landscape studies, and spatial political economy, this paper argues that Songdo’s built form reflects the strategic realisation of elite objectives. Through spatial and discourse analysis, it demonstrates how global city rhetoric was mobilised to legitimise industrial policy, land speculation, and class reproduction. By treating landscape as both infrastructure and ideological medium, the study contributes to ongoing debates on urban transformation, spatial inequality, and the political logics of 21st-century city-making.
Kim et al. (Fri,) studied this question.