The automaker's urban planning concept debuts at the 2022 World Cities Summit, but how realistic is it?
- Hyundai Motor Group reveals HMG Smart City Vision, previewing a hexagonal urban concept with a large park in the center.
- The city concept features a function-centered underground layer, and human-centered surface layer.
- Hyundai envisions cities of the future to be powered by hydrogen, distributed through grid pipelines to buildings.
Automakers don’t enter the field of urban planning very often, but when they do the results are either very incremental, or wildly utopian. Just think of all the midcentury GM Motorama concepts, which, to be fair, previewed things like autonomous driving.
Hyundai’s effort perhaps looks as far into the future as some Motorama city concepts did, imagining a new type of hexagonal city structure that promises sustainable and smart mobility, while also helping revitalize urban communities.
Dubbed HMG Smart City Vision, the concept is being presented this week at the 2022 World Cities Summit.
The hexagonal shaped city features a function-centered underground layer, and human-centered surface layer that it grouped into three sections by population density. Closer to forests and parks in the city center, population density decreases, allowing residents an unobstructed view of wooded areas. The high density areas, meanwhile, feature city landmarks and tall buildings, while the medium density areas feature security infrastructure. Most of the roads run underground—quite similar in this respect to Elon Musk’s Boring Co. tunnels—while deliveries of parcels and other cargo are handled autonomously, traveling between automated logistics hubs.
In effect, the city is a giant ring spanning tens of miles, albeit with a hexagonal shape, and features a giant park inside it.
“In the future smart cities, our ambition is for humankind to live with nature while embracing technology. Our air and ground mobility solutions will redefine urban boundaries, connect people in meaningful ways, and revitalize cities,” said Youngcho Chi, Hyundai Motor Group president and chief innovation officer. “We will continue to work with governments around the globe to bring our smart city vision to reality, while rapidly advancing capabilities in future mobility solutions.”
A honeycomb-style design envisions large parks in city centers, with a denser ring of office and living infrastructure around them.
Hyundai
One possible issue with this design, of course, is that traffic from one side of the ring to another, won’t be easily accomplished over land. But that’s what the advanced air mobility (AAM) part of the concept will address, according to Hyundai, with aerial vehicles able to travel between towers, which will feature mixed office and residential areas. This aspect is similar to the various VTOL startups that had launched in the middle of the past decade, including Hyundai itself, which presented an Osprey-like VTOL aircraft at CES 2019.
But the relatively narrow section of tall buildings, bounded by park land, may yet present other issues that a number of cities, such as New York, have been experiencing when it comes to commuting. Large geographical features that could present boundaries to surface or subsurface traffic, as they do in a number of cities on islands or that feature large harbors, have not been solved elsewhere. Narrow cities that run along coastlines also have their own problems with traffic, which tends to be forced into a funnel, making travel from one end to another difficult.
Given that Hyundai has been a supporter of hydrogen fuel-cell technology, its solution to powering a city of this type is perhaps unsurprising, though it doesn’t address the economics of hydrogen generation in detail.
“To ensure carbon neutrality, the city’s primary power source will be hydrogen, distributed through the smart grid pipelines to power buildings through hydrogen fuel-cell generators,” Hyundai adds.
Of course, fuel-cell generators require energy to produce the hydrogen in the first place, before it can be transported and converted to electricity, which is something that hasn’t been done on a large scale for powering office buildings.
Overall, Hyundai’s Smart City bears some similarities to other recent city concepts, including Saudi Arabia’s narrow, 170-kilometer-long city concept that has attracted plenty of attention due to myriad construction difficulties and cost, while drawing comparisons to Kowloon Walled City.
Keyword: Here’s How Hyundai Would Design a Future City