Songdo in South Korea is built on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. The Bill Gates Foundation plans to build Belmont City from the ground up on a site in the Arizona desert.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will become home to Neom, which includes The Line, a 170km long, 500m high and 200m wide car-free zone, as well as the Oxagon floating complex, an advanced industrial hub powered by renewable energy sources.
The effort focuses on the use of technology, with the aim of setting new standards for urban real estate, while introducing the concept of a more sustainable city life.
But new cities are not the only ones affected by technological progress. Across Europe, areas such as La Défense in Paris are undertaking ambitious redefinition master plans, more friendly to residents and less harmful to the environment.
When approaching new large-scale projects, integrated data are essential to clarify profitability, both for development agencies and local communities, but also to determine environmental requirements.
In this process, smart building technologies are consistently playing an important role in understanding how ambitious plans can be realized.
For example 3D scans of existing buildings are used to create detailed models of 'digital twins' – an extremely useful process for predicting how new construction will fit into the existing environment.
They also help in timely monitoring of construction progress and emerging issues in real-time while improving facility safety.
Source: JLL
