Something Korea's national government appears to be in the process of doing is trying to break apart the centralization on Seoul and spread economic activity more evenly around the country. For example: South Korea is in the process of establishing a new planned capital like Washington D.C. or Canberra. The move has been compared to the U.S. capital moving from New York City and Philadelphia to D.C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City

There's all kinds of secondary reasons for this. Seoul has an astonishingly high population density for a developed country and controls such a vast percentage of the economy that municipal decisions basically act as national policy. Satellite cities all basically follow whatever Seoul is doing and other than Pusan, there's strikingly little major cultural of social development. The rest of Korea is basically farms, minor industrial centers and museums/monuments.

Other smaller issues are things like the problems with depopulation of the rural areas: for example, farmers regularly import wives from nearby countries, leading to a spate of new laws regulating this practice.

So development efforts like Songdo and Sejong are basically intended to spread the population centers around a bit, attract foreign investment and continue the momentum South Korea currently enjoys in becoming a regional and global player.

With Songdo in particular, the attraction is specific, it's the virtual geographic center of the North East Asian regional economy:

Shenzhen, Taipei and Tokyo are all around 3 hour flights to Songdo. This makes business meetings in or from Songdo a (long but doable) single day affair, while doing the same in Seoul adds enough hours* that it turns them into 2 day events.

A trip from Incheon International to central Seoul is easily a 2 hour one-way trip in traffic. Doing the math, 6 hours in the air, 4-5 hours driving, 4 hours in security and waiting to take off (2 hours each way) and you're looking at a very long day.

So why not just do this in Incheon? Incheon is like Seoul, a densely packed, established city mostly existing as a port city for handling imports and exports of goods. It's not the greatest place to do business deals in a nice setting. It's hard to clear out enough space to make work and btw, the road to Incheon passes through Songdo. This arrangement basically makes Songdo the nice showroom for Korea for doing business while the ugly warehouse in back is reserved for the chaos of execution.

Cost to live in Songdo isn't bad. In fact, most of Korea outside of Seoul is fairly reasonable.

http://www.realestatesongdo.com/

For example, A 145m^2 (about 1500 sq ft) 3 bedroom apartment is running about 550million Won or about half a million U.S. Dollars. A similar sized apartment rents there for ~$2400/mo.

By comparison, a similar sized apartment in Namdaemun (an area in Seoul) runs around $1.2million.

Why aren't people moving there? Probably because it's inconvenient. People get really invested in the places they live, and the Seoul metropolitan area is huge. There's nicer places to live for a similar cost in the Seoul Capital Area that are better established and offer more benefits for the average non-international jet-setter.

More importantly, Songdo is part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone, which offers various tax incentives to qualifying residents and businesses, incentives which the average person wouldn't be able to take advantage of. The article focuses too much on Koreans living there. Songdo is really intended as a place for foreigners doing business in South Korea to comfortably live and for South Koreans engaged in International Business to interface with them, a kind of Korean Dubai. For example, highlights are a Golf Course (expensive as sin for Koreans), an International School district and an Opera House.

More reading here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Free_Economic_Zone

this one in particular is basically a brochure outlining most of what I've provided above and providing a few other interesting points, particularly about the benefits of the Free Economic Zone that Songdo is within.

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity...