This chapter is concerned with how present Seoul is experienced. Cities are not experienced as wholes, unless from space, perhaps fleetingly from the air, more comprehensively from a map. Rather, they are experienced as disaggregated places, always already fragmented, bits, moments, feelings, memories. A city is a collage, a collection, an assemblage.1
Whereas chapters 2 and 3 have focused on the social construction of Seoul and on the ideologies that have permeated that process, the present chapter seeks to understand the uses made of the city and how it is to be read—how the observer is to make sense of what is seen. Reading is concerned with images (what is seen) and with what those images might be revealing or else masking (ideas, meanings, ideologies—that is, with making sense).
The chapter is in four very unequal parts. The ἀrst is a brief discussion of how images and ideas intersect in urban space. It will introduce notions of dialectical image, montage as a technique, and collage as a result of that technique. Part 2 will occupy a greater part of the chapter and will view Seoul as a multiplicity of fragmented places, each distinct visually, functionally, and in its activities—something of a collage, a patchwork. All cities, to some extent, can be seen as fragmented into differentiated neighborhoods, each with its unique complexity of history, buildings and places, vibrancy, activities, and pathologies; in Seoul this fragmentation is augmented by the city’s geography—the city is an aggregation of seemingly separate “towns,” in the interstices between multiple dominating mountains and mostly in the lowlands of streams winding their way through those ranges of mountains. 132It is a constantly disorienting city, made even more so by the metro subway lines that can take the traveler from one place where special mountains and landmark buildings are reassuringly visible, only then to deposit the traveler in another place—perhaps only two or three stations away—where there seem to be different mountains and the previous landmarks are hidden. Part 3 will therefore see the city as transits—as lines rather than places.
The city will therefore be walked through (also ridden through) as a collection of places and their experience—“grabs” from the spaces of an inconceivably vast city, randomly and without connecting narrative. While this might give an impression of how the city is seen and experienced and of how one might seek to make sense of its component spaces, there is still the question of what sort of city these elements assemble to form. Therefore part 4 of the chapter—also brief, like part 1—will move from the idea of collage to that of an assemblage. The idea of Seoul as assemblage will subsequently be taken further (in chapter 5) to ask a more demanding question: what sort of city is Seoul becoming?
Part 1
DIALECTICAL IMAGE, MONTAGE, COLLAGE
Urban space transmits messages—street signs, the name of a building, directions to other places. There is a second though more ambiguity-laden order of such communication, in the ways that buildings and places suggest their uses—this is a house, this an office block, school, park, apartment block, factory, highway, laneway. The ambiguity can arise from dissembling (this only looks like a holiday resort; it is actually a prison) or because uses have changed over time (old offices become loft housing, a house becomes an office or a clinic). Then there is a third communicative order: this may look like a house (it may be a house) but it was once the residence of a famous writer or the site of a gruesome murder; this entertainment zone hides a military encampment; these advertising boards screen informal or illegal enterprises behind them.
This third order of communication requires information other than that directly transmitted by the appearance of the building or place—the second order. That may come from a reading of its history, a plaque, or less directly from incongruous juxtapositions, a whispered story. Thus we come to that city of blank boxes encountered in the 133“impressions” of the preface that launched the present text and whose production was a topic of chapter 3 above. The blandness of Korean everyday space is ultimately misleading: while the erasures of history, the violent division of modern Korea, the compromises and accommodations of dictatorship, and the headlong rush of the “tiger economy” may all have underlain the production of the present city, the dilemmas and contradictions can be obscured in the blandness and the visual cacophony. At that third communicative order, there is thus some imperative to attempt a reading—to determine what might lie behind the phenomena of the present city.
The chapter accordingly turns from the grander spaces of the city (the palaces, gateways, axes of chapter 2, and the stories of their resurrection in chapter 3) to how one is to read the boxlike structures, the regimented order alternating with jumbled disorder of labyrinthine space, discordant images and signs, in the seemingly undistinguished, proliferating spaces of everyday Seoul. The method will be to present the city as a collage, a vast aggregation lacking the ordering of any author but where the aggregated components set up tensions, ambiguities, and contradiction that constantly call meanings into question.
“City as collage” could apply to most cities. Seoul presents as a patchwork of distinctive communities in rather unique ways, not least due to its topography, whereby its intervening mountains fragment it into seemingly separate towns, which are then reinforced by a high level of functional specialization (Oh Myung and Larson 2011, 1). Patterns of ethnic fragmentation are also unique: though South Korea is classiἀed as a nonimmigration society, Seoul has been described as “a global city with ethnic villages” (Kim Eun Mee and Kang 2007, 64).2
Dialectical images, dialectical juxtapositions
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) famously redeἀned the phenomenal world: “All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs” (quoted in Benjamin 1982, 313). In the never-completed Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), Walter Benjamin worked in the 1930s on ways of seeing—reading—the historical space of the streets and passages (arcades) of Paris in the nineteenth century.3 The method was to be a juxtaposition of “dialectical images” (“I have nothing to say, only to show”), a vast collection of visual images, aphorisms, textgrabs, and ideas from a seeming inἀnity of sources, assembled into an elaborate ἀling system of some thirty-six “Konvoluts,” or folders. This material, it seems, was eventually to be brought together as six provisional chapter divisions that would juxtapose a historical ἀgure with 134a historical phenomenon. So there were to be “Fourier or the Arcades” (the too-early, anticipatory images of modern architecture), “Daguerre or the Dioramas” (the too-early anticipations of photography, ἀlm, and television), “Grandville or the World Expositions” (the too-early precursors of the commodity’s slippage to pure image), “Louis-Philippe or the Interior” (the dust of the bourgeois era obscuring the traces of its own origins, even of revolution), “Baudelaire or the Streets of Paris” (the preἀgurement of the loss of meaning—the desert of modernity), and “Haussman or the Barricades” (the dialectical tension between obliterating the past and actualizing its potential) (Benjamin 1978; Buck-Morss 1991, 51–53; King 1996, 186). The juxtapositions would “deconstruct”—demolish the myths and delusions—of each taken-forgranted phenomenon of the Paris of that time (as of the 1930s Paris of Benjamin’s own time).
Benjamin’s approach is savagely political. Space will be viewed as multivoiced cacophony, layered images, a “complicated tissue of events,” to be deconstructed by the juxtapositions of images, both visual and textual, that are set up to refer to it. One might translate Benjamin’s method from Paris to Seoul—“Park Chung-hee and the Jungang-cheong” (the Japanese reembrace, the chaebol, and the tiger economy), “Kim Swoo Geun and the National Assembly” (unmasking the imagining of the future city), “Paik Nam June and Television” (anticipating the Korean Wave and the city’s modern translation to virtual reality, to be considered in chapter 5) … and perhaps others. More revealing, however, is to take the Benjamin method more directly to the scenes of the present city, to observe the too-frequently incoherent, perplexing juxtapositions and to ask: what contradictions in the society and culture itself might these contradictions in the city’s imagery bring to reflection? What memories might be stirred?
Any application of the Benjamin approach in the case of Seoul needs caution. Because memories in Korea are contested, thereby fragmenting its historiography (the theme of chapter 1), an image (memory) from the past that is set against an observation of the present may lead to multiple, opposed unmaskings. The screaming Christian proselytizer in the subway carriage may be purposively ignored, but, if reflected upon, remembered antecedents and lineage will likely rush back to older ideological confrontations (chapter 2). The glance at a colonial ediἀce will summon conflicted histories and their distortions in memory; reflection on the regimented rows of apartment towers will be set against the reality of surviving old Seoul, the memory of “what good times have been lost” or of “what bad times we have left behind.” Dialectical imagery is not predictable, but it does enrich the imagination and thereby the urge to creativity (chapter 5). 135
Benjamin’s method can be illustrated through his assertion of progress as fetish. If the city seems ancient, it is because of the rapidity of technological change—innovation, new commodities, new ways of producing and marketing them, new forms of consumption. A second reading reveals that all of these “changes” are but shifts on the surface of the unchanging fetishization of change itself—“hellish repetition” (Buck-Morss 1991, 108). It is the city as a phantasmagoria, a world where fashion is the “measure of time”—Seoul, indeed, in the present age presents as the epitome of highest fashion—for, as Susan Buck-Morss writes, “fashions are the medicament that is to compensate for the fateful effects of forgetting, on a collective scale” (Buck-Morss 1991, 97–98). A near century of compelled forgetting in the case of Korea—though deἀant memory always survives—leaves that only-ever-partial vacuum that can enable the fabulous outbursts of fashion that make for the new world of Korea—a story for the next chapter. “Monotony is nourished by the new,” says Benjamin, to which Buck-Morss adds, “Hellishly repetitive time—eternal waiting punctuated by a “discontinuous” sequence of “interruptions”—constitute the particularly modern form of boredom” (1991, 104). Seoul, it seems, is newness itself.
Benjamin would pose two images of the space of the city: its “organic, naturalistic” growth unmasked as delusion, on the one hand, and modernity and its progress unmasked as Hell, on the other. Both, it seems, present as images of Seoul; both also, suggests Buck-Morss, “criticize a mythical assumption as to the nature of history … that rapid change is historical progress; the other is the conclusion that the modern is no progress” (Buck-Morss 1991, 108). These two conceptions of time and history are complementary; they are inescapable oppositions whose critique, we are told, must be directed to yield the “dialectical conception of historical time.” Each image of the city, as “natural” history (evolution, the organically growing city) and as “mythic” history (the wonderful progress of the human race), is to erode the other. Only through space is time to be understood (King 1996, 192).
While this is only one part of the Benjamin critique, it is a useful one for present purposes. For Seoul, “natural” history is ambiguous—“nature” (ecological evolution) is still there, intact though possibly ignored; the idea of the “natural,” organic evolution of the city and its life, however, is interrupted, destroyed, erased. “Mythic” history, by contrast, is intact and resplendent, progress is everywhere, fashion reigns; Benjamin’s “progress as Hell,” surely, could well be Seoul.
This, of course, is all grand scale and grand hyperbole. Ordinary lives go on in the ordinary spaces of an immense city. While Benjamin’s critique (and Buck-Morss’ critique of Benjamin) suggests a method 136for reading the spaces and signs of the city, how does this translate into a reading of the city of the everyday? The method of this chapter is to tour the spaces of the city, to observe the inconsistencies of a metropolis mostly of blank surfaces and undistinguished boxes, albeit then variously identiἀed by numbers (on otherwise identical housing towers) or festooned in advertising boards—dialectical images and dialectical juxtapositions.
Part 2
SEOUL AS COLLAGE
This traverse of the city begins with “old” Seoul, still its symbolic center, then a sample of its distinctive neighborhoods, on to Gangnam as a new form of city, then, in part 3, a subway transit through the city—another dimension of its experiencing—to diverse attempts to “jumpstart” an even newer, seemingly artiἀcial form of city. Places are selected for their political and ideological context or for their ability to throw light on the city’s production, its underlying ideas, and their afterlife. Touristic Seoul is avoided unless, like the palaces, its sites illuminate that afterlife of the Chosun/Japanese collision or, like Gangnam, they are central to understanding the modern city’s trajectory.4
Jongno: Front street, back street
The long, straight, east-west avenue of Jongno (Street of the Bell) is an appropriate place to begin a reading of Seoul space. It connects the north-south axis of Taepyeongno (Sejongno) to the ancient city’s eastern Dongdaemun Gate and, as observed in chapter 2, was the street of shops that served the royal court in the Chosun era; its commercial and cultural preeminence persisted into the colonial period and in part to the present (ἀgure 4.1). It also divided the town: north were the royal and aristocratic quarters in the Chosun age, south the plebeian; the order reversed in the Japanese era. At its intersection with Taepyeongno stands the Bigak Pavilion, built in 1902 to celebrate Emperor Gwangmu (erstwhile King Kojong), as well as the Bosingak Belfry, originally constructed in 1396 but destroyed and replaced many times. Its bell, which signiἀed the time of day and also warned of disaster, gave the street its name. Also on Jongno is Tapgol Park and the Jongmyo Royal Shrine (chapter 2). 137
FIGURE 4.1 Old Seoul in the present era: the ancient Chosun City, Namsan Mountain, Yongsan (and Itaewon), and the Hangang River. Source: author, based on 2014 maps.
138Tapgol (Pagoda) Park was once the site of Wongaksa Buddhist Temple, founded in 1465. It was laid out by Irish advisor John McLeavy Brown on the orders of King Kojong in 1897 as Seoul’s ἀrst “public” garden, for the enjoyment of the aristocracy.5 It was subsequently opened to a wider public in 1913, in the Japanese era. Tapgol Park was the starting point of the Samil, the March First Movement, 1919; here the Korean Proclamation of Independence was read.6 As an emblematic place in Korean history, it is a popular locale for demonstration and protest. It was the terminal point for the Grand Peace March for Democracy on 24 June 1986 that led to President Chun Doo-hwan caving in to the demand for free elections.
While Jongno’s economic centrality has in part been lost to other centers, most notably Yeouido and Teheranno (Gangnam), and in part to the general dispersal of economic activity across the greater metropolis, it still retains both economic and commercial signiἀcance and will commonly be referred to as Seoul’s “main street” (Korean Institute of Architects 2000, 73). Many of Korea’s largest bookshops are concentrated here; Dansungsa, the oldest cinema theater in Korea (established 1907), and a number of other important cinemas are on Jongno; office towers, shops, and restaurants line it; the ideosyncratic Jongno (Samsung) Tower, designed by Uruguayan but US-based architect Rafael Viñoly and completed in 1999, is symbolic of Jongno’s continuing economic role;7 it is on the site of the old, iconic Hwasin Department Store.8 At the more informal end of the economic spectrum and at its eastern geographic end, there is the vast Dongdaemun Market and garment district.
The most revealing aspect of Jongno’s spatial economy, and indeed of Seoul’s more widely, emerges from a short stroll from the wide and emblematic Jongno into its parallel back streets. Jongno is some eight to ten traffic lanes wide, then add to that the generous sidewalks on either side. The “thickness” of the wall of fashionable blocks fronting the avenue varies—around its intersection with Tonhwamunno, for example, it is seventeen meters thick on the north side and twenty-nine meters on the south. Then, behind this decidedly imposing corporate and formal façade are the narrow back streets: that on the north side is generally six meters wide, that on the south, varying from only three to six meters. The Jongno back streets—bars, eateries, entertainment, small shops, services—present an urban landscape and economy surviving from an earlier era, though still thriving, serving the towers and corporations of the “front” street in what will be claimed, following, is an emerging urban vernacular. Front street and back street are to be seen as diametrically opposed urban worlds, yet they are clearly interdependent both economically and culturally. 139
There is yet another Jongno space, in sharpest contrast with both front and back street. Seoul’s winter climate is very cold, and in some measure curtails street life; accordingly, much day-to-day commercial activity will go underground, to the subterranean shopping arcades that are mostly linked to various subway train stations. These range from the formal and organized arcades to groups of the more informal and opportunistic entrepreneurs selling assorted and often secondhand clothing, electronics, secondhand books, stationery, groceries, and assorted bric-a-brac. The Jongno underground arcade is especially extensive, regimented, and linked into the more corporate underground bookshops in the basements of larger buildings (ἀgure 4.2).
Ultimately Jongno is to be seen as old, tired, passed-by. Life—for it is still there, and vibrant—is mostly in the narrow back streets. This world of dichotomous urban realms—front street vis-à-vis back street and then underground arcade, chaebol-corporate vis-à-vis the very small entrepreneur, the formal vis-à-vis the informal—characterizes the space of Seoul.9 It is the point of the present chapter and, I argue, will dominate any reading of the space of Seoul; it is also the point expressed in the dichotomous urban realms represented in ἀgure 1.1 of chapter 1.
