Why Eco Delta City Doesn’t Feel Like a City—Yet

Busan, South Korea — This September, a pair of limited-route buses will begin serving Eco Delta City, a newly built urban development on the western edge of Busan. Promoted as the first case in a national initiative to support transit in new towns, the plan is being welcomed by city officials as a timely solution to the area’s transportation woes.

But for residents already living in the neighbourhood, where apartment blocks have risen faster than crosswalks and morning commutes regularly stretch beyond an hour, the arrival of a few buses feels more like a symbolic gesture than a practical fix.

Eco Delta City, billed as a “smart city” and a model for sustainable, walkable living, is struggling with the most basic metric of livability: mobility. While technology-driven infrastructure like sensor-equipped crosswalks is being installed, the area remains physically and socially disconnected from the rest of Busan. And the residents who now call it home are asking a simple question: Is this really a city, or just housing with a name?

The Smart City Illusion

In Eco Delta City, the word "smart" is everywhere—in branding, in official speeches, even on the crosswalk poles that flash when pedestrians approach. But for those who live here, the real question isn’t whether the city is smart. It’s whether it works.

Traveling to the rest of Busan from Eco Delta still feels like leaving the city rather than moving within it. Residents describe the experience as living in an outpost—surrounded by nature, clean air, and new buildings, but disconnected. Reaching work, school, or appointments in more established parts of Busan often requires lengthy commutes and multiple transfers, if not a car.

While officials point to upcoming limited-license bus routes set to launch in the fall—adding six buses across two new lines—coverage and frequency remain limited. No direct subway connection exists, and the area still lacks a robust transit backbone. For now, owning a car isn’t just common; it’s close to essential.

For all its talk of sustainability and future-forward urbanism, Eco Delta leans heavily on private vehicles. Streets are wide, parking is prioritized, and despite the installation of smart pedestrian crossings, the overall experience of navigating the city on foot remains fragmented.

Residents aren't asking for more technology. They're asking for connectedness—the kind that allows a child to walk to school safely, or a worker to reach their job without spending hours in traffic. Until then, the promise of a smart, 15-minute city remains, at best, a distant goal.

Eco Delta City was never supposed to be just another residential complex. As part of a national push for smart, sustainable urban design, it was envisioned as a self-contained, livable city—where homes, jobs, schools, and green spaces would be integrated from the start. But today, what exists on the ground tells a different story.

The apartment towers are here. The people are moving in. But the city around them is still under construction—physically and socially. Many residents have moved into brand-new homes, only to discover that essential services like transit, retail, education, and health care remain limited or underdeveloped. As a result, daily life feels provisional, improvised.

This is not a new pattern. Across South Korea, large-scale residential developments often follow a familiar sequence: land is cleared, apartment blocks are built and sold, and the rest—the public services, the commercial fabric, the cultural life—comes later, if at all. Urban planning becomes reactive rather than integrated.

In Eco Delta, the consequences of this approach are magnified by its relative remoteness. Without immediate connections to the broader city, residents must rely on personal vehicles or long commutes to access jobs and services. This undermines the very principles of the “15-minute city” that the project claims to support: that essential needs should be reachable within a short walk or transit ride.

Moreover, the project’s heavy reliance on private developers has meant that once housing units are sold, long-term community-building often falls through the cracks. Schools may be promised but delayed. Small businesses are slow to arrive without a critical mass of foot traffic. And public transport becomes a patchwork effort to catch up to what was already built.

For a development built in the name of innovation, Eco Delta reveals an old problem: a city designed on paper, but not yet in practice.

To walk through Eco Delta City is to be reminded, constantly, that this is supposed to be the future. Crosswalks flash LED alerts when pedestrians approach. Environmental sensors line intersections. The term “smart city” appears in official signage, promotional brochures, and media coverage. But beyond the visual signals of innovation, residents are still waiting for the basics to catch up.

