The South Saad Al Abdullah New City, a planned city to be jointly built by South Korea and Kuwait in the Middle Eastern country, would be the first smart city to be developed in a foreign country by technology of Korea that is pursuing smart city development as one of the nation’s nine future growth engines.

According to an unnamed official at Seoul’s Land & Housing Corporation (LH) on Friday, LH last week hired a company to set up a master plan for the smart city, about 30 kilometers west of the center of Kuwait, at about 34 billion won ($30.8 million).

A smart city refers to a highly efficient and eco-friendly city equipped with a seamless infrastructure involving road, power, water, environment and security systems based on information technology (IT) and automation.

On Wednesday, the South Korean government selected smart city as one of its nine national strategic projects and decided to inject a total of 330 billion won in public and private funds by 2021.

The smart city in Kuwait to be built by the country’s IT technology will offer homes for 40,000 households and various industrial and commercial facilities. The Middle Eastern country plans to build the city where about 400,000 people can reside.

Generally, the master plan cost for an overseas construction project does not exceed 10 billion won. But because the new smart city, which is estimated to cost about $4 billion to develop, requires cutting-edge IT and automation technologies and designing to build, LH spent more than the industry’s average on the master plan for the city.

LH’s terms of reference (TOR) and request for proposal (RFP) also requires the participation of an IT company in the consortium and in-depth research of a smart city and plans for the new city.

In May, Korea and Kuwait signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate on the development of the South Saad Al Abdullah New City along with LH and the Public Authority for Housing Welfare of Kuwait.

By Moon Ji-woong

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