Back street, boxland, box space
Back streets, behind the office towers of most districts, occasionally hidden behind the marshaled ranks of residential towers, with their fragmented space of small, boxlike buildings ranging from two to four or ἀve stories, will be found in all but the newest and most antiseptic of districts. At the scale of everyday life, this boxland of Jongno, as elsewhere, increasingly becomes “box space” in modern Seoul. The “karaoke box,” of mostly Japanese derivation and common in Japan and Hong Kong, more often called KTV in Taiwan and China and videoke in the Philippines, is norae bang in Korea—literally, “song box.”10 However, in Korea these are alleged to have emerged more from the games parlors than from the karaoke bars, often initially as small booths in corners of video-games rooms.11 They ἀrst appeared in Busan (Pusan) at the beginning of 1990, as shops and technology came together to provide places where people could sing together accompanied by controllable music, up to the scale of a full orchestra. A typical establishment will have ten to twenty (or more) boxes as well as a main “karaoke bar” area in front; they might often sell refreshments, but many will not provide “beverages” and so are deemed suitable for families and children.
The norae bang went through a ἀrst crisis in 1992, and a second in 1994. Song Do-Young (1998, 100) writes, “Those crises were the result of not only cultural dynamics but also … of technological development, of market & industrial environments, of control and regulations, and … of differentiated daily life of residents.” The keys to their success, Song suggests, were new technology, the separation of singing from drinking, and cheap slot machines operable even by children. In 2012 they could still be reported as the general way to enjoy Korean popular music (K-pop).12 140
FIGURE 4.2 The complementary spaces of Jongno, 2012: (a) Jongno itself and the Samsung Tower (architect Rafael Viñoly), (b) back street, (c) underground arcade.
141There are other bang (boxes) in the modern Korean space: there are PC bangs (Internet cafés) as LAN gaming centers;13 DVD bangs or video bangs are establishments that have private rooms for couples and friends to watch movies—they began to appear in the 1980s, the motivation being mostly the seeking of privacy in a society in which Koreans lived at home until marriage and there was a social stigma surrounding public displays of affection. These rooms could often transform into something less subtle in terms of what might transpire there. There is also the soju bang, a pub,14 and manwhabang, where Koreans can go to read manwha, the Korean form of comics and print cartoons. The term manwha is a cognate of the Chinese manhua, as is the Japanese “manga.”15 There are also jjimjil bang, large public bathhouses, usually gender-segregated but with unisex areas on other floors; they are a popular weekend getaway for Korean families to relax, soak, lounge, and sleep while the children play away on PCs. As Song summarizes their role, “[The] urbanized environment of Korea has been terribly lacking in time and space for cultural activities. That’s the effect of rapid growth oriented processes over the past 40 years … pro-collective cultures which did not provide enough individual free expression” (Song Do-Young 1998, 123).
The bangs are literally boxes. Floor space is typically divided into the smallest cubicles that can still be used for their intended purpose; bangs might occupy a single floor or multiple floors in a building. Their roles relate to the typical crowding of Korean domestic space in a period of changing values placed on privacy and escape. They especially boomed after the 1997 crisis, as the government helped create the conditions for establishing small businesses. Kang Inkyu (2014) sees the bang as signifying the metamorphosis of Korean culture to a new, ever-emerging state of fragmenting cybercultures.
The bangs of Jongno back streets are mostly above small shops or food outlets, and mostly labeled “PC” or “DVD.”
Insadong: Labyrinth
Insadonggil can be seen, in one sense, as a back street to Jongno but taken to an extreme (and without the bangs). In the early Chosun era, 142there were two towns whose names ended in “In” and “Sa,” divided by a stream that ran along what is now Insadong’s main street, Insadonggil. Its diagonal irregularity in an otherwise Zhouist (though partly Japanese-imposed) grid reflects old ecological processes and signiἀes an antiquity preceding the present city with its modernist imposed order. It became the area of subsidiary palaces, of which only the restored Unhyeongung Palace survives,16 and a residential area for government officials in the Chosun era; it also housed Dohwaseo, the government-based royal painting institute of the dynasty. During the Japanese era, the wealthy Korean residents were forced to move and sell their possessions, whereupon Insadong became the locale for the trading of such antiques. In the Japanese era it was part of the “northern village” and a realm of Korean decay and poverty (Henry 2014, 9, 52–53). After the Korean War, the area became a center of the city’s artistic and café life, evolving as a popular destination for foreign visitors during the 1960s and even more so during the 1988 Olympics. In the late 1990s there was a program of renovations and modernization, to further attract the tourists. This, however, provoked protests due to the consequent loss of its “historic character,” leading to a halt in the officially endorsed renovations.
The promotional rhetoric on Insadonggil will commonly refer to it as a “traditional street for both locals and foreigners,” the “culture of the past and the present,” “unique,” and representing “the cultural history of the nation” (Ch’oe Chun-sik et al. 2005). While it was once known as the biggest center for antiques and contemporary art trading in Korea, much of that activity has now relocated to areas near the newer “cultural hot spot” of Samcheong-dong north of Insadong, or to the luxury shopping locale of Cheongdam-dong in Gangnam, south Seoul. Accordingly, it is now commonly referred to as merely a “tourist spot” (Moon So-young 2009). Still, about one hundred art galleries are claimed to be clustered in the area as it reinvents itself, albeit now more as a tourist area. A consequence of the tourist focus is higher turnover of establishments and, increasingly, outlets for less expensive works by younger and “rising” artists. “Young people who felt that the threshold for art galleries was very high now feel free to enter our gallery after seeing small paintings through the show window,” said Han Jin-sook, a curator at Gallery Topohaus. “Paintings are popular, especially as wedding gifts” (Moon So-young 2009). Gallery Topohaus’ show window was in the form of a giant red heart surrounded by silver stars. The small-scale, almost grassroots rise of this new, decentralized production and marketing soon attracted the corporate sector, however: across the street from Gallery Topohaus arose Ssamziegil, a complex of small art galleries and handicraft shops opened in late 1432004 by Ssamzie, a company manufacturing accessories and trading artwork.17 Certainly Ssamziegil has helped Insadong to attract young people—as artists, as voyeurs, and as purchasers and thereby collectors. Yet, noted one manager, “[a]bout 70 to 80 percent [of customers here] are Japanese tourists” (Moon So-young 2009). Where Hongdae, to be discussed below, might be seen as a domain for cultural production (though more as a site where the putative cultural producers would “hang out”), Insadong is where they might seek to market their production.
Change—though in Benjamin’s terms it is no change, just the delusion that the eternal present is always change—will continue to produce both the fantasy of culture and the consumer paradise. It will also reassure the young artist to continue in the delusion that their genius is real and recognized, until the reality of the commodity world slowly dawns. Fashion, the fetishization of novelty, seizes Insadonggil; the consequent inflated rents expel the creative and the champions of “alternative lifestyles”—to Hongdae, Samcheon-dong, and elsewhere. There may indeed be “no change,” but there is certainly constant relocation, of which Insadonggil, like Jongno, is emblematic.
The reality of Insadong is that it is a collection of 1960s and 1970s small two- and three-story, boxlike buildings that have now been gentriἀed, often rebuilt, adapted, and commodiἀed—it is heavy urban design applied to an indigenous muddle. The northern end is the fashionable, tourist stretch of the better-presented galleries and narrow radiating alleys with pseudo-ancient teahouses and fashionable shops (ἀgures 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5). It goes downmarket as it goes south, toward Jongno, marketing Korean crafts, antiques, food, and music, to a more local clientele, hosting performers of indigenous music, religious practices, and local foods. The labyrinthine intricacy of ancient Seoul is retained as is the minute scale of its alleys, no doubt for its marketability; however, it is also part of a wider project of riding on the reconstructed memory of the Chosun age. Comparison of the area’s present structure (ἀgure 4.3) with the 1928 map of Insadong in Todd Henry (2014, 53), citing Keijo toshi keikaku chosasho (1928), reveals that only limited “improvements” have occurred since then. Tapgol Park has been enlarged and the southern end of Insadonggil reordered; however, the most signiἀcant change has been connecting previous culs-de-sac to provide east-west accessibility through the “village.”
While the tiny establishments in Jongno’s back streets are for the most part just boxes adorned with their advertising boards and other signage, on Insadonggil and in its alleys these are more often minimalist, understated, and self-consciously “modern.” It is Seoul boxland taken to its limit. 144
FIGURE 4.3 Insadong as labyrinth. While the colonial Japanese “modernized” the principal roads of the old city, the interiors of the blocks retained their premodern, Chosun, labyrinthine complexity. Source: author, based on 2014 maps.
FIGURE 4.4 Insadonggil, 2012: urban elegance and minimalist design.145
FIGURE 4.5 Insadonggil boxspace, 2012: high elegance transforms Seoul boxland.
Namdaemun and Myeong-dong
South of Jongno and east of the ancient Namdaemun Gate, in the erstwhile plebeian district of precolonial Seoul and the upmarket commercial locale of Japanese Seoul, is Myeong-dong, recently Seoul’s most “high-end” retailing district, though increasingly replaced in that role by Apgujeong-dong in Gangnam-gu, south of the river—this latter has Apgujeong Rodeo Street, homage to Beverley Hills. Then, between the gate and Myeong-dong is its obverse in the vast Namdaemun Market. The two zones, Namdaemun Market and Myeong-dong, constitute another labyrinthine district of narrow alleys that reflects its unplanned, unregulated, underclass genealogy (ἀgure 4.6).
Namdaemun Market’s history goes back to the beginning of the Chosun dynasty, when merchants established their businesses nearby, just outside the city wall. The present market dates from 1922 and is one of Seoul’s two largest markets, the other being Dongdaemun Market at the eastern end of Jongno.18 It comprises some ten thousand shops of all sizes, especially for clothing, agricultural products and other foodstuffs, everyday needs, and medical supplies. Namdaemun’s commercial space is layered: its alleys are deἀned by formal buildings, many of them high-rises, with their ground-floor space used as shops and occasionally food outlets; there will be stairs to other levels; in front of the shops and often as extensions to them will be a layer of stalls, typically under retractable awnings, beneath which clothes and other wares typically hang from hooks and wires; in front of those again, though more often freestanding at intersections of the labyrinth, will be smaller, mobile stalls, often under multicolored umbrellas; a ἀnal layer are the food vendors operating from metal dishes on the ground. 146There is all manner of merchandising; missing, however, are the vendors of pirated DVDs who characterize the street markets of Southeast Asian cities—the Internet and the DVD bangs have mostly replaced them (ἀgure 4.7).
FIGURE 4.6 Namdaemun Market as disordered space, 2012.
FIGURE 4.7 Namdaemun Market as diverse, intersecting economies, 2012.
The chaos and disorder of the street surface is matched vertically on the façades of the enclosing buildings. Projecting from the 147buildings are layer upon layer of advertising boards for products, establishments, and services in a visual cacophony that would defy any disentanglement of messages. It is an adornment of façades that is repeated across the districts of the city.
Myeong-dong in the Chosun dynasty had been a residential area. In 1898 the Gothic-styled Catholic Cathedral was completed there (chapter 2) and, in the colonial period, the area became the Japanese colonists’ primary commercial district. Much of its ἀne colonial architecture was destroyed in the Korean War. After rebuilding in the late 1950s, the area acquired the National Theater, bookshops, and teahouses, to become a center of Seoul’s artistic life. In 1962 the junta generals put dampers on Seoul’s raucous nightlife, at that time centered on Myeong-dong, in part to save electricity (Cumings 2005, 356). With the subsequent relocation of the National Theater, however, both art life and nightlife declined, and instead Myeong-dong began to acquire high-end shopping, thence to become Seoul’s focus for high fashion.
Like Namdaemun Market, the adjoining Myeong-dong is a labyrinth and also displays the festoons of advertising boards projecting from building façades; however, they are better designed and more often associated with national and global names, and the more fragmented, smaller-scale buildings are interspersed with the department stores, office towers, and surviving colonial-era buildings—the Bank of Korea Building, for example (ἀgure 4.8).
As corporations and, less often, state institutions seek “presence” with iconic buildings, these also come to distinguish the often dispersed districts in which they locate. The overdesigned Jongno (Samsung) Tower performs this function on present Jongno. Several towers distinguish Myeong-dong—the “split” Post Office Tower is one, the “bent” SK Tower is another.19
Cheonggyecheon
Unlike Myeong-dong or the immediate back streets of Jongno, Insadonggil presents as a display of purposive urban design. Although it follows an ancient streamline, there is no attempt to acknowledge that past in the design or signiἀcation of the space. The stream is missing. A far more interventionist and comprehensively designed project to transform the boxland of the city center is Cheonggyecheon, a 5.8-kilometer creek in downtown Seoul. Here also was an ancient stream, named Gaecheon (Open Stream), albeit artiἀcial, constructed as part of a drainage system in the early Chosun era, thence to be regularly drained and refurbished throughout various reigns. It was renamed Cheonggyecheon in the Japanese colonial period and was 148remembered from that era by composer Kang Sukhi (2007), cited earlier; he recalled it running parallel to the city’s commercial Jongno, with women washing clothes in the stream, its life seemingly little changed from the old dynasty. It was also totally polluted, according to newspaper reports of the time (Henry 2014, 158–159). After the 1950–1953 Korean War, rural-to-urban migration turned Seoul into a slum city, and the banks of Cheonggyecheon acquired squatter settlements in flimsy makeshift houses. A twenty-year program of slum demolition and concrete covering of the old watercourse was crowned, in the 1967–1971 period, with the elevated, sixteen-meter-wide Samil highway over the top of it for its 5.8 kilometers. Together with the emblematic Samil Building, it served as a proudly displayed example of economic growth and urban modernization (Park Kil-Dong n.d., 10).20
FIGURE 4.8 Myeong-dong, 2012. Like Namdaemun Market, Myeong-dong is labyrinthine but also upmarket; the indigenous muddle is interspersed with grand department stores and with monuments from the late Chosun and Japanese eras.
149In July 2003, Seoul’s then mayor (and subsequent president) Lee Myung-bak resolved to remove the elevated Samil highway and restore the stream as part of a wider movement to reintroduce nature into what had become a “hard” urban concretescape. The project, with its underlying rhetoric and somewhat brutal manner of implementation, must be seen in the context of Lee’s political ambitions and self-reconstruction. In Cheonggyecheon Flows to the Future (Lee Myung-bak 2005), published by Lee to coincide with the stream’s (re)opening, we are told how he “endured developmentalism” (Park Chung-hee?) represented in the paved stream, how he had escaped from developmentalism, remaking himself as the man of “the future” to show the path to reembrace the nature of common people.
Accordingly there was rhetoric to promote a more eco-friendly urban design and, at the same time, to advance urban competitiveness with rival East Asian cities through ampliἀed urban infrastructure (Lee Myung-bak 2006). Cheonggyecheon merchants demonstrated against the project in 2003, however, echoing antirestoration discourse raised by NGOs;21 there were also protests and debate on the need for alternatives to high-rises and against unsystematic development, traf-ἀc problems, and the displacement of merchants.22 The process was also widely criticized as being procedurally undemocratic and rushed, as the desires of the Seoul metropolitan government took precedence over all else (Cho Myungrae 2004; Ryu Jeh-hong 2004, 23).23 The project continued, however, with the ἀnal cost of some 386 billion won (around US$281 million), and the stream ἀnally opened to the public in September 2005.
