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New Songdo City
Songdo International Business District
Featured Project
Planned by KPF atop reclaimed land, abundant green space and robust infrastructure define this internationally oriented Korean city sited between Seoul and its primary airport.
Between Seoul and the World
New Songdo City rose from a true tabula rasa. Critically positioned between Seoul and its main airport, Incheon International, the district is sited on nearly 1,500 acres of reclaimed waterfront. The entire development was designed to leverage its proximity to a major metropolitan center and robust transit infrastructure while creating a desirable, green, tech-forward, mixed-use urban space for the Korean capital’s growing population.
Songdo’s emergence is closely tied to broader economic growth in Asia, particularly the liberalization of trade and the rise of intra-Asian commerce. The city’s status as a Free Economic Zone is a strategic response to Korea’s shifting economic landscape, marked by the decline of traditional manufacturing and the ascent of research, technology, and finance. Fittingly, Songdo’s planning process involved a diverse international consortium and was shaped by a deliberate synthesis of global urban models and local traditions.
Crafting the City of Tomorrow
The city’s urban fabric is characterized by planned heterogeneity, with varied building typologies, street scales, and open spaces designed to foster vitality, adaptability, and a distinctive identity. The integration of indigenous landscape features and cultural patterns ensures that, despite its international orientation, Songdo remains rooted in its Korean context.
The reclaimed land is punctuated by canals that serve as features of the central park and various residential areas, connecting the new development to its coastal location.
A high-density commercial strip with the tallest towers creates a central spine. Commercial towers descend in height, falling away from the spine into lower density office space.
Open, green space is woven throughout, anchoring the heart of the development with the central park and weaving through residential streets.
Retail is strung through both commercial and residential neighborhoods, creating a lively, 24/7 atmosphere while making Incheon a convenient 15-minute city.
A key feature of Songdo’s urbanism is its emphasis on pedestrian-friendly environments and mixed-use neighborhoods, which are structured to encourage walking, social interaction, and efficient public transport. Innovative infrastructural elements, such as seawater canals and a comprehensive network of streets, bike lanes, and public transit, reinforce the city’s commitment to sustainability and connectivity.
The city’s spatial organization employs a “tent” model of graduated density, with the highest concentrations of activity and tallest buildings clustered around a central park, tapering to quieter residential areas at the periphery.
Creating the Anchors
In the case of Songdo, flexibility, project phasing, and connections to neighboring urban hubs and airports were key to success, but so too was the fluency between two-dimensional planning and three-dimensional architectural execution, the incorporation of abundant green space, and a quality mix of programming that created a heart for the new city. KPF had the unique responsibility of acting as both urban planner for the entire city and as architect for several of its key projects.
Songdo First World Towers
The principal architectural challenge for the first residential development at Songdo was to challenge the perception of the superblock typology as a single housing estate and instead conceive of it as an assemblage of distinct communities, utilizing varying building heights in a nonlinear progression.
ConvensiA Convention Center
A fitting landmark for Korea’s international business hub, the Songdo ConvensiA Convention Center houses one of the largest column-free spans in Asia and is among the most technologically innovative structures of its kind.
Chadwick International School
KPF’s design for The Chadwick International School pioneers a model learning environment for the future and creates a fittingly aspirational educational facility for Songdo.
Songdo Central Park
KPF led the design of the 100-acre Central Park, where mounds and canals reflect the surrounding natural context. Songdo Central Park serves to connect to various civic and cultural destinations and the waterfront via a series of manmade seawater canals accessed by water taxi. The combination of these natural and manmade elements makes this park the cultural and recreational heart of Songdo.
Posco Tower
A landmark on the skyline of Songdo IBD, the Northeast Asia Trade Tower symbolizes and embodies the tenets of an international business hub in a free-trade zone.
Songdo Xi Harbor View
Overlooking Central Park, the North Residential Neighborhood signifies a shift in the superblock housing design typical to new developments in Korea. Scaled down four to six times smaller than the archetypal block, the neighborhood offers a wide variety of housing types.
Songdo Canal Walk
The kilometer-long Songdo Canal Walk is a dynamically textured mixed-use destination that stitches together the business and residential neighborhoods of Songdo.
Project Details
New Songdo City, with walkable streets, 40% green space, an urban density that promotes an active street life, and 70% fewer emissions than developments its size, represents a new paradigm for urban planning in Korea.
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