KimChang Practice!!, tourmap: SONGDO, 2010

As a collaborative project with the publishing section of “the invisible”, tourmap: SONGDO is built upon a field study of construction sites in New Songdo City to investigate the basis of ‘new city’ formation, the historical context of old and new downtowns and the flux of urban culture.
tourmap: SONGDO focused on the similarities between the development-oriented and purpose-driven mottos of New Songdo City and the modern power that returns to vanishing point. In New Songdo City, on top of an immense magnitude of administrative control, there are aspirations of the petit bourgeois overwhelmed by economic logic.
Concepts such as desire, power and capital were either understood symbolically, or in relation to complex ideologies. And yet, in New Songdo City all these abstract words seem to materialize in real life as a gigantic civil engineering project. Things that did not and could not reveal themselves formed a gigantic urban landscape.
tourmap: SONGDO is a tour map that guides visitors around the construction sites in New Songdo City, regarding them as one of the characteristic features that vigorously reveal the ‘here and now’ of the city. The landscape, which is full of iron structures of buildings and huge cranes, construction screens, and geotechnical construction, creates a skyline distinctively different from that of a metropolitan city, or anywhere else in the suburbs of new cities in Korea. The skyline changes according to the position of the observer, a virtual line that derives from the difference in perspectives. Likewise, the diversity of skylines corresponds to the diverse positions of the observer. tourmap: SONGDO leads the way to ‘the place’ where the New Songdo City skyline can be identified.
This ‘place,’ however, is a ‘spot’ where the observer is forced to stand, much like the vanishing point mentioned earlier. Indeed, to see New Songdo City in just the same way as in the promotional New Songdo City blueprint, the viewer has to be at the exact spot where the photographer took the picture for the blueprint. To verify all 12 skylines presented in tourmap: Songdo, visitors to New Songdo City need to look all over the construction sites. As a guide map of this itinerary, tourmap: SONGDO is a sort of a game, road signs that suggest one possible way to experience the city.