Ubiquitous urban infrastructure: infrastructure planning and development in Korea.

The Korean government has played a significant role in developing various policies for the formation of U-infrastructure projects and encouraged the development of U-infrastructures in major cities via strong institutional and budgetary support. Several cities are currently actively planning their U-infrastructure. In Korea, 13 local governments have shown interest in developing U-infrastructures to become a U-city (Figure 2). These cities include Seoul and Inchon which have plans to introduce an intelligent transportation system, home networking, telemedicine, natural disaster prevention and monitoring by providing a ubiquitous environment around the port area, convention and exhibition centres, and integrated transportation services. Another Korean city, Daejeon, also aims to build the fastest network infrastructures and digital walls for broadcasting commercial advertisements in public squares in the form of digital streets (Seoul Development Institute 2003). When the infrastructure is completed residents in Daejeon city will also receive an electronic identifier to allow them to access various ubiquitous services. Jeju city is also active and now focusing on tourism development by using U-services, including U-traffic, U-museum, U-park and U-coupon services. U-traffic based on RFID technologies allows residents and visitors to access traffic information anytime and anywhere. U-museum will be built at the Jeju Stones and Culture Park in Northern Jeju (Lee et al. 2008a). The ubiquitous technologies used in this museum will include a system which electronically collects admission fees and wireless guidance devices as well as an effective management system for the administrative agency.

Many other towns, cities and regions across Korea now are planning to use ubiquitous computing as a standard planning tool in development strategies. These are often accompanied by the Ucity projects, which aim at creating a sustainable city based on U-infrastructure (Lee et al. 2008a). An example of this is the new Unjeong city that has been planned based on a public and private partnership. Most recently, Korean government and Korean Telecom are jointly investing over 90 million US dollars to finance such projects and build U-infrastructure using the latest ubiquitous techniques such as WLAN, WiBro, WCDMA, FTTH and BcN by the end of 2009 across the country. As one of the receivers of this funding, Unjeong city, develops several key objectives, which are quite different from those in the existing planning strategies of other Korean cities (Lee et al. 2008a). These objectives include extending ICT infrastructure to the neighbouring towns and cities to create a snowball effect of the expansion of the U-infrastructures and creating a knowledge spill-over effect by sharing ICT infrastructure. As such objectives are technologically specific to the particular urban infrastructure provision, different ICTs have a specific role in minimising chronic urban problems of the mega metropolitan cities (i.e. Seoul), such as traffic congestion, energy shortage, waste management, pollution and impacts of climate change. The Korean government heavily stresses not only sustainable development but also on new ICT development to become a partial panacea to some of the urban problems (e.g. pollution, congestion).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Recent improvements in U-infrastructure technologies encourages city planners to use web applications, which provide a good opportunity to communicate with the public from a distance, to see timely results according to instant input, and to get as many people involved as possible involved in decision making. An example for that would be having an online collaborative decision-making platform for the community to participate in the urban and/or transport planning processes. Additionally, conventional urban infrastructure planning spends a lot of time and resources when trialling a new policy, U-infrastructure planning makes simulating and trialling much more easy and relatively affordable.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Ubiquitous urban infrastructure brings information and communication technologies into the real world to improve the quality of city living and achieve sustainable urban development. To support ubiquitous infrastructure development, the Korean government recently announced the largest ubiquitous technology development project in the world as one of the National Priority Agendas, and assigned considerable public funding for that project, which has the potential to revolutionise the ways in which cities are managed and their urban service and amenities are developed and delivered. On the one hand, ubiquitous infrastructures are going to become the lynchpin of sustainable urban development in the coming years; on the other, these human- and environmentally-friendly technologies can empower the public to actively participate in the decision making process by accessing information and services anytime and anywhere. Arguably ubiquitous computing technologies could be harmful if misused (e.g. loss of confidentiality and privacy breach of personal tracking and security systems) so access limitations and protection walls are among the important security measures of the ubiquitous infrastructure system capacity. They may turn out to be the as yet invisible golden geese of the system.

Ubiquitous urban infrastructure equips planners and developers with much flexible design and development options by providing mobile and built infrastructure to the public as the urban system is now becoming more dynamic and programmable (i.e. ubiquitous digital street). These programmable spaces in ubiquitous infrastructure provide experimental urban planning opportunities. Planners are also better equipped to encourage public participation in planning decisions in the use of programmable public spaces fuelled by the fast data acquisition, monitoring and experimental computer simulations (Lee 2004). Additionally, the integrated ubiquitous infrastructure network management centre plays a core role in collecting, inter-correlating, analysing and distributing real-time city information.

In a successful ubiquitous infrastructure, innovative changes in urban form and land use patterns are achieved through the planning and development of built ubiquitous computing environment. Ubiquitous infrastructure technologies create programmable spaces which are built as flexible and modular spaces that can be changed into other uses when needed. For example, walls of a building can be converted into digital advertising walls or digital picture walls. Finally, programmable land use planning can make lands and buildings more effectively satisfy user demands by bringing new uses for a land use and programmable space can decrease the trip distance, and energy and land consumption, and the spread of this practice helps in sustainable development of urban regions. Ubiquitous infrastructure can provide information on urban utilities and real-time monitoring of the environment while this real-time planning and management in turn can contribute to conservation of urban natural resources, urban growth management and sustainable urban development (Yigitcanlar et al. 2007; 2008c). In the past, mixed land uses or vertical villages could not reduce the transport demand as this type of development also attracted travels from other areas. However, combined with Ubiquitous Infrastructure, now it is much easier to manage everyday life of residents without extra trip generation.

Internationally Korea is showcasing and taking a lead role in building ubiquitous urban infrastructures as leverage tools for national and local economies and creating future urban growth engines for their residents (Yigitcanlar et al. 2008b). The Korea-led ubiquitous urban infrastructure concept, planning and design schemes and management policies are brand new and somewhat controversial in conventional urban and infrastructure planning circles but are increasingly influential. The wave of ubiquitous infrastructures has already hit some Asian countries (i.e. Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong) and some North American and European countries are observing the developments closely (Talley 2000). The successful implementation of ubiquitous infrastructure systems in Korea and the development of ubiquitous cities will provide best practice cases for the other cities around the world. However, as the Korean examples reveal, moving towards a ubiquitous city is costly and requires much time and considerable public educational and skill development. Therefore, rather than solely observing its development in Korea and Japan it might be wiser for other interested countries and cities to start developing their own initiatives in intelligent infrastructure systems provision while researching on how to best benefit from these technologies to provide improved quality of life and sustainable urban development and a bright future for their public.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Jane Marceau (Guest Editor) for her helpful, constructive and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. This research (08U-Eco A03-1) was conducted by the U-Eco City Centre research team, and supported by the Korean Government Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs Grant Scheme.

References

Bessho M, Kobayashi, S Koshizuka N and Sakamura N (2008) A space-identifying ubiquitous infrastructure and its application for tour-guiding service, Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on applied computing, Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, pp. 1616-1621.

Cohen G (2004) Modelling ICT Perceptions and Views of Urban Front-liners, Urban Studies 41(13): 2647-2667.

Cohen G and Nijkamp P (2002) Information and communication technology policy in European cities: a comparative approach Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 29(1): 729-755.

Print Get the Mag Weekly Updates