While the attempted character of the restoration might be labeled “naturalistic,” it is quite artiἀcial. The stream had long run dry, and so the design called for 120,000 tons of water to be pumped in daily (Park Kil-Dong n.d., 13). Environmentalists, however, had previously called in vain for the restoration of the original upper reaches of the stream in order to use available and natural water flow in the watercourse.
The corridor’s beginning, at the great north-south axis of Taepyeongno (Sejongno), is dramatically and elegantly signiἀed in the immense Spring sculpture by Swedish American sculptor Claes Oldenburg; it plays on the notion of “spring”—rebirth, source of water, but also spring as a mechanism. It uses a conch shell as its generating springlike form, with a stone pseudo-rivulet running across the plaza to the artiἀcial waterfall (“spring”) that feeds the reconstructed stream 150(ἀgure 4.9). It is surely accidental that the sharply conical form of the sculpture also reflects the ubiquitous conical “spires” with illuminated red crosses atop all manner of shop blocks and other, small, boxlike buildings that house small churches throughout the Seoul region (and to be discussed further, below).
FIGURE 4.9 Cheonggyecheon: (a) Spring (sculptor Claes Oldenburg); (b) Spring and pond.
As completed, the restored stream begins at a fountain pool in the ἀnancial-government-royal district of Sejongno, below the stone rivulet that connects it to the symbolic Spring, then flows eastward along its old concreted channel; the rapids, rock pools, wetland swamps and marshes, ecological displays, walking paths, and climbing areas are simply additions, sitting atop the concrete channel that still lies beneath its surface (Stevens 2009). In the water, however, there are still some stones from the much older stream and its retaining banks, as well as traces of the vanished highway. On the high walls retaining the roads above on both sides, there are images and stories of past history; most dramatically, there is a vast tiled mural over several hundred meters long depicting the grand procession of King Sejong to Suwon. The stream changes along its length—stony and sculptural, then softened by limited planting, then more “naturalistic.” The whole project is urban sculpture on a vast scale, in part as a vehicle for historical storytelling—reinvented memory, erasing the erasures of the past (ἀgure 4.10). 151
FIGURE 4.10 Cheonggyechon as it passes through the Jongno financial district, 2012; right, the mural of King Sejong’s procession to Suwon.
Both the economy and the architecture change along the length of the stream: corporate and “high-end” as it traverses the ἀnancial district near its beginning, then the less imposing boxland of smaller, mostly older buildings. Then, in its lower, eastern reaches, it enters the vast Dongdaemun Market area. This part of the present city is mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, built at a time when the stream was still extant, although the present market can be traced to Chosun era enactments of 1791 (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 230). Here, for around a kilometer, the stream is lined on both sides by long, standardized building rows from the 1970s, ἀve to six stories to the north and ἀve stories to the south, uncompromisingly modernist in style, dilapidated, seemingly underoccupied—almost abandoned—and now used as part of an extensive garment district. The more decrepit north side is a busy street market of continuous small stalls—a shoe zone, a pet-shop zone, and so on. It links to the extensive Dongdaemun Market district (ἀgure 4.11). The southern side opposite the traditional Dongdaemun Market is the also linked Pyonghwa Market. Chun T’ae-il was a worker in one of the several hundred textile sweatshops there in the 1970s; he died on 13 November 1970 at the age of twenty-two when he set himself on ἀre to protest the failure of a petition for a Labor Standards Law—his slogan: “Workers too are human beings.” On 30 September 2005, two days before the opening of the rehabilitated stream, a statue of Chun was unveiled at the Boduldari Bridge over the Cheonggyecheon in front of Pyonghwa Market (Kal Hong 2011, 118). Whereas these lines of buildings previously faced an elevated highway, they now face 152a very popular stream and its walkways. There are already signs of the gentriἀcation that might be expected to follow the restoration of the stream: in 2012 the JW Marriott Hotel was constructed immediately facing Dongdaemun Gate. Also at the bridge across the stream at that point, platforms were under construction in April 2012 for a pop concert—a regular event—a younger generation being attracted into an old, albeit tired place, though briefly. More was to come.
FIGURE 4.11 Cheonggyecheon looking toward Dongdaemun Market and the garment district, 2012: identical five- and six-story blocks on both sides.
In March 2014 the immense Dongdaemun Design Plaza was opened on the south side of Cheonggyecheon as the new centerpiece of the city’s “fashion hub,” designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid and Korean studio Samoo, with its curving, elongated forms, and tautologically proclaimed as “neofuturistic” and “the world’s largest asymmetrical free-formed building” (Ashin 2014). It also marks the corporate sector’s spectacular takeover of what had been a district of informal, small-scale, and even chaotic invention and entrepreneurial vigor (Hwang Jin-Tae 2014), as well as a powerful response to the “Bilbao effect”—the shock of architect Frank Gehry’s Bilbao 153Guggenheim Museum of 1997—one for the ages, and a locale for the equally extraordinary exhibition in 2001 of the video art of Korean/universalist Paik Nam June, a topic for chapter 5. Also one for the ages.
In a critique of the effects of the Cheonggyecheon project, Ryu Jeh-hong (2004) has described three areas that it traverses, each locally renowned for small-scale, highly networked metal and molding industries, referring to “networks and processes of high-tech production based on multi-kind items and small quantities that colluded to constitute the system.” The discussion leads to an interesting question that implies a broader critique of modern Korea’s evolution: “This metalworking network producing multi-kind items and small quantities resembles a postmodern, or at least late modern, production system. How is it possible to form a postmodern system of production out of a pre-modern way of applying technology within a modernized space?” (24–25). The suggested answer is that, in the shambles of 1945, there were no means of production left behind in Japanese factories or flowing from American military bases except machinery parts. In the struggle for survival, small workshops arose to utilize this refuse in what was in effect a “premodern,” informal, and folk subsistence economy and industry. When the Park-led shift to import-substituting manufacturing began, a premodern mode of industrial organization simply morphed into part of a postmodern, “flexible accumulation” mode in the sense argued by David Harvey—the collapse of the “consensus” of big corporations and big labor (the chaebol?) and its replacement with more “flexible” ways of organizing the creation and appropriation of wealth (Harvey 1989). In Harvey’s understanding, vertical integration is broken down, processes are split up, their components are dispersed, and self-employed consultants and outworkers replace in-house experts. All this fluidity is, however, highly organized; there are strong coordinators in the form of the ἀnancial markets, and the key investment and management decisions are more centralized than ever before (King 1996, 116).
Ryu tells of the Sewoon Arcade area of Cheonggyecheon, discussed earlier in relation to architect Kim Swoo Geun. This has evolved into a network of technological know-how in computers, enabled by a diversiἀed folk industry of deconstructing and reconstructing imported electronics, in a virtual explosion of innovation that would not be possible in a grand, mainline corporation. The disintegrated apparel industry in the Dongdaemun Market area of Cheonggyecheon has likewise increased the speed of imitation, design development, manufacturing, and marketing.
It is suggested that there were here two signal failures of the Seoul metropolitan government. The ἀrst was the failure to recognize both 154the vitality of the chaotic economies of the Cheonggyecheon corridor, ultimately built on the desperation of a post-1945 slum community. The second was to charge bulldozer-like into a world whose role, vitality, or vulnerability they saw ἀt to ignore. Yet it is likely that the national prosperity (the chaebol, the Five-Year Plans) ultimately rides on that world’s flexibility, innovation, inventiveness, and transgressions. It represents another of the deἀning space types of Seoul.
Cheonggyecheon continues to evoke controversy. While one of its claimed effects has been to reduce the separation between the north and south of the old city, there was criticism that this would be achieved via intended gentriἀcation of adjacent areas that house many shops and small businesses and, of course, those incubators of creativity suggested above. An emphasis on a hoped-for network of activities to be named the Cheonggyecheon Cultural Belt only deepened the sense of misgiving.24 Then, in the face of the restoration of two ancient bridges over the stream in the name of a return to old culture—in effect simulacra in the sense argued by Baudrillard (chapter 1) and also represented in the re-created Gyeongbokgung Palace—there were attacks on the project’s frequently articulated claims of a return to authenticity.
The criticism of Cheonggyecheon on the grounds of its inauthenticity is problematic: certainly there is no replication of wild nature nor of the “soft,” ἀne-scale, intimate, designed nature of the traditional Chosun-era garden. Cheonggyecheon may, however, be seen as an urban-scale translation of older cultural practices of representing human responses to ecological reality—in this case to the ecology of an urban drain in a city district starved of green space. The adverse reactions might therefore be seen more as nostalgic yearning for speciἀc, lost aspects of the culture—for the garden as a place of withdrawal and scholarly contemplation. The places of withdrawal in modern Korea are boxes rather than gardens and rarely for scholarly contemplation, as observed in relation to the bangs (unless, of course, the Internet is the new site of scholarly contemplation in a cyberage).
The question of authenticity is problematic in present Seoul, especially in light of the attempts to reconstruct the Chosun world and to obliterate that of the Japanese colonial age.
Dongdaemun and hybrid economy
The long Cheonggyecheon blocks and their adjoining Dongdaemun Market highlight the juxtapositions of Seoul space and their anomalies. There is Ryu Jeh-hong’s (2004, 14) reference to the hybridity of Dongdaemun, drawing on Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1997), who in turn 155references Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch: “The uneven moment of social development, or ‘the coexistence of realities from different moments of history’ (Jameson 1994, 307) is no longer embarrassing: Pyeonghwa clothing stores in front of Migliore fashion centre in Dongdaemun [since 2014, in front of Cheonggyecheon Design Plaza], mom-and-pop stores alongside convenience stores, European restaurants next to Korean folk taverns, and traditional tea rooms next to coffee houses. This hybrid coexistence of different pasts is called ‘the synchronism of the non-synchronous,’ or the ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’ (Bloch 1997).” Nederveen Pieterse (1997, 50) has drawn attention to the hybridizing effect of globalization (hybridization being a constant theme of the present account): “What globalization means in structural terms … is the increase in the available modes of organization: transnational, international, macro-regional, national, micro-regional, local.” It is an effect that translates into modes of production: “The notion of articulation of modes of production may be viewed as a principle of hybridisation…. Counterposed to the idea of the dual economy split in traditional/modern and feudal/capitalist sectors, the articulation argument holds that what has been taking place is an interpenetration of modes of production” (50–51). The sheer speed of Korean development has precluded any neat transformation of one mode or era of production into another. Instead, we end up, in the urban landscape of Seoul, with radically disjunctive modes of economic organization coexisting, both reinforcing and undermining each other simultaneously—seemingly more so here than elsewhere.
Seoul’s public markets in particular illustrate both the traditional/modern split and the “principle of hybridization” that brings these together. In Korea the public market does not appropriate a public square or a designated building; rather, it will occupy a street or group of streets, restricting or even ending vehicular movement. The markets are permanent, giving circulation space back to pedestrians and thereby, in a city of small and often-crowded apartments, providing a public space and local community focus—albeit also crowded (Gelézeau 1997, 77). The markets and the blank-walled laneways that they most typically appropriate are cultural survivals of ancient Hanyang; they also signify Korea as being linked to a Chinese spatial realm of communal lanes and walled, secluded houses. The markets thrive even in the newest areas of the metropolis; streets are seized in the absence of lanes and where the housing is high-rise apartment blocks. Yet the markets are now also of the twenty-ἀrst century; the more traditional stalls and their vendors interweave with outlets of the more formal (and “modern”) economy. 156
Korea is distinguished by the sheer speed of its modernization, ergo of its globalization; when everything spins ever faster, there is no time for evolution and little time for reflection. The consequence is the sort of hybridization suggested by Nederveen Pieterse, in which the chaebol coexists with the wild disorder of the traditional market, Samsung with the proliferating stalls of Dongdaemun or Namdaemun, and the fragmented production of Cheonggyecheon with the global corporations lining Gangnam’s Teheranno—indeed the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history (Jameson 1994, albeit referring to Japan rather than Korea). The hybridization makes Korean space “different,” enabling a larger-sized underground economy in Korea than in other OECD countries,25 but thereby problematizing efforts to measure the “national” economy in the same way as others. Itaewon, Hongdae, and Insadonggil, but also both the grand and more minuscule markets, are manifestations of this intermingling of economies, of nationalistic exclusiveness but with global embrace, of order with disorder. An even more dramatic manifestation of proliferation and disorder, however, is represented in that forest of red plastic crosses that electrify the night skyline of Seoul.
In this context of ahistorical hybridization and coexistence of realities, Ryu Jeh-hong (2004) refers to the story of Seoul Plaza, another mayoral project of Lee Myung-bak. An open area is bounded on the west by the grand north-south axis of Taepyeongno, the Korean-traditional Deoksugung Palace, the Romanesque-Revival Anglican Cathedral, and the former National Assembly Building; on the north by the Japanese Art Deco City Hall; on the south by the American-Modernist Plaza Hotel. The modern history of Seoul seems to have been assembled here; it had also been a historic site of protest, notably for the 1919 anti-Japanese uprising and June 1987 democracy movement. In the early 2000s, a forty-year-old fountain was demolished, and the plaza’s previous dominant role as a traffic intersection was ended and instead it was reopened in May 2004, grassed and with diverse art installations, ostensibly as a public open space and for “cultural displays.” Ten days after the opening the public was forbidden to walk in the plaza, however: “Don’t Walk, Just Look” was the instruction written next to the roped-off ἀeld—landscaping is only to provide spectacle (Ryu Jeh-hong 2004, 11). It has subsequently become a new location for anti-American protests—the (hybridizing, anticolonial, neocolonial) story of Korea still playing out there (Kim Rahn 2008).
The hybridization and coexisting realities continue. In 2012 the old City Hall had been screened and hidden (for restoration). It would be overwhelmed by a very large, overdesigned, idiosyncratic 157new building. The old Japanese building is to be effectively embedded in—embraced by—the new, plastic-form, high-tech City Hall (Yoo Kerl, architect).
Boxlands 1: Itaewon
The spaces listed above are all within the old walled area of the Chosun city and evoke memories of that space and age. Itaewon, on the southern slopes of Namsan (South) Mountain, began its modern history later, as a residential area of the Japanese colonists in the early twentieth century. The Japanese departed in 1945, and the city was destroyed in the early 1950s. The city of the 1960s and 1970s rush was hurriedly, poorly built; it was also a city of transgressive insertions, none arguably more blatant than the American military area of Yongsan to the immediate south of the old walled city, which, in 1945, had simply and smoothly been taken over from the departing Japanese. Nearby but in the dreary, disordered boxland of the city itself it spawned Itaewon—“entertainment” places, bars, brothels, American music, and disorder. In the Cold War it could be seen as “the only alien space within Korea” (Kim Eun-shil 2004, 60); it was also a focus for resentment against the occupiers and their indigenous clients (the dictatorship). In more recent times it is seen more as one hybridized, ambiguously signed space among many. Itaewon can be observed in the context of Lee Jin-kyung’s (2010) analysis of South Korean military labor in the Vietnam War, domestic female sex workers, Korean prostitution for US troops, and Asian migrant labor in Korea. Her argument, to reprise from chapter 1, is that the Korean “economic miracle” is to be demystiἀed, to be seen at one level as a global and regional articulation of industrial, military, and sexual proletarianization, and, at another, as the transformation from a US neocolony to a “sub-empire.” The “miracle” stood on a masking of the changing status of both Itaewon and Korea more broadly. The lesson of Itaewon is that it reveals the mask as just that—merely a mask, of advertising boards, surface glitter, and consumption. In a study of kijich’on (military camptown) prostitutes, Moon Hyung-Sun (1997, 1) comments that, since the Korean War, over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the US military.26
In more recent times Itaewon has transformed into Seoul’s center for international cuisine and cosmopolitan entertainment; it is still mostly visited by American military personnel stationed in the nearby Yongsan Garrison.27 The main street, Itaewonno, runs for some 1.4 kilometers eastward from Itaewon Junction; off this branches a network of alleyways and arcades crammed with stores, restaurants, 158nightclubs, and bars. One of these alleys leads up to “Hooker Hill,” resplendent with nightclubs and establishments of lesser repute and a favored haven for much of the military population of the nearby Yongsan US military base. Paradoxically, the prostitution market is in part Russian-supplied.28 From the late 1990s on, Itaewon also gathered a moderately visible gay and lesbian community.