For many, the experience of living in Eco Delta feels less like a technological leap forward and more like a city half-finished. The smart features may make headlines, but they don’t shorten the walk to the bus stop, ease the long ride to the city center, or guarantee a nearby grocery store. The cutting-edge infrastructure remains surface-level while the social and logistical foundation—the true backbone of urban life—lags behind.

This disconnect isn’t unique to Busan. Around the world, smart city projects have drawn criticism for prioritizing technology implementation over community needs. In Eco Delta, the same critique applies: sensors and apps are only meaningful if they serve people navigating real distances, real delays, and real limitations.

The smart crosswalks, for example, are a well-intentioned safety measure—especially near schools and construction zones. But they coexist with incomplete sidewalks, long block lengths, and low walkability between neighborhoods. For a district designed to reduce car dependency, Eco Delta paradoxically encourages it.

Residents are not rejecting the idea of innovation. They’re simply questioning its priorities. They ask: Why invest in digital infrastructure before securing functional transport networks? Why roll out tech pilots in a place where daily life still requires long commutes and workarounds?

What emerges is a portrait of a city where the “smart” label has arrived ahead of the city itself—a branding exercise more than a lived condition. And unless the basic urban framework catches up, the technology risks becoming decorative: light shows in a place where the fundamentals remain dim.

Urban Policy in Theory, Planning in Practice

Eco Delta City has been held up as a flagship for Korea’s “15-minute city” vision—an idea rooted in the belief that daily essentials like work, school, groceries, and recreation should be reachable within a 15-minute walk or ride. It’s a promising framework, one that emphasizes proximity, livability, and sustainability. But its application in places like Eco Delta raises difficult questions about what it means when policy ideas are adopted without the infrastructure to support them.

The 15-minute city is a compelling narrative tool, often invoked in political speeches and urban planning documents. Yet in Eco Delta, it has become more of a rhetorical device than a functional reality. With few nearby jobs, limited shopping or healthcare facilities, and a lack of integrated transport, the 15-minute ideal feels distant. Most residents still rely on cars to access what their neighborhood doesn’t yet provide.

This isn’t a matter of ambition, but of sequencing. When urban districts are built around housing supply before the other parts of city life are in place, it creates a lag between vision and experience. The “city” becomes a future promise, not a present condition. Residents are effectively asked to wait for urban life to catch up with the buildings around them.

At the heart of this gap is the challenge of planning for people rather than parcels. Much of Korea’s new town development—including Eco Delta—is driven by housing targets and land-use efficiency. While these are important considerations, they often overshadow the social infrastructure needed to make places livable. The result is a model where community life, public transit, and local commerce are treated as secondary—when they are in fact the core of what makes cities work.

Policymakers have an opportunity to revisit how success is measured. Instead of focusing on how many units have been built or which technologies have been installed, the question should be: how well can people live here, now? That metric—not just the presence of buses or bandwidth—will determine whether Eco Delta City becomes a sustainable urban model, or just another dormitory town wrapped in futuristic language.

When Does a City Become a City?

Eco Delta City was imagined as a blueprint for the future—a smart, sustainable, people-centered district on the edge of Busan. But today, its residents navigate a more complicated reality: one shaped not by sensors or slogans, but by long commutes, unfinished connections, and the quiet dissonance of living somewhere that still feels incomplete.

The city has homes, but not yet the systems that connect them. It has crosswalks that flash and buses that are coming, but not enough reasons to stay within walking distance. It has ambition—but ambition out of step with infrastructure.

This is not just a story about one neighborhood in Busan. It’s about a broader model of urban development—one where housing is delivered ahead of urban life, where innovation is rolled out before access, and where planning often follows construction rather than guiding it. It’s a pattern repeated across Korea and in new cities around the world.

What Eco Delta reminds us is that a city is not a collection of buildings, or a label applied to new ground. A city is a pattern of daily movement, of interaction, of trust that one’s needs can be met close to home. And that kind of city doesn’t arrive when the ribbon is cut. It arrives when people stop needing to leave in order to live.