Free Zone

Incheon is an International Free Economic Trade Zone. Free Zones seem to be rather opportunistic jurisdictions which lighten bureaucracy in an effort to instigate the flow of goods and services within a region/country. Their purpose is based in generating foreign capital. Naturally, both legislatively and economically the free zones function as bubbles inside of their supporting locale--with stronger ties to other free zones in adjacent countries than to their native soil. The local infrastructure, including its working class, nurture the free zone by providing resources and labor to meet the needs of the new business and tourism industry. This room-and-board, so to speak, is provided in good faith under the notion that foreign capital will compensate for these generosities in the form of enhanced infrastructures and economic opportunity amongst individuals. According to Stephen Graham, author of Splintering Urbanisms (2001), however, these jurisdictions' further distance themselves from their surrounding regions after the capital begins to flow--investing much of the dividends into the infrastructure of the free zone itself and offering very little to areas just outside itself. This creates what Graham calls polycentric urbanisms, or those with strong urban centers surrounded by failing areas. Both systems--the stronger, more global systems and the weaker, local systems--form intra-connections within themselves; linking agencies with like conditions and needs as opposed to inter-connections which would pair a strong with a weak.

The result is a dually continuous system made up of two systems functioning physically within the same space while remaining largely isolated from each other.

Interestingly the Incheon Tower brief envisions a facility that can advertise Incheon as the Best International Free Economic Trade Zone, and thus promote this new city to a leading capitol within both South Korea and the South/SouthEast Asia global region while also providing the local population with a community feature to which they may return daily. The tower becomes the point where two systems meet--how it is developed will determine the way in which the two system interact with each other, both in form and behavior.