FIGURE 4.12 Itaewon space, 2012: Hannam-dong and cascading buildings appear as if constructed on top of each other. As Seoul is a landscape of mountainsides, it is also a landscape of seemingly precarious cascades.
Itaewon is “ordinary space”—undistinguished boxlike buildings with advertising boards and neon signs. It is atypical in that the smallscale boxland is on the main road as well as on the lanes and back streets, although, even here, there are the “signature” corporate towers—most notably the elegantly designed Cheil Worldwide.29 Whereas the back streets to Jongno (and of Teheranno, to be discussed below) are mutually deἀning, dialectic opposites of the front avenue, those of Itaewon are exaggerations—in some sense caricatures—of the main Itaewonno Road. The back street to the north has most of the ἀnest and most fashionable bars and restaurants; that to the south is the notorious Hooker Hill. The back street behind the small bars and other establishments of Hooker Hill—a back-back street—is Muslim: the Seoul Central Mosque is here, discretely embedded behind a long building that has, among other things, PC bangs and Islamic coffee shops. The Seoul Central Mosque opened in 1976 and has been the target of a number of “incidents” and a consequent need for police protection. This back-back street has a proliferation of tiny enterprises: small shops, a few tailors, computer repairs, Indian halal cafés; they would be nearly the smallest to be seen in Seoul, no doubt reflecting the economically depressed status of the city’s Muslim community.
In a discussion of Itaewon’s mosque and small Muslim commercial community, Kim Eun Mee and Jean S. Kang (2007, 78–80) observe that the more numerous groups of its patrons are Indonesian and Bangladeshi. On the basis of Seoul Metropolitan Government 159data they ἀnd that both groups in the 2000s had small concentrations in the industrial southwest, mostly Geumcheon and Guro, with the Indonesians also in Seongdong and Seongbuk in the northeast. The mosque preceded the influx of the Muslim workers, and none of these localities would be seen to have much connection with Itaewon.
Itaewon possesses a visual drama in that it is built on very steep hill faces, with cascading buildings and spaces. It is quite unique in that most of its signage is in English (ἀgure 4.12).
Only its nightclubs and the ladies of Hooker Hill hint at the compromises of Korean history—the American intrusion, the earlier rescue of the capitalist “progress” in the Korean War, the Japanese occupation preceding that of the Americans. If viewed in an earlier Cold War context, the Russian ladies of the nightclubs present as a wonderful anomaly—how many secrets transmitted across the pillow? In the present age, however, their presence seems to attest to no more (nor less) than the collapse of the Russian world and of one of the great myths of history (yet to be learnt by the Koreans of the North). Itaewon is fashionland in Benjamin’s understanding, “progress as Hell,” yet it is also a screen—albeit the paradox of a revealing screen—across the national humiliation (ἀgure 4.13).
FIGURE 4.13 Itaewon space, 2012: Hannam-dong back street, an assemblage of high-end, finely designed, discordant boxes.
160Yongsan (Itaewon) provides another, very different screen across the national humiliation: here is the immense War Memorial of Korea, originally conceived by the Roh Tae Woo government as an emblem of military glory to legitimize the military dictatorship that Roh had served and as a symbol of ethnocentric nationalism. Sheila Miyoshi Jager has noted the connection forged between “the military, manliness and nationalism,” as well as the fact that the museum at the memorial virtually ignores the Japanese period—it is a blank, expunged from history (Jager 2003, 118, 129; Kal Hong 2011, 73).
Seoul is a metropolis of a multiplicity of distinctive neighborhoods, often very concentrated in what each is known for. The western side of Yongsan is sharply different from the eastern, Itaewon side; the west has the Yongsan electronics market, comprising some twenty buildings housing around ἀve thousand stores selling computers and peripherals, stereos, appliances, electronic games and software, videos, CDs, and all things electronic. Stores range from the traditional retail to the noisily, aggressively entrepreneurial. The term Yong pali, “Yongsan salesperson,” has been coined to describe ruthless, shameless sales behavior. Yongsan is thus a patchwork of concentrations—military base, Itaewon, Hooker Hill, Muslim focus, electronics mart—all effectively a reflection of Seoul itself as a multiplicity of interacting multiplicities, an assemblage, as will be argued following.
There is far more to Yongsan, however. In September 2010 plans were revealed for a new Yongsan Business Hub, to include an underground strip mall “six times larger” than anything else in the city, to house studios, galleries, and “concert stages for young artists.”30 The centrality of “young artists” in marketing everything Korean is a theme for the next chapter. There would additionally be three landmark buildings at the center of the district, a triangle of spikes allegedly inspired by an ancient crown, to be 100, 72, and 69 stories tall. The one-hundred-story “spike,” designed by architect Renzo Piano, was proudly proclaimed as the world’s most expensive building, to be built by Korea’s Samsung Corporation, which also built the Burj Khalifa (162 stories in Dubai) and Taipei 101 (101 stories, in Taipei). Another “spike” would be the Yongsan Apartment, designed by the Dutch architects MVRDV: it would comprise twin towers, sixty and ἀfty-four stories (somewhat at odds with the elsewhere-proclaimed seventy-two stories), connected by “a pixelated cloud” of apartments, swimming pool, amenities, cafés, and a serene koi pond connecting the two towers. The “cloud” would be a ten-story bridge linking the buildings at their twenty-seventh floors. The response, however, has varied from the troubled to the outraged. “The ‘pixelated clouds’ evoked the clouds of debris that erupted from the iconic 161World Trade Center towers after terrorist planes flew into them,” charged New York’s Daily News. MVRDV’s response: it “regrets deeply any connotations The Cloud project evokes regarding 9/11. It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process.”31
Yongsan Business Hub was initially proposed as a project of Korail (whose vast land holdings in Yongsan would thereby be greatly enhanced) and Samsung. The overall plan was designed by Daniel Libeskind, who, ironically, was the designer behind the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Construction was scheduled for January 2013; however, by August 2010 the project’s demise was already being predicted (Kim Tong-hyung 2010); by March 2013 its ἀnancial collapse was clear (Rosenberg 2013); a month later the project was abandoned.
Yongsan thereby presents three worlds in confrontation. First is the world of military domination—it was the center of the Japanese military colonial enterprise from as early as 1894, which seemed to pass seamlessly in 1945 to that of the American hegemony. The second is Itaewon. It was and continues to be the realm of American happiness—here are the places of escape, the nightclubs, entertainment “spots,” and brothels, just beyond the gates of the US military realm. The third world of Yongsan is that of the global hyperspace—the electronics mart in which a new generation of Seoulites will seek the gadgetry to join a wider cyberworld. There is also a putative fourth world of Yongsan Business Hub, in which the ideas and the designers will no longer be simply “Korean” but, rather, “other,” as an assembly of more global attempts at understanding and constructing what might constitute a “Korean world and space.” There are different spaces, each standing against and contradicting the others: military space (with all its own contradictions), the hedonistic space of escape, the space of entrepreneurial vigor, and the space of capital and its regime of accumulation.
Boxlands 2: Hongdae
Another example of the ambiguity of Korean blank space is addressed in Lee Mu-Yong (2004): Hongdae, an abbreviation of Hongik Daehakgyo (Hongik University), had been just another nondescript residential area in the 1950s but, in the 1970s, it metamorphosed into an art culture district following the establishment of Hongik University and its College of Fine Arts (ἀgure 4.14).
Seoul is extraordinary in its proliferation of art districts and profusion of galleries and museums. One is tempted to identify Seoul as the Berlin of Asia; it reveals the power of destruction and erasure 162that then seemingly enables the sudden release of creativity and the dream of representing both the idea of Korea itself and that other idea of Korea’s place in a new, twenty-ἀrst-century world.32 Claes Oldenburg’s Spring at Cheonggyecheon may indeed provide a metaphor for Seoul and Korea (albeit from an American sculptor): the fantastic kinetic energy held within the spring by its suppression (1895 to 1945, to 1953, to 1987?), then the colossal drama of its sudden release (see ἀgure 4.9). One looks at Seoul as the greatest manifestation of cultural resurrection. It is the theme of chapter 5 to follow but also of any reading of chaotic, even tawdry Hongdae—a wonderful place, like much else in what is simultaneously the ultimate Orwellian, Kafkaesque city of urban-design oppression, with all those seemingly identical graywhite towers. It is the greatest contradiction.
FIGURE 4.14 The wider city. Source: author, based on 2014–2015 maps.
In the early 1990s a trendy café culture in pastiche (postmodern?) buildings inserted itself into Hongdae; it is now galleries and small theaters, art studios, handcraft furniture shops, art institutions, 163publishers, “culture spaces” and clubs, techno and trance. Many foreigners prefer Hongdae to Itaewon, given its relative lack of prostitutes and seediness.
The tiny shops that proliferate in the back streets and alleys are, in their “style,” survivals from an earlier, harder age (even though many are from a more recent time). They are akin, in some sense, to the endless stalls and street markets and underground galleries. These small establishments proclaim their presence with signage, variously projecting signboards, decoration, and emblems. This, of course, is also the character of the establishments behind Jongno. The decoration in Hongdae becomes more inventive, however (this is, after all, a zone of art and performance), and there will be self-conscious design. Yet this is still to be seen as a “folk” vernacular. There are just a few instances, in Hongdae as in Insadong, where that self-conscious design will be expressed in an avant-garde architecture (ἀgure 4.15).
Hongdae is an expression of the explosion of cultural production that accompanied the collapse of the era of dictatorship, albeit exploding as if from the vacuum of obliteration (the spring is released). The power of Hongdae may be in the exuberance that becomes possible in the lack of an artistic/cultural “establishment.” Instead of a still-thriving, conservative, self-protective community of “old art,” here it is nostalgia that is to be countered by the young students and a nascent avant-garde.
FIGURE 4.15 Hongdae, 2012: in both images indigenous muddle morphs into avant-garde.
164If authenticity—truth to oneself—is the dialectical opposite of nostalgia (chapter 1), then the confrontation with nostalgia might be seen as a condition of possibility for “authentic” creativity and reinvention.
Seoul, as observed above, is resplendent with “art districts,” caught up in the shifts from freewheeling avant-gardism to commercialization and exploitation. Hongdae is only one of these “wild places” simultaneously in tension and collaboration with the ever-shifting and redeἀning art market. Yet it is still antinostalgic in its presentation (if not in the intentions of its entrepreneurs); thus it stands dramatically against the elitist, antiauthentic national enterprise of rebuilding the ancient palaces, gates, and grand monuments. It is as if in opposition to the “Chosun return,” embodied in the reappearing palaces, that one can read Hongdae.
The national enterprise and the start-up nature of Hongdae come together, somewhat incompatibly, in the Seoul Art Space program of the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (SFAC), established in 2004 by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. In 2015 there were fifteen Art Spaces listed, widely distributed across the space of the city.33 The programs, facilities, and political agendas vary as widely as their locations. Thus Seoul Citizens Hall, in the basements of the new City Hall and like a symbolic rhizome under the older Japanese hall, is clearly a promotional instrument of the city government. Seoul Art Space Seogyo is an intrusion into the Hongdae area, its mission proclaimed as “the dream of being a hub of the art ecosystem in the Hongik University area”—to take it over? It exudes the discordant order of officialdom in the dishevelment of Hongdae.
Other Art Spaces would seem more creative in their intent. That at Geumcheon is proclaimed as being linked to the “urban regeneration” movement of Seoul city planning and as responding to the decline of the Guro complex (chapter 3); it was established in 2009 to provide an experimental art complex with residency programs, exhibitions, urban research projects, and an open studio—all accommodating both Korean and international artists. It occupies the buildings of an old printing factory.34 Similarly, Seoul Art Space Sindang utilizes an old and bypassed underground shopping center from 1971; forty-two previous shop units have been converted into “creativity workshops” and exhibition halls. Yeonhui’s Art Space is a small “village” for writers; Seoul Art Space Mullae has been fashioned from a strip of steel materials shops, with a theater and performance emphasis; Seongbuk 165has a focus on arts participation and health. There are also Art Spaces at Gwanak, Hongeun, Jamsil (dedicated to people with disabilities), and Namsan Arts Center (a theater), as well as Namsan Creative Center, Daehak-ro Creative Space, and Seoul Theater Center—all with an experimental theater focus.
It is instructive to see, in the mind’s eye, the disciplined program of SFAC and the Seoul Art Spaces against the undisciplined disorder of Hongdae, and even more against the informal vigor of Cheonggyecheon. And to ask: where is creativity most likely to be found?
Gangnam Chamwon-dong
Nothing could be further removed from the wild, unconstrained, exuberant disorder of Hongdae than the regimented discipline of the stiffly restrained ranks of identical apartment towers of Gangnam and a seeming inἀnity of other districts on the southern side of the Hangang River (ἀgure 4.14). As Hongdae and the other areas contemplated above are in the north, this contrast might mistakenly be seen as a north-south distinction; we will see following, however, that the immense zones of identical residential towers are ubiquitous to Seoul. However, those of Gangnam, fronting as a vast wall onto the river and determining the river’s character in its central reaches, are especially emblematic.35
One could take any of the hundreds of zones of multitowered housing for special discussion. For present purposes, a medium-sized estate in Gangnam’s Chamwon-dong will be observed (ἀgure 4.16; also seen in ἀgure 1.1 from chapter 1). It abuts the Kyeongbu Expressway (Highway 1) and comprises forty-four residential towers, each some twenty-eight stories, together with its own schools (sizes of towers in Seoul vary: those of the estate immediately to the south are thirty-ἀve stories). The soul-less, virtually identical, necessarily numbered towers have elaborate, overdesigned entrances, completely hidden car parking, a ἀnely wooded landscape weaving through the blocks, woodland trails (albeit alongside an elevated highway whose scale is further visually augmented by ten-meter-high noise barriers) with exercise equipment liberally distributed along the trails. This is clearly an upmarket housing estate—“Gangnam style.” It is also, however, the ultimate Corbusian, modernist landscape—one lives by numbers, in numbered towers in an idyllic woodland park, isolated.36
An underpass under the elevated highway leads to another, more varied urban landscape of both large and small, older apartment buildings, a very few separate houses, small shops, bars, and bangs—the necessary, complementary urban landscape that can supply what 166the vast, regimented estate is planned to exclude. It is, in effect, the housing estate’s back street; most estates, however, enjoy no such immediate back street. There is another, vaster, and far more vibrant zone of entertainment and escape little more than two kilometers to the south, in the Gangnam-Teheranno District, that serves, in various ways, much of the city.
FIGURE 4.16 (a) Housing estate, Chamwon-dong, Gangnam District … and (b) its obverse, on the opposite side of the Kyeongbu Expressway, 2012. These dichotomous worlds are within three minutes’ walk.
Boxlands 3: Teheranno
It has been suggested above that the political economy of the Cheonggyecheon Stream is to be seen in the context of a premodern, post-1945 subsistence economy of scavenging, recycling, and reinvention, morphing into a postmodern economy of disintegrated, flexible, small-scale, high-tech production and services on which the corporate economy of large-scale, globally connected activity ultimately rides. In such a view, new invention and creativity are always more likely to arise in the flexible world of Cheonggyecheon and similar zones of the old, disheveled city than in the corporate towers of the chaebol.
Cheonggyecheon’s obverse is Teheranno (Tehran Street). Samneungno was a 3.5-kilometer stretch of Highway 90, in the Gangnam-gu District on the south side of the river; in the 1960s it ran through a relatively remote and underdeveloped area that was annexed into Seoul in 1963. Its name was changed to Teheranno to mark a 1976 visit from the mayor of Tehran (a street in Tehran was, reciprocally, supposed to be renamed after Seoul). In the following 167decades Gangnam-gu experienced phenomenal growth, with Teheranno becoming one of Korea’s busiest streets, noted for the number of Internet-related companies operating there—Yahoo!, Korean rivals Daum and Naver, Samsung, Hynix, diverse Korean and international ἀnance institutions, and major banks.
Teheranno is popularly called Teheran Valley and is the Silicon Valley of Korea, though more a steel-and-glass canyon than a valley. Except for the signage in Korean script, it could be any North American city center. It is believed that more than half of Korea’s venture capital is invested there.37
There is a view that the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on cities is essentially substitution, replacing the need for proximity and presence with telepresence (W. Mitchell 1999, 110).38 Nigel Thrift (1997), however, sees this as myth, arguing instead that we need always to be aware of the ways that “culture, context and content mediate the contingent social constructions of ICTs, and their resulting effects” (Graham 2004, 98).39 Some aspects of these effects will preoccupy chapter 5; other aspects are to be read from the (distanced) juxtaposition of Teheranno space and Cheonggyecheon space. Two lessons can be drawn from this relationship: the ἀrst is that neither Teheranno nor Cheonggyecheon is unique to Seoul; rather, both are different though inseparable aspects of a globally linked (hyper)-space of flexible corporate coordination and control (Teheranno) and an equally globally linked (and hyperspatial) realm of creativity and innovation (Cheonggyecheon).40 The second lesson is that there are different genealogies and time scales involved in these radically different, interlinked realms. Within the context of Seoul, the most modern of metropolises, Cheonggyecheon and the space that it presents is “ancient,” dating from the immediate post-1945 period of scraping for scrap materials and promising ideas; it evolves from pilfering, the junkyard, and local, small-scale invention. Teheranno space is new; its antecedents are the multinational corporation and the more homegrown, Japanese-modeled but ultimately indigenized chaebol, albeit often dating from colonial-collaborationist family enterprises from the Japanese era. There is a third lesson from Teheranno, relating to the fragmentation of Seoul space: that, however, will be deferred until later in this chapter.
While dialectical imagery might run through both Teherrano and Cheonggyecheon, it is their dialectical (though distanced) juxtaposition that is to be read as most clearly throwing “the miracle” into question—the Park-chaebol axis (and order) always inextricably linked with and dependent on the disordered, ultimately subversive “Miracle on the Cheonggyecheon.” 168
Teheranno, a street and associated business district in Seocho-gu, is a glass-and-steel canyon, with ten to twelve lanes of traffic; it is both corporate “cool” (Samsung) and a display of earlier, less pretentious, and less architecturally sophisticated blocks. At the Gangnam subway station, and effectively the heart of Teheranno and of Gangnam as it is more widely understood, is Samsung Town (see ἀgure 4.14). It is not a town but an office park and IT and electronics hub for the multinational Samsung corporation: Samsung Electronics, Samsung C&T, and Samsung Life Insurance have built three towers that are forty-four, thirty-four, and thirty-two stories, respectively. Samsung Town was designed by architects Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF); it is “twinned,” albeit symbolically, with Disneyland Paris and Sony World (Tokyo), which might suggest something of a fun park. It is, however, more corporate than fun (although the same cannot be said for its neighborhood, of which more following). The architecture of Samsung Town’s towers is late modernist, beautifully elegant, internationalist high-tech. Immediately opposite, however, is the bizarre Gttower, designed by Dutch architecture ἀrm Architecten Consort, a twisting, writhing, wavy steel-and-glass contortion that deἀes the corporate rationality of Samsung Town—its signiἀcance is that it demonstrates the free-form architecture that flows (seemingly literally) from the design processes that have been suddenly unleashed by the computer applications that Samsung (among others) seems to have bequeathed.41 Gttower would seem to confront Samsung by highlighting the liberating power of the computer and Samsung’s own failures of imagination in the realm of content—another issue for chapter 5 (ἀgure 4.17).
This is also, incidentally, close by the site of the infamous 1995 Sampung Department Store collapse. The area houses the Korean Supreme Court and the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office; nearby Seorae Maeul (Seorae Village) is home to much of Seoul’s expat French community (Kim Eun Mee and Kang 2007, 82–84).42
The real surprise of Teheranno is immediately behind the corporate towers, especially in the back street on its south side—a muddled space of small buildings of two to six stories, with eateries, bars, bangs, and local shopping. It is every bit as vibrant as Teherrano, though differently and more frenetically so. This “landscape of entertainment”—widely exhibited in the ubiquitous back streets, also Itaewon, exuberantly in Hongdae, self-consciously in Insadong—can be seen as an urban vernacular. Like much vernacular, it responds to new tastes (desires, demands) and new technologies, especially those of consumption. So IT is inseparably part of it (ἀgures 4.18 and 4.19). We return to Gangnam (style) anon. 169
FIGURE 4.17 (a) Samsung Town and, immediately opposite it, (b) Gttower, 2012.
FIGURE 4.18 (a) Teheranno, and (b) Teheranno back streets, 2012. Whereas Teheranno could be found anywhere, its back streets are distinctively Korean.170
FIGURE 4.19 A Teheranno back street … almost the epitome of disaggregated, Seoul boxland, as well as of mountain-clinging Seoul, 2012.
Teherrano also replicates the underground malls ubiquitous in Seoul and described above in relation to Jongno, though here taken to a new extreme. COEX Mall is proclaimed to be Asia’s largest underground shopping mall, with convention centers, exhibition halls, many malls, movie theaters, aquarium, a games area used for televising computer game tournaments, and stages for seasonal events and public performances by celebrities. With its corporate towers, the back streets and their entertainment zones, and then underground COEX, Gangnam presents interdependent realms characterizing Seoul more widely.
Part 3
SEOUL AS LINES
Seoul is places, locales, neighborhoods, as recounted above. It is also experienced as lines and transits, the highways snaking between districts and along the valleys, and the ever-proliferating network of the metro subway system, described in chapter 3. Seoul presents as a sprawling metropolis of dispersed and often-discontinuous towns strung along these highways and subway lines. Although now visually dominated by the multitowered estates of repetitive residential apartments, much of the city is from earlier decades and is characterized by 171unrepetitive small blocks on small allotments—the boxlands referred to above, frequently with small shops or other business premises at ground level, and two or more levels of very small flats above. Subsequent development has inserted newer high-rise towers into these older districts or else adjoining them on previously underdeveloped land; also, at subway interchange points, it has typically inserted corporate office towers and larger-scale commercial premises.
To the rider on the subway train who might randomly chance to the surface, Seoul does indeed present as a collage of seemingly disconnected, differentiated cities—the districts, towns, and neighborhoods often visually isolated from each other by the intervening mountains, referred to previously. Although any of these numerous lines could highlight this experience of the city as discontinuous and disorienting, the present account will turn to Line 1; it is the oldest and can especially relate to the pathways of the city’s modern growth.
Line 1 and the Incheon corridor
Subway Line 1, following the older Korail commuter line from the Japanese era, began operating in 1974 (see ἀgure 3.7). It runs from Dongducheon, indeed a dispersed town in a mountain valley to the north, through Seoul Station and on to the contiguous city of Incheon in the west. An extension to the south, completed in 2008, goes to Asan, a city of universities, spas, and hot springs, distant from the metropolis but increasingly a commuter city. Line 1 covers some ninety-ἀve stations, and to traverse it is to observe the processes of the city’s development.
Such a transit, northward, would begin at Seoul Station—a shambling, chaotic area of postwar rebuilding, a boxland hill town to the west and Namdaemun Market to the east, the Japanese station now the museum observed in chapter 3 and the new station a modernist display in glass and steel. The line passes under Jongno, Dongdaemun Gate and Market, and thence into the geological region of mountain and valley of the city’s inner northeast. Here, at the intersection with the Jungang Line, is Hoegi Station: it is part of the broader expanse of the city and within the Dongdaemun-gu District (see ἀgure 4.14). The area was developed mostly in the 1970s and 1980s and, accordingly, like Dongdaemun itself, the masses of older, smaller, two- to six-story blocks dominate. The multitower housing estates are few, small, and mostly the result of redevelopment of older neighborhoods under programs outlined in chapter 3.
Despite some proximity to inner Seoul, Hoegi reads as a separate, self-focused town. It has its own commercial precinct, its own 172proliferation of churches and universities (notably Hankuk University of Foreign Studies). It also presents, as a building type almost unique to Seoul, a splendid example of a wedding palace: it is a box, like most others, but adorned with fantasy domes, spires, and minarets. To stray for one moment from Hoegi, Seoul is a city of “districts,” city-as-montage, and one of these is Ahyeon-dong Wedding Street, strategically adjoining the prestigious Ewha Women’s University, concentrating wedding shops, galleries, and palaces, although wedding palaces are also distributed across the greater city. Equally as splendid as Hoegi’s wedding hall are the churches, nondescript blocks like all others but distinguished by their attached, witch’s-hat spires and indicative crosses, which are illuminated red at night (ἀgure 4.20).
FIGURE 4.20 Hoegi, 2012: boxspace, churches, and wedding palaces.
While Hoegi is clearly part of the more concentrated area of inner Seoul, from there Line 1 moves through the narrow valley of the Junghangcheon Stream, a tributary of the Han River—the Cheonggyecheon flows to it, near to Hoegi. One of the Line 1 stations in that narrow valley is Dobong. There are older, smaller flats and commercial premises around the Dobongsan subway station, as around Hoegi and other stations nearby, but then there are the massive, multitowered estates both interspersed in and surrounding this older development as newer development effectively overwhelms the older town.43
At Dobongsan there is again the proliferation of churches: in one magniἀcent example, a vast, blue box is signiἀed as a church only by its giant statues of Jesus and Mary. As the line moves up the valley, the towns become newer, although their cores are always from an earlier time. At the end of the line is Dongducheon: while there has been a village there since at least the 173Koguryo age (37 BCE to 668 CE), it is presently a small town from the 1970s that is now effectively overwhelmed by the outward expansion of the metropolis via the proliferating multitowered housing estates.44
Other aspects of the city’s growth are manifested in the Line 1 corridor toward Incheon in the west. Whereas the corridor to the north traverses a mountain valley, this to the west is mostly across the alluvial lands and mudflats of the Hangang estuary, with mountains rising from it like islands. Also like islands are the numerous white multitower housing estates projecting from a sea of mostly brown, smaller, and older, but similarly dense, development scarcely distinguishable, in the distance, from the brown mud of the floodplain.
The line crosses Guro District, southwest of the old city. Guro Industrial Complex was Korea’s ἀrst industrial complex of its modern resurgence, created in 1967 out of the Second Five-Year Economic Development Plan, with a focus on textiles, dressmaking, and other labor-intensive industries—all labeled as part of the “Miracle on the Han,” with Guro being the “core” of the miracle (Kim Donyun 2015). In the 1960s and 1970s, Guro contributed 10 percent of national exports. It subsequently suffered decline but then rapidly changed from a manufacturing zone into a “futuristic” center for research and development and, since 2000, has developed into Korea’s largest digital industrial complex. As elsewhere there are stands of identical high-rise housing blocks, as well as areas of older, low-rise mixed development from earlier decades.
Oryu-dong, some three kilometers farther along the Incheon corridor, is a neighborhood of the Guro District. Like other villages along the Seoul-to-Incheon line in the Japanese era, it has long been integrated into the metropolitan region. On the north side of the tracks it presents as a hillside community like many others in the broader region: it has apartment block complexes of various ages but also small, older blocks of flats, even some separate houses, small pockets of houses that predate the modern development era and that take rooftile systems from a distant past. It is very complex spatially, in part due to the hillside location and in part to its development having been stretched over several decades. Very small-scale industry—effectively cottage industry—is interspersed with the housing and equally smallscale commerce. There are many churches, as well as a large Catholic college on the hillside; there is also a small private art gallery manifesting the virtually ubiquitous presence of new Seoul as congeries of art, its production, and inevitably its marketing (ἀgure 4.21).
On the south side of the line are high-rise buildings from a previous decade, poorly ἀnished and now poorly maintained in what is clearly a rundown area. There is also the Pyungkang Cheil Presbyterian 174Church and its associated Abraham Park Kenneth Vine museum of biblical artifacts.
FIGURE 4.21 Oryu-dong churches, 2012. Churches are multiple in Oryu-dong, as elsewhere in Seoul. Look carefully: there are actually two churches in (a), and others behind the viewer in both (a) and (b).
Yeokgok, two kilometers beyond Oryu-dong, presents the imagery of a (noncentral) business district: office towers, high-rise apartment blocks, churches and their conical spires, and back streets and alleys. There is also one of Seoul’s fifty-three Home Plus department stores.45 Yeokgok (like many other noncentral business districts) provides an interesting contrast with high-corporate, high-fashion Gangnam and Teheranno: it is the contrast of a still-struggling underclass versus an ever-rising middle class, the unfashionable versus the fashionable, small-scale commerce and production versus the realm of corporate control, slowly dilapidating high-rises from the past versus the constantly reinventing architecture of internationalist elegance of Gangnam (ἀgure 4.22).
Bupyeong is yet another (noncentral) business district in a long sequence along Line 1 (ἀgure 4.23). It is also the interchange station with the Incheon Line 1 serving the city of Incheon and its environs: its northern arm from Bupyeong connects to the Incheon International Airport Line, its southern arm to the extraordinary New Songdo. Bupyeong has its ghosts: in April 2001 there was a brutal and illegal attack on unionists at a Daewoo plant, earning it the title “the second Gwangju” (Kwon Jong Bum 2011, 67–68). 175
FIGURE 4.22 Yeokgok, 2012: (a) undistinguished high-rise slabs (at the far end of the row is the Home Plus department store); and (b) two of Yeokgok’s many churches.
FIGURE 4.23 Bupyeong shoe market, 2012: the surrounding architecture is again that of the undistinguished high-rises of the city’s expansion along the armature of Line1 in the age of dictatorship and the “Miracle on the Han.”176
Incheon Line 1: Sinyeonsu to Woninjae
The southern line of the Incheon Subway Line 1 system runs southwest from Seonhak Station, under the broad avenue of Younsoo-2dong of Younsoo (Yeonsu) District, Incheon. Together with the subway and its next four stations, the avenue constitutes a long access corridor that connects (via other subway lines) to downtown Incheon and, far more remotely via Line 1, to downtown Seoul. Although the sense of order (regimentation) of this and other newer sectors of Seoul stands in dramatic contrast with the chaos of older areas, this is still a sprawling megalopolis that simply follows the flow of ἀnancial capital, always abetted by a capital-dominated planning system—the semblance of order is merely the consequence of the scale of its development. It is, indeed, the scale of the chaebol written on urban space. The convenience of its string of subway stations has seen the corridor here become prime residential space, especially on its northwest side, which, around the 1990s, became lined with a ἀne array of boxlike, mostly identical apartment blocks, as elsewhere distinguished from each other only by virtue of the large numbers painted on them.
The apartments’ occupants hasten to assure the casual visitor or interviewer that this is middle-class real estate, that these are indeed upmarket blocks in an area of some prestige, and that the individual units are larger than those enjoyed by most of the city’s denizens. In the late 1990s visitors to the Seoul region would commonly be taken to areas such as Sinyeonsu and Woninjae on this line, as examples of newer and more upmarket high-rise housing. By 2012 the estate had not aged well; furthermore, its standards were clearly below those of more recent estates such as those encountered in the Gangnam District, above; here car parking is at grade, whereas it is more often underground in the Gangnam estates. In Sinyeonsu-Woninjae there is a clear spatial hierarchy: the blocks near Woninjae Station are poorer, more run-down; there is a razor-wire fence between them and the slightly-better-presented estate to their immediate north.
Unlike inner Seoul or inner Incheon, with their disorder and wild displays of advertising boards and other signage, here the boxes are regimented, with only the name of a proprietorial chaebol occasionally displayed. There are interruptions to the discipline, however: periodically along the corridor, though discreetly hidden behind the screening blocks, there will be a small local shopping and community center—also a plain box, though smaller, discordant and riotously adorned with advertising boards as if to compensate for their banishment from the grand blocks. Inevitably, it seems, there will be a church somewhere or other in each such building, its spire and cross rising 177incongruously out of the boards and logos. As elsewhere, Christian witness is on aggressive display.
If the boards, crosses, and regimented blocks present as dialectic images in the sense of Buck-Morss’ argument—throwing into question the dilemmas and contradictions of the society itself—here there is yet a further incongruity. On the southeast side of the avenue, near the Sinyeonsu subway station and opposite the procession of blocks, is another display of order and precision in the form of an immaculately reconstructed Chosun dynasty shrine complex.
Korea is not the only country that purchases or else reconstructs antiquity. The rebirth of Kwanghwamun Gate and Gyeongbokgung Palace are the most dramatic and politically charged cases, in this instance of full reconstruction. Woninjae presents a more modest case, in Woninjae Shrine on the southeastern side of the road and immediately facing one of the housing estates. Woninjae was constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth century to protect the tomb of and hold ancestral rites for Lee Huo Kyum, who was founder of the Incheon Lee family and was given the post of Lord of Sosung (the old name of Incheon) in the fifteenth year of King Hyunjong of Goryeo (Koryo) (1024). It was originally in Shinji Village but was relocated to make way for housing developments in 1994 and moved to its present site, which happily adjoins the founder’s burial place.46
Woninjae Shrine is an elegant, understated assembly of traditional Confucian pavilions. Almost opposite it, embedded in the housing estate, is its dialectically opposed image: a disordered church, conical spire, and red cross. While small shop blocks adorned with a spire, a cross (illuminated red at night), and multiple advertising boards are ubiquitous in Seoul, this at Woninjae—one of several sprinkled through its estates—is especially poignant in highlighting the inseparability of Korean Protestantism and Korean capitalism (albeit at a very local scale). The shop block presents as a dialectical image in its own right, and in another sense in its proximity to the Confucian shrine. The mutually reinforcing effect of Confucian discipline and Protestant ethic in the formation of modern Korea has been alluded to in chapter 3; at Woninjae they come together as incongruous images (ἀgure 4.24).
The Woninjae Shrine complex, like the reconstruction of Gyeongbokgung Palace, can certainly be seen as a reassertion of the cardinal principles of Korean architecture as articulated in the retrovision of Kim Swoo Geun. Its effect here is to point up the radical departure from such principles in the Corbusian-utopian world of the regimented blocks—as well as in the wild, undisciplined display of new (Protestant) religion in the churches-as-shops little more than one hundred meters distant. It is ironic that whereas the regimented blocks defy the Kim Swoo Geun precepts, the churched shop blocks can be seen to comply with at least some such rules: they are human-scale and harmonious with their (urban) environment. The shrine, on the other hand, is to be seen as representing the foundational source of such precepts; it is also surely to be seen as nostalgic—repetition as an act of mourning for the loss of the past. 178
FIGURE 4.24 (a) Woninjae Shrine and its dialectical opposite, (b) a festooned box (indeed, it is a church, albeit with additions), 2012; the high-rise slab blocks loom over both.179
Songdo
There is another space that, in the 1990s, would be juxtaposed with the regimentation of the subway line through Sinyeonsu and Woninjae, some three kilometers distant from it. The next subway station after Woninjae gives access to Songdo Resort, albeit now increasingly lost in new development, facing the West Sea and bordering Mount Cheongnang to the northeast. The resort dates from the colonial era: the Japanese had opened the Suin Line in 1937 and decided to develop the Songdo coastline to make money from tourism; in 1939 the coastline was opened as a beach. After the Korean War the area was a US and British military camp. The military departed, and in 1963 the beach was reopened. Its hotels, food outlets, nightclubs, bars, and other entertainment adjoined a fun park (with a Ferris wheel, a few other rides, and a sledding slope) that opened in April 1964 to provide weekend escapes during the dour dictatorship.
It is the township on the landward side of the resort that is of interest. A somber element is the Incheon Landing Memorial Hall, opened in 1984 and overlooking the resort; it comprises a museum, monument, and lookout dedicated to those who died in the Incheon Landing of the Korean War. There are the flags of the sixteen nations that fought under the UN mandate, a memorial tower, and some relief carvings of soldiers and battle. The town is yet another landscape, mostly of architecturally undistinguished boxes. Not all of them, however, could be described as bland: they carry appliqué decorations evoking tawdry imaginings of “other places”—the classical world, an Alpine chalet, the fantasies of ἀ e Arabian Nights. While small incidences of fantasyland will be found in Insadong, Hongdae, and especially in the absurdist “wedding palaces” that occur in the forlorn business districts around so many subway stations, here they proliferated. The escapeland of the fun park has aged and now departed, suppressed by newer forms of family entertainment; the adjoining township has thrived, albeit to entertain entirely different groups—its bars and nightclubs and the barkers for available ladies reveal its role as an out-of-town Itaewon. The exuberance of architectural fantasyland is distinctive of Songdo; Itaewon is altogether more architecturally sober. 180
New Songdo
A far grander fantasyland is in the making, however. New Songdo is being developed on 1,500 acres (6.1 square kilometers) of reclaimed land in the Incheon harbor area, immediately to the south of the Songdo getaway township and some twelve kilometers south of central Incheon. It is part of an Incheon Free Economic Zone, a response to China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs). The rhetoric proclaims it as Songdo IBD (International Business District). Its designer is the New York office of the Kohn Pedersen Fox architectural practice, with Gale International and Korean steelmaker Posco E&C as the developer.47 Its ἀrst phase opened in July 2009; by its completion date in 2015 it was planned to have 80,000 apartments, 4.6 million square meters of office space, and 930,000 square meters of retail. Its advertising blurb makes many claims: a sixty-eight-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower will stand as “Korea’s tallest building” and “most advanced corporate center”; 48 there will be the obligatory Incheon Arts Center, concert hall, opera house, and museum; a canal network inspired by Venice (after all, it is built on a saltwater marsh); a “Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea,” with the usual appended luxury housing estate; top private “international” schools and an “international” hospital; and the Yongsei Songdo Global Academic Complex and the hoped-for campus of a major overseas research university.49 Controversially, English is to be the lingua franca.
There has been some success in attracting splinter campuses of American universities, the ἀrst (in 2014) being State University of New York at Stony Brook, with courses in mathematics and science (Park Eun-jee 2013). This was joined by a unit of George Mason University from Fairfax, Virginia, with University of Utah also offering courses. A major research university, however, is still awaited.
The New Songdo master plan is clever and reflects the “postmodernist” design approach of Kohn Pedersen Fox, with intersecting diagonals enabling six zones to intersect to create the town’s center: office, residential, and commercial zones can all face onto the generous one-hundred-acre Central Park. It is also very clever marketing, as one would expect from that designer (and on the earlier story of KPF, see Jencks 1987).50
The Cheonggyechong refashioning and New Songdo are both to be seen against the political program of Lee Myung-bak, who promoted the ἀrst as Seoul mayor (2002–2006, pitching for the presidency) and the latter as president (2008–2013). Lee had built his political career around rhetoric of green and low-carbon growth as Korea’s avenue for a postindustrial future after sixty years of reliance on export-oriented growth (Lee Myung-bak 2005; 2006). 181
New Songdo suffered in the 2008 global ἀnancial crisis and there were scrambles for reἀnancing. Incheon’s famously gung-ho mayor, Choi Ki-Sun, reinforced the state’s backing for the project, emphasizing its “real quality.” Yet there is always a doubt with such lifestyle theme parks: “‘If you live in Manhattan, why would you want to live in a new town in Long Island or somewhere like that?’ wonders Jongryn Mo, a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University.”51 New Songdo’s rival may not be the Chinese SEZs but Seoul. Where are innovation, creativity, and cosmopolitan lifestyles to be found? The Teheranno-Cheonggyecheon dichotomy may be instructive, as one suspects that creativity arises in disorder more than in order, although, note that Teheranno is generating its own disorder in the vibrancy of its back streets.
New Songdo in 2012 presented an extraordinary scene: there are vast spaces, completely derelict, not a person in sight, and almost no vehicles. Some new trees, now stunted, had been planted in an otherwise bare landscape. It is desolate and disconcerting—one is alone, abandoned in an alien, surreal world. I arrived at New Songdo on 16 April 2012 through the very spectacular International Business District (IBD) subway station; I was the only passenger on the eight-carriage train. This would be the central business district for the new, emerging international economy. The names of other stations on the subway line reveal other aspects of the delusion: Campus Town, TechnoPark, BIT (Bio-Information Technology) Park, University of Incheon, Central Park, and then, at the end of the line, International Business District.
The reclaimed mudflats present as a vast expanse of weeds and desolation, with empty office towers and empty apartment towers rising forlornly from superbly engineered roads with no vehicles; pedestrian paths less well engineered and now breaking up as the reclaimed land subsides and the weeds intervene; and numerous office towers empty except for a small component of the proprietor’s (Posco’s) building—there is no sign of life in the distant high-rise housing districts (ἀgure 4.25).52
Central Park could still prosper, as it is well designed; however, it is derelict and overgrown with weeds for the most part. There is a monument to the “Hello Kitty” marketing enterprise, now closed and abandoned.53 It is all empty, and a sure sign that the lessons of 1997 have not been learned—overinvestment, capital idly tied up in unoccupied real estate, poor maintenance eroding the wished-for image. There is no visible provision for the disheveled, enlivening chaos of Seoul space—shops, stalls, street market, bang, entertainment. The only shopping in this grand new city are two coffee shops and a 7–Eleven convenience store. 182
FIGURE 4.25 The splendor of New Songdo, 2012: (a) a splendid residential district; (b) the grandeur of Central Park. It is an awe-inspiring experience to be the only person in an immense city.
183The real question is: Would the visiting executive or conference-goer want to stay here or in Seoul or Gangnam or Hongdae? Would the innovators and creative thinkers live here or in Itaewon, Hongdae, Dongdaemun? It is the universal problem of start-up cities—they are competing with real urban space.
Completely missing is any evidence of an understanding of how Seoul urban space actually “works.” There is no possibility for back streets with their small businesses (for family investments of time and effort, for petty entrepreneurs) or for local pastimes and entertainment.
The juxtaposition of the old, decrepit theme park of the Songdo Resort with the new, postmodernist lifestyle theme park of New Songdo—and they are within sight of each other—is cautionary. Theme parks age rapidly, and obsolescence very soon hits, as happened a decade and more ago with Songdo and seems already to be afflicting New Songdo. Organically evolved cities—inner Seoul as a paradigm case—seem somehow to regenerate, even after colonization, civil war, and dictatorship. It is the ultimate dilemma for planners designing the expansion (sprawl?) of their cities.
By 2015 New Songdo was still largely empty. Gale International was reported to be now walking away and in ἀnancial trouble as a result of it, though still managing aspects of the resort’s residential component. New Songdo was by then in “real trouble.”54
ἀ e Paju corridor
While the pages above have commented on aspects of the growth of the city through the medium of the generative Line 1 of the subway system, the northern bank of the river’s estuary has necessarily been bypassed. The northern Paju corridor focuses on the city of Paju, “capital” of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and just south of Panmunjom, an allegedly “grey, grim locale.”55 The present interest, however, is in Seoul’s expansion into the corridor and, more speciἀcally, the phenomenon of Paju Book City.
The Paju corridor might be traversed via the Gyeongui subway line or the expressway along the north shore of the Hangang River. Seoul is for the most part mountainous, although, once in the Paju corridor, as in that to Incheon, the landscape presents as clearly estuarine. The river is very wide and sluggish, and winds through an ancient estuary of mudflats and silt plains from which the mountains incongruously rise like islands from the flat, extensive plain. The corridor has long been agricultural and is still so: in the spring ἀelds are prepared for sowing with last season’s straw infusing the mud; then there is the annual cycle of summer growing and autumn cropping; and ἀnally the 184expanses of plastic-covered hot houses for managing winter crops. The agricultural communities present as poor and poorly housed; many could be described as slums.
The corridor is also and more recently industrial, with factories and storage facilities interspersed with the farmland. By far the largest of these industrial-type facilities is Kintex, the Korea International Exhibition Center, from 2005, in the form of an airplane, with its swept-back, fifteen-story office tower as the tail ἀn.
The other intrusions, along the river in the south (Incheon) corridor and further back in the north (Paju) corridor, are the extensive estates of high-rise apartment towers. They present as discontinuous and dispersed (though certainly in the Incheon corridor they are not uniformly discontinuous). Seoul, indeed, presents as a dispersed metropolis—the mountains account for much of this, but it may also be a defensive planning strategy. There are the ubiquitous boxlike churches, with their conical spires and red crosses, usually on the lower, rounded hills of agricultural and industrial villages; on top of the higher mountains one will usually see a shrine—sometimes it will be mountain-Buddhist, sometimes shaman. The overall effect is of a disheveled landscape of incongruities and of the urbanization of the countryside.
Paju Book City
Another “new city” to Seoul (and indeed, like New Songdo, an element of its sprawl) is Paju Book City, some thirty kilometers northwest of the central city on what its proponents claimed would be an “urban wetland,” adjacent to the Han River. It is a “national culture industrial complex” on a large site (some 396,000 square meters, in a 1.6-square-kilometer master plan), ἀrst proposed in 1989, as the country was emerging from its Dark Age of military repression, and commenced in 1998. Its claimed purpose was to assemble publishing companies, printers, paper manufacturers, and book publishers. It was initiated by publisher Yi Ki-Ung, who envisioned a city that might bring together the reconstruction of the culture, the rediscovery of the region’s marsh ecology, and a new architecture for a rediscovered Korea. It presently comes under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. Edwin Heathcote has described it as “[l]ike something imagined by Calvino or Borges, it conjures up a city of wisdom and surprise, of endless narratives, meaning, knowledge and languages. What it does not evoke is an industrial estate bounded by a motorway and the heavily guarded edge of the demilitarised zone. Yet somehow, South Korea’s Paju Book City begins to reconcile these two extremes into one of the most unexpected and remarkable 185architectural endeavours” (Heathcote 2009). It is a fusion of industrial estate and office park. It is also an architectural zoo, of publishing houses each with its hopefully signature building. Most of these buildings, however, are either underoccupied or by 2012, and still in 2016, deserted. The overall impression is forlorn, ill-maintained, abandoned—a sunk investment. The city’s broad landscape design was by London-based Architecture Research Unit (ARU) and dates from 1999. This is a unique example of a programmatic city, where everything revolves around “the book.” The goal was to develop Korea’s publishing industry by combining all the processes of publication: planning, editing, printing, logistics, and distribution.
Rhetoric around the project proclaims it to be a “City to Recover Lost Humanity”56—the implied recovery being both that of the memory of the ancient landscape (the marshes of the river estuary) and of the deeper human culture of Korea (loss, erasure). Again there is Edwin Heathcote’s account:
Publishing had gathered momentum and status after years of underground activity and censorship, and it re-emerged following the liberalisation of the regime in 1987 in an explosion of small, often family-run publishers. Their beautifully crafted books attempted to re-engage the nation with the history and culture that had been distorted, manipulated and lost over a period which included colonial rule from Japan, brutal civil war and military dictatorship. The project was also, at least in part, a reaction to the rapacious redevelopment of Seoul, the loss of the city’s historic fabric and its rapid embrace of the culture of bigness and congestion (Heathcote 2009).
The city’s Asia Publication Culture and Information Center claims to house book cafés, used bookstores, galleries, and restaurants; various exhibitions and fora are hosted; and there is a cultural center for children, with a performance hall, gallery, and book café (ἀgure 4.26). The project is also intended to be something of a museum of contemporary architecture. There is the beautiful Mimesis Museum, housing a book publisher’s private art collection, designed by architect Alvaro Siza, and based on flowing concrete forms around a central courtyard, allegedly inspired by a sketch of a cat—owing nothing, however, to any memory of the “lost humanity” of Korea. The ἀnest buildings on the site, however, are those designed by ARU itself (with local partner Choi Jong Hoon). The ἀrst was founder Yi Ki-Ung’s own Youl Hwa Dang publishing house. To the street it presents a dark, bland façade, and thereby a recollection of the traditional Korean courtyard house and its blank external walls—indeed, a box. Its internal courtyard, 186however, offers transparent membranes that might recall the paper walls of traditional hanok—the lost past held within the anonymous box of present Seoul? The second building was for the Positive Thinking Publishing House, designed as domestic-scale offices, in two units that enclose a small public plaza. These are of traditional dark-gray Korean brick set in a steel frame that evokes a Eurasian hybrid of Beijing (or Seoul?) courtyard houses and equally conservative Mies van der Rohe modernism.
Paju Book City might present as something of an architect’s response to the assembled, decorated boxes of Insadonggil. What is missing, however, is the life and dynamism of Insadonggil and the organic chaos of its architectural production and constant reproduction. It is the difference between bottom-up production of both the built environment and of culture more widely (art, literature, books) and an imposed, top-down vision—as well as between informal urbanism and controlled urban design. Missing from Paju is the promise of enlivening chaos (informality as process) that might lead to the productive subversion of its “designed” disorder—which, of course, is in reality order. As Paju is designated as an industrial zone, building dwellings is difficult, yet some housing has been provided—very limited in extent but more spatially generous than what one normally ἀnds in Seoul. There are stirrings of urban and commercial activity: a street market and some small shops, as well as a church on the hill behind the project and a small shrine on the mountain above.
FIGURE 4.26 The Asia Publication Culture and Information Center, 2012.
187The architecture of Paju Book City is one of boxes, some very skillfully designed and detailed. However, they are internationalist in their styling and could be found anywhere. What is interesting is their presence here, in fringe Seoul: in this speciἀc geographic and cultural context they can be seen as holding a mirror to the small-scale boxland of noncorporate, non-high-rise Seoul. Here the dialectical, mutually deconstructing imagery, in the Buck-Morss sense, may be stretched over some thirty kilometers, yet its power seems enhanced by that distance.57 The urban design of Paju Book City has just such a deconstructive program: to reestablish the reality of the estuarine ecology—to bring wetlands back into the urban landscape, as well as to counter the culture of the city’s modern development (ἀgure 4.27).
FIGURE 4.27 Paju Book City as estuarine wetland and boxland, 2012.
188Yi Ki-Ung has suggested that Paju Book City calls for a somewhat deeper reading than the merely architectural or ecological:
Thirty-six years of Japanese colonial rule, followed by a chaotic liberation period, the Korean War fought between kin, and an indiscriminate influx of Western culture upon a Korean society made stagnant by authoritarian rule since the founding of the state until the 1980’s in the economic order of the world’s soaring industrialization: all these contributed to bringing intense psychological confusion and disorder to the people’s sense of values. We have arrived at a stage today where life in urban to rural areas is extremely distorted.
It is now time not merely to lament over the situation, but to ἀnd new alternative solutions….
Correcting the picture stained and distorted by history is not easy, but we expect this city [Paju Book City] to aid Korean society’s expansion and reproduction by making a new milestone in Korea’s desolate urban culture. Witness a new ideal in urban culture. It is our hope that such a specialized city will serve as a model in boosting Korea’s general development of industrial structures.58
Here the wetlands imagery stands against both the back-turning development of modern Seoul and, perhaps more interestingly, the very sculptural “restoration” of the Cheonggyecheon rivulet of the old city. Note, however: both Cheonggyecheon and the Paju wetland are designed, and both raise the question of authenticity.
Paju Book City presents the same dilemma that confronts New Songdo. Would the creators of the new “cultural content” elect to live here? Arguably not. So, might it be the editors and subeditors who are to be relegated here? Editing, like writing, is a creative activity, and with online services, it is likely that the editors, like the authors, will elect to live elsewhere. So one is left to speculate that the obvious abandonment of Paju Book City simply reveals the logic of a wired world. Publishing, as distinct from printing, storing, and distribution, may ultimately be seen as a cottage industry, dispersed to editors’ and copy editors’ own homes.
There is one further, clearly intended dialectical image presented in Paju Book City. Adjoining the large, elegantly designed and emblematic Asia Publication Culture and Information Center is Seohojeongsa, a traditional Korean house that was originally an annex to the main house of Kim Dong-su in Ogong-ri, Jeongeup City. Built in 1834 and restored and moved to its present location in 2000, in 2001 the house was titled Seohojeongsa, meaning “cultivating the mind and having 189reedy creek in west”: The notice board at Seohojeongsa on 18 April 2012 read, “‘Jeongeupsa’ … is a traditional Korean popular song that was created in Baekje dynasty, and loved by people to Joseon dynasty through Goryeo dynasty. It says that a woman prays the Moon to shine brightly for her husband not to stumble in the dark. The Paju Bookcity [sic] chose it as their symbolic song, in the hope that the longstanding wisdom, integrity and trust brighten the publishers’ way forward like the moon in their hearts.” It is the same phenomenon of purchasing antiquity observed in the case of Woninjae Shrine—nostalgia is transformed into an urban design strategy.
Heyri Art Village
Something of a spin-off from Paju Book City is Heyri Art Village (also referred to as Heyri Art Valley). It was initially conceived, in 1997, as a “book village” linked to the larger project, but as it began materializing many artists joined and transformed it into a “cultural art village.” With more than 370 artists claimed as its supporters (writers, artists, cineastes, architects, musicians), and with a collection of workrooms, museums, “art spaces,” and galleries, it has become a signiἀcant focus for creative activity—perhaps giving the lie to the speculation immediately above. It has also assembled a collection of distinguished smallscale architecture that, for the most part, ἀnely acknowledges its landscape. Kim Jun-sung, one of its principal architects, comments, “My vision of the project was to not merely focus on the expression of individual buildings but more so on organic ability to maintain the original setting” (Curley 2010). It is unlikely, however, that this “organic ability” can arise through formal design. Heyri’s claimed attraction needs to be seen alongside Paju Book City’s manifest lack of attraction; the claim, however, just may be justiἀed: the (Confucian) scholar’s retreat has long been a phenomenon of Korean culture, a place to which the Chosun artist or thinker would withdraw, either periodically or permanently, from a politically hostile urban realm. For some, Heyri may succeed in fulἀlling that role—at least for a time. The brief retreat from Gangnam?
Against the ideal of the artist’s retreat and Confucian-infused nostalgia, however, is another reality. The art village’s restaurants, art shops, children’s play areas, and other attractions manifest a canny commercial strategy on the part of Paju City and the village’s entrepreneurs. Heyri Art Village is a theme park, skillfully marketed.59
The self-conscious creativity and tourist fun of Heyri Art Village presents perhaps the ultimate dialectic juxtaposition: only six kilometers away is the Demilitarized Zone, arguably the world’s most heavily 190fortiἀed border, to contain what is—equally arguably—the world’s most repressive state (repressive against the freedom of creativity as historically understood and as Heyri Art Village would proclaim). The art village might well be seen as riding on the undoubted tourist attraction of the DMZ and its terror—questionably a retreat from Gangnam but also emotionally from the DMZ.
Yeongi-Sejong and new towns
There is one further case of projected escape from the maelstrom of Seoul and the thought of the North. In 2002, new President Roh Moohyan had planned to create a new South Korean capital on the site of the existing small town of Yeongi, which would be developed and renamed Sejong, for King Sejong the Great—the ultimate Chosun recall. The Korean Supreme Court, however, ruled a relocation of the national capital to be unconstitutional; accordingly, in 2004 the plan changed to the creation of an administrative center accommodating nine ministries and four national agencies and an envisioned population of around 500,000. The new “capital” opened on 2 July 2012, with thirty-six government agencies to be located there by 2015. The project has always been controversial, partly on grounds of its economic efficiency (Kang Hyun-kyung 2009, 2). The existing town has long been a signiἀcant educational hub, with university campuses (including a Hongik University campus); it is also, as a consequence, largely English-speaking. A further criticism has been that the agency relocations would result in separations of workers from their families remaining in Seoul (it is some ninety minutes from Seoul) and that Sejong City would accordingly experience a “toadstool” effect, with bars, nightclubs, bang, and worse mushrooming to provide entertainment for isolated workers. Sejong would become another Itaewon. The counterstrategy has been to promote Sejong as a hub of education, science, and business. Yet, again, how is it really to outweigh the attractions of Hongdae in Seoul itself—and of Itaewon or Gangnam, for that matter?
Mention must be made of ἀve other projected “escapes.” In the late 1980s the Korean government had initiated the “Two Million Home Construction Plan” to tackle a severe housing shortage and soaring house prices. Five new towns were planned to adjoin Seoul: Bundang, Ilsan, Pyeongchon, Sanbon, and Joongdong. By the mid-1990s the towns’ residential areas had been mostly completed and the housing goal achieved; however, they remained largely dormitory suburbs to Seoul, with underdeveloped commercial and community services. Lee Chang-Moo and Ahn Kun-Hyuck (2005) could report, however, 191that by 2000 commercial dependency on Seoul had reduced though dependency for employment and for services continued.
It is interesting to observe that all ἀve towns are at similar distances from inner Seoul (twenty to twenty-ἀve kilometers), but that Bundang and Ilsan are much larger than the others. Bundang and Ilsan are also on undeveloped land more distant from established centers, while the other three are effectively expansions of existing built-up areas. Seemingly consequentially, the government’s self-containment goal had been more successfully achieved in Bandang and Ilsan than in the other towns. Sejong, even larger and more isolated, may have a better chance. Witness, however, the travails of New Songdo.60
Fragments
There seems to be a (central, not-quite-central, or noncentral) business district at each of close to a thousand subway stations; there are multiple and proliferating centers for digital technology and production (Teheranno, Digital Media City, Guro Industrial Complex, New Songdo’s wished-for TechnoPark, and BIT Park, …); art districts likewise multiply and proliferate (Insadong, Samcheong-dong, Hongdae, Cheongdam-dong, …); the chaebols similarly seem to be variously multicentered and uncentered (Samsung both everywhere yet nowhere); everywhere Seoul presents as a high-rise, “big” city characterized, nonetheless, by fragmentation and discontinuities.
In its fragmentation, Seoul might not be entirely unique, although it is difficult to think of any other city that, as a developed-world city, has taken such a form so late and so rapidly. Seoul illustrates the processes of developed-world fragmentation in fast motion. Rapidly increasing affluence, economic transformation (from third world to ἀrst world), and fragmentation have occurred simultaneously. All at high speed.
The account above has tended to present Seoul as a city of interior spaces. The space of everyday life might move from the conἀnes of the boxlike apartment to the similar conἀnement of the office or workshop or factory, through the cavernous subway stations and the crowded, claustrophobic trains moving underneath the city. Almost emblematic of an interior city is its arrival and departure point: at Seoul Station, the Incheon Airport “Very Fast Train” arrives and departs from Basement 7. When one adds the underground shopping arcades and the new world of leisure in the microspaces of the bang, there is the image of a city of small spaces and underground lines of travel. One looks with difficulty for the interstitial spaces as venues of civic life.
This seeming caricature of the city might well hold for Seoul in winter. Seoul’s is a difficult climate, very cold in winter and for most of 192the spring. While Korea’s great invention of ondol (traditional underfloor heating) has been translated into the boxlike apartments, and there is heating, albeit less traditional, in other indoor spaces, exterior space can be forbidding.
For the rest of the year, however, exterior Seoul space explodes with life. The Western visitor will be disoriented by the extraordinary anomaly of the city’s sophisticated, technologically bewitched denizens crowding the ubiquitous street markets. It borders on the incredible that the most modern of cities, global exemplar of what seems to lie ahead, could be a city of street markets, informal economy, street vendors, and disorder. For the chaos of its street markets—ampliἀed by ever-present evangelizing street Christians and political protesters—Seoul rivals any city of Asia. The street markets and the disheveled back streets constitute one level of the city’s real “living room.”
With the outburst of spring, the parks and gardens arise as another level of the “living room.” Winter sees Seoul as a gray, leafless place; spring brings the brilliance of cherry blossoms and then a lushly, verdant city; many of the parklands are new, the trees still immature, yet already this can present as one of the great, green cities.
The point of these observations is that Seoul emerges as a city of extraordinary contrast—the dialectic written on the fabric of the city. It is a multiplicity, conἀning interior spaces against a wildly exuberant exterior, civic realm, in the seeming absence of an intervening, interstitial, space of hybridity. There is, however, yet another space that is indeed interstitial: in cyberspace, interior and exterior hybridize—a theme for chapter 5.
Part 4
SEOUL AS ASSEMBLAGE AND THE PLACE OF MEMORY
The text above has described, at varying levels of detail, various fragments, bits, and pieces grabbed from the vast fabric that constitutes Seoul. How, though, are we to understand Seoul as something more than just the districts and transits that form the experience of the city? This is the question that preoccupies the remainder of the present chapter.
In his very thorough exploration of the Japanese understanding of the city and their would-be imposition of that thinking on to Seoul, Todd Henry (2014, 49, 52) sees all such thinking as captive to the organic idea of the city. 193
Gilles Deleuze rejected the organic metaphor, the superἀcial analogy between society and the human body, for explaining classes, groups, and human institutions—including, notably, the city and its spaces. The reasons for such rejection are well summarized in DeLanda (2006, 8–10). As an alternative approach to such explication, Deleuze has proposed assemblages, wholes characterized by relations of exteriority. So a city (Seoul) is to be seen as an assemblage of places, and places in turn as assemblages of streets, buildings, ideas, technologies (the hand phone, the Internet, the bicycle …), the watcher and the actor, the vendor, walls, gaps, interstices, a metro subway station, power, action, inaction, sounds, music, smells, memories, the rain—all have relations to other places, ideas, imaginings (Hongdae, an Itaewon back street, a Gangnam laneway). Such relations of exteriority imply that a component part of an assemblage can, in the mind’s eye, detach from it and become part of a different assemblage, whether materially or affectively, where its interactions will be different (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Deleuze and Parnet 2002); they also imply that the properties of component parts cannot explain the relations that constitute a whole—relations do not have as their causes the properties of the component parts between which they are established (Deleuze 1991, 98; DeLanda 2006, 11). An assemblage is marked by multiplicity, immanence, instability, by “becoming” rather than “being.” Deleuze writes, “What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never ἀliations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind” (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 69). The exclusion of lines of descent is to exclude organisms and species from the deἀnition. It would similarly exclude the metaphor of the city as an organism. Assemblages, in this conception, are complex constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning (Livesey 2010, 18).
