South Korea has achieved a new milestone in its efforts to spearhead a smart city initiative as the global smart city market is expected to reach above 2,000 trillion won ($1.66 trillion) by 2025.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and Korea Land & Housing Corp. (LH) said Tuesday that they broke ground to build a pilot smart city in Sejong, the nation’s administrative city, on an area of 2,743,000 square meters.

The smart city to be up and running by April 2023 will consist of three zones (startup zone, business zone and smart living zone) to provide innovative mobility, education, energy, governance, job and culture and shopping services to residents.

The government gives more focus on mobility service. Residents will use only self-driving or ride-sharing cars powered by electricity or hydrogen at the startup zone. Such cars will be provided with transportation big data based on 5G-based real time traffic monitoring, and green vehicles, drones and robots will be used for delivery service.

Through the project, the government aims to apply cutting-edge technologies to a real city to improve people’s quality of life. Lifestyle and behavior patterns of the smart city residents will be collected as big data for companies to develop new services and products.

The global market for smart cities is expected to grow exponentially. Global market research firm MarketsandMarkets (M&M) estimated the market will grow 18.4 percent on average per year to $617.2 billion by 2023. Another market tracker Frost & Sullivan projected the global smart city market would grow to $2.5 trillion by 2025 and consultancy McKinsey & Company predicted the market to reach $1.7 trillion by 2025.

By Sohn Dong-woo and Choi Mira

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