Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) presented its smart city vision at this week’s World Cities Summit in Singapore.

The model represents the South Korean car maker’s vision for smart cities and illustrates how it will empower them with sustainable and smart mobility. Hyundai hopes the model will serve as a guideline for developing smart mobility that supports smart cities around the world while revitalising their urban communities.

During the development of the model, the group also affirmed its smart city philosophies, which are human-centred, coexist with nature, and embrace the future.

“The HMG Smart City master model is our vision for a human-centred city that will revitalise urban communities,” said Youngcho Chi, Hyundai’s chief innovation officer. “In the future smart cities, our ambition is for humankind to live with nature while embracing technology. Our air and ground mobility will redefine urban boundaries, connect people in meaningful ways, and revitalise cities. 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.”

The concept, inspired by a honeycomb pattern, is a hexagonal-shaped city with a human-centred surface layer, and function-centred underground layer. On the surface layer, the buildings encircle nature, in the form of parks and forest, which sit at the centre of the city, effectively reducing the gross area developed by humankind.

The buildings are divided into three sections by population density – high, medium and low. The density decreases nearer the parks and forests in the city centre, affording people an unobstructed view of nature from any part of the city. Buildings are arranged within these sections according to their purposes. For instance, city landmarks will be in the high-density area, while security infrastructure will be in the medium density area, enabling effortless access to any section.

The city will be connected through road infrastructure in the underground layer. All goods and services will be transported underground via autonomous mobility to each region’s automated logistics hub, where autonomous robots will make the final delivery.

Citizens will travel between cities by the advanced air mobility (AAM). The AAM vehicles will land and take off from a series of the Hub 2.0 towers, which combine residential and office areas with AAM ports at the top of the building.

The concept also envisions a sustainable green city where large natural areas are preserved. The city centre will feature recreational forests, parks and a reservoir to provide water for the city. 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 has introduced electric vehicles such as the Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 while announcing plans to produce purpose-built vehicles and robotaxis in the future. Motional, the group’s joint venture for autonomous driving technology, is developing robotaxis, which will be commercialised next year.

The group’s AAM subsidiary, Supernal, recently revealed the cabin concept of the eVTOL vehicle, under development with an aim of commercialisation in 2028.

The group is also working with governments around the world to make cities smarter. It signed an MoU with Singapore’s government agency JTC on a transport modelling project that aims to enhance logistics efficiency using autonomous driving, EVs, AI and big data.