AbdouMaliq Simone, in an exploration of the space of Jakarta, dwells on the inherent instability of an assemblage (“collection”): “As a collection, each component has to deal with the others, but they also have a life outside the collection, something that came before and that is ongoing. So when technology, people, things, and space operate as a collection, this process has various implications for the different networks in which each of these elements is individually situated…. Any collection of these things in one place inevitably has an impact on 194the places from which they were drawn. And they act back” (Simone 2010, 7–8). This is akin to Jacques Derrida’s insistence on the notion of grafting to account for the nature of montage (and Derrida’s “montage” can in some sense be equated with Simone’s “collection” or Deleuze’s “assemblage”). Gregory Ulmer (1985, 88) quotes Derrida at length to the effect that “no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which is not itself simply present” (Derrida 1981). So the interweaving of grafted elements in the montage results in each element “being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements in the chain or system.” However, there is always more than one such chain for any sign and more than one level of meaning; indeed, insists Derrida, such meanings are “absolutely illimitable” (Derrida 1977, 185). Here memory cuts in, conditioned as always by the individual’s understanding of a past that such memory would recall—history, the contestations of historiography. Thus we return to the themes of chapter 1. To graft will change the meanings of both the source and the montage: “Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that too, as it affects the new territory” (Derrida 1981, 335). So, a question: how do the grafts that characterize the assemblages constituting Seoul radiate back, via distorted memory and contested history, to other sites (places, ideas, times)?
In A ἀ ousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 88) suggest that an assemblage is to be understood in terms of two dimensions. On a ἀrst, horizontal dimension or axis are deἀned the various roles that an assemblage’s components may play, from purely material at one extreme (a Cheonggyecheon rag-trade designer tied in to Dongdaemun Market) to purely expressive at the other (King Sejong alongside the US Embassy—Derrida’s “sign”). These roles are not mutually exclusive, as a given element may perform both roles in varying degrees (Samsung City). The other dimension deἀnes the processes in which these components variously become involved: these may either stabilize the assemblage by increasing its internal homogeneity or by stabilizing its boundaries, or destabilize it (DeLanda 2006, 12). Stated otherwise, “the assemblage has both territorial sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away”—the both stabilizing and eroding roles of a Gangnam back street, or the simultaneously symbiotic yet subversive relationship between Cheonggyecheon IT boffins and a Gangnam chaebol as an assemblage of convenience (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88).61
Urban assemblages are immensely complex, bringing together buildings, spatial relations, technologies, forms of power, and random and unpredictable actions.62 Central to Deleuze’s thought are 195multiplicities. The assemblage flies apart; as its components attach in other places and thereby form other assemblages—an architectural detail or a memory or a word sending the mind’s eye elsewhere—so the identities of things and places will multiply, constantly unstable. Deterritorialization, becoming, constantly besieges (emancipates) the mind. The city’s multiplicities of images and the dialectics of their contradictions, ambiguities, and discord bring back suppressed memories.63
Todd May (2005), on the idea of assemblage, suggests that immanence, duration, and affirmation of difference are concepts through which “the world becomes strange to us again.” Assemblage thinking is part of the way in which the city becomes strange to us again, and its possibilities can be contemplated though never fully grasped.
It is here that the vitality and the constant “becoming” of Seoul are to be located. Cheonggyecheon; the bland buildings that line it; their diverse, low-rent occupants; the adjoining Dongdaemun Market—all can be seen as elements of an assemblage. There are relationships of interiority, yet those of exteriority seems to dominate: the computer boffin attaches to a wider realm of e-Korea (Samsung, the video games bang, other innovators and entrepreneurs—another immanent assemblage); the market vendor attaches to family, residential district, suppliers, and a shifting market demand; the mind contemplating Cheonggyecheon Stream will drift to the stories of King Sejong and his mural, to the stream’s periodic pop concerts and performers, to the memories of its previous existences—other immanent assemblages.
The small Muslim street at the Itaewon mosque—effectively a back-back street to Itaewonno and encountered above—can illustrate the temporal character of assemblage. It is after the Friday prayers that the street most comes to life, a focus of community activity, attracting with both the mosque and its surrounding small shops. Then its participants will disperse to become elements of other assemblages—homes, workplaces, coffeehouses. Itaewon-dong also harbors “Nigerian Street,” which will periodically gather the small Nigerian community; the neighboring Hannam-dong will bring together the Indian, German, and Italian communities; there are two China Towns, in Hyoja-dong and Yeonhui-dong, and a Japanese Town in Ichon-dong. Just north of the Hyehwa subway station, on Line 4, is a Catholic church at a traf-ἀc roundabout on Daehakno Road; on Sundays after the 11 a.m. Mass (in Tagalog), this small stretch of Daehakno becomes Hwehwa Filipino Street; there is a street market, with stalls and vendors of Filipino goods, exchanges of information; then, at 5 p.m. the market (and the assemblage) ends, relations of exteriority resume their power, and the Filipinos disperse. The street may remain, but it is now another place.64 196
It is as assemblage, unstable, always becoming, that Gangnam projects the constant immanence and the unpredictable and uncoordinated metamorphosis that underlies its dynamism and vitality. Likewise it is in the absence of such powerful, ever-changing relations of exteriority that Paju Book City’s lack of any sign of vitality is to be located. Its purposeful isolation deἀes vitality. At a much vaster scale, New Songdo also attempts to divorce itself from the wild forming and transforming of assemblages and links—the proliferation of connections and liaisons—that distinguish Seoul.
This flying apart—immanence, becoming—explains the richness of Seoul space. It also explains the vastly greater richness of chaotic Seoul vis-à-vis “designed” New Songdo. Seoul is “from the bottom up,” emerging from countless uncoordinated decisions over a century and more; New Songdo is the single great idea of a committee.
Assemblage thinking needs to be taken further. There is effectively a second emerging—perhaps already emerged though still always immanent—Seoul in cyberspace and increasingly global rather than local or national. As both manifestations of the city are to be seen as assemblages, they are also to be seen as breaking up and reassembling in new forms and constellations. This is the subject for the chapter to follow.
NOTES
1. This observation is akin to Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) identiἀcation of the eschewing of metanarratives as the hallmark of “the postmodern condition.” In considering “the urban condition,” Michael Dear (2000) translated Lyotard’s argument into the intellectual realm of urban space, questioning the validity of the idea of “the city” as concept or metanarrative in the present age. Instead, Dear writes of the city as a collection of places in a space of “Keno capitalism,” also of the “power of place” as the real concern of late modernist geography. While the present argument also rejects the possibility of some metanarrative to account for the city (there is no overall structure that can explain the myriad places that constitute Seoul), it will invoke assemblage theory to account for how these places form and transform, also constantly come together yet fly apart in a world of immanence and becoming. For another perspective on this phenomenon, Jameson (1991).
2. A number of papers in Korea Journal 47, no. 4, in 2007, approached the theme of Seoul as a patchwork of ethnic communities. See also Kim Eun Mee (2008).
3. I have previously developed the following argument in King (1996).
4. “Touristic” Seoul brings its own ambiguities: while Seoul does not present as a focus for global tourism, in 2014 it ranked tenth among global destination cities for international visitors, and sixth for visitor spending (Hendrick-Wong and Choong 2014).
5. Sir John McLeavy Brown was a lawyer in the British Customs Service, based in Canton and subsequently in Seoul to manage the Korean Customs Department. King Kojong in 1893 offered him a position as ἀnancial advisor and chief commissioner of customs. Upon the murder of Queen Min in 1895, the king fled but ἀrst handed absolute control over the Treasury to McLeavy Brown (New York Times, 31 August 1905).
6. The actual declaration was at the Taehwagwan Restaurant, out of fear that a declaration at the park could lead to a riot.
7. It is also symbolic of the continuing, wary glance to Japan: Jongno Tower is not Japanese in its referencing, yet architect colleagues shortly after its 2811999 completion would darkly comment to me that “it’s Japanese, you know”—therefore presumably invalid as a Korean icon.
8. A site of some ambiguity: the store’s reviled collaborator-entrepreneur in the Japanese era was referred to in chapter 2.
9. Historical Seoul had always been a city of markets, marked by informal assemblage. In the speciἀc case of Jongno, a night market had been established there in 1916 as an initiative of the Korean community following the 1915 Korean Industrial Exposition (Henry 2014, 112). This set the pattern of formal and informal market juxtapositions that characterizes much of present Seoul commercial space.
10. Where bang signiἀes a room, norae carries the meaning “singing your way to success”; the “singing rooms,” norae bang, therefore carry a certain ambiguity (De Mente 2012, viii). I acknowledge my indebtedness to Jorge Almazan for drawing my attention to the full signiἀcance of the rise of the bang. Jorge Almazan, pers. comm., 23 November 2009.
11. On the bang and their derivation, see Song Do-Young (1998); Huhh Jun-Sok (2008); and Oh Myung and Larson (2011, 145–146).
12. Yi Whan-woo, Korea Times, 4 April 2012.
13. On the role of the PC bang, see Kang Inkyu (2014).
14. Soju is a distilled beverage, akin to vodka, indigenous to Korea. A 2002 study ranked it number one in global sale records of the diluted alcohol market; see Han Joonhye, “Korean Soju,” TED Case Studies, no. 756 (2004), http://www1.american.edu, accessed 6 November 2015.
15. The origins of Chinese manhua “comics” can be traced back at least to the Ming dynasty and, in their present satirical form, to Chinese newspapers of the 1870s and to Shanghai picture books in the 1920s. Sun Yat-Sen established the Republic of China in 1911 using Hong Kong manhua to circulate anti-Qing propaganda. There has long been a subversive dimension to the manhua, albeit mostly subliminal in recent times; similar undertones can be sought in much of the Korean manhwa.
16. Unhyeongung, strictly speaking a royal residence rather than a palace, was the residence of the Daewongun (1820–1898), the father of King Kojong. He was regent during Kojong’s minority and effective ruler of Chosun thereafter. The residence shares much of the controversy and ambiguity that still attaches to the Daewongun.
17. On Ssamzie, see “Company Introduction,” EC21, http://ssamzie.en.ec21.com, accessed 19 May 2011.
18. The genesis of both markets is traced by Lee Ki-baik (1984, 230).
19. SK Group is the third largest of Korea’s chaebols, comprising ninety-two subsidiary and affiliate companies. While its business is mainly based in the chemical, petroleum, and energy industries, it also provides services in construction, shipping, marketing, and information technology. Like other chaebols, SK is a monarchy: its chairmanship is inherited from father to son, from its founder, the late Chey John-hyun, to the eldest son, Chey Tae-won, who is married to the daughter of former president, Roh Tae-woo.
20. Samil (Sam-Il) refers to the March First Movement, hence Korean “self determination” and the Declaration of Independence. Also on the Cheonggyecheon, see Kal Hong (2011, chapter 6).
21. The antirestoration debate can be seen in the context of two others: ἀrst, the wider debate on retention of more immediate history versus restoration of an imagined past that had especially raged around the demolition of the Jungang-cheong (chapter 3); and second, the debate over retention of existing, vibrant communities that lined the Cheonggyecheon and on which Seoul’s creativity was said to partly rest (Ryu Jeh-hong 2004). 282
22. In K-pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea, John Lie notes that, in transforming Cheonggyecheon, Lee Myung-bak also obliterated the concatenation of used-book sellers and secondhand music dealers for the second time; the ἀrst had been with its paving in the 1960s. A slice of Korean history was thereby ἀnally consigned to oblivion (Lie 2014, 6).
23. For further references in this debate, see Kal Hong (2011, 144–145n3).
24. The overriding rhetoric of this intended makeover relates to Seoul’s 2010 designation as “World Design Capital” by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. It is in part the context in which Cheonggyecheon Cultural Plaza is to be read.
25. See “Shaping Change—Strategies of Development and Transformation,” on the Bertelsmann Transformation Index: http://www.bertelsmann-transformation-index.de, accessed 30 July 2011; on the determinants of the Korean informal economy, Joo Donghun (2011).
26. From the extensive literature on Korean prostitutes and the US military, see Moon Seungsook (2010); and Höhn (2010).
27. In the face of strident opposition to the American presence in Korea, the garrison is (in the 2010s) being progressively moved south, out of the inner city, albeit very slowly.
28. It is worth noting that the Korea Tourism Organization describes Itaewon as “a unique place where one can meet people of diverse nationalities and cultures” as well as Seoul’s ἀrst designated “Special Tourism District,” and extols its “diversity of culture, shopping and entertainment experiences”; Korea Tourism Organization, “Itaewon,” http://www.visitkorea.or.kr, accessed 26 January 2010. The blogs, on the other hand, stress the venality.
29. Cheil Worldwide is a global marketing and communications company and Korea’s largest advertising agency. Its forerunner, Cheil Jedang (a sugar company), was founded in the 1950s by Lee Byung-chull (1910–1987), who had previously, in 1938, founded Samsung (chapter 2). Cheil is now a subsidiary of Samsung.
30. “New Master Plan for Yongsan Business Hub Unveiled,” Chosun Ilbo, 17 December 2011, http://english.chosun.com, accessed 17 December 2011.
31. “Yongsan Apartment Design ‘Conjures Images of 9/11,’” Chosun Ilbo, 12 December 2011, http://english.chosun.com, accessed 17 December 2011.
32. If one is to focus on avant-garde artistic production, Beijing would be seen as being ahead of Seoul. See Wu Hung (2005).
33. The spread of the Seoul Art Space program across the space of the city is well suggested in the map “Arts Space of SFAC,” http://english.sfac.or.kr, accessed 29 July 2015.
34. “Seoul Art Space Geumcheon,” Transit Artists, http://www.transartists.org, accessed 28 July 2015. Seoul Art Space Geumcheon is linked with the Dutch program, TransArtists.
35. The label “Gangnam” here is used somewhat broadly. The term “Gangnam area” commonly refers to the southern region of the Han River. When urban development began in the 1960s, the area was called the Yeongdong District, or “east of Yeongdeungpo,” and comprised four wards, of which Gangnam was one. In 1975 Seoul City named the area Gangnam-gu. In 1979 Songpa-gu and Gangdong-gu were separated from Gangnam-gu, then in 1988 Seocho-gu was similarly separated off. So Banpo might be in the greater Gangnam area, but not in Gangnam-gu.
36. The Corbusian “perfection” of the estate cannot be overemphasized. In his plan for Ville contemporaine for three million people (1922), Le Corbusier stressed the importance of a pedestrian world separated from vehicular traffic, passing through a richly landscaped ground that provides a setting for recreation of all kinds as well as for schools, restaurants, cafés, clubs, and youth centers. It is in 283Seoul that the dream seems ἀnally to have been achieved. In this particular fragment, however, it is disturbing that the “richly landscaped” pedestrian world is right beneath the immensity of Highway 1, and that one needs to pass under Highway 1 to access the “restaurants, cafés, clubs” segregated from the Corbusian purity of identical towers and green paths. See Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret (1935); and King (1996, 51–54).
37. “Gang Nam Seoul, South Korea,” GlobalPhotos.org, http://www.globalphotos.org, accessed 12 July 2011.
38. The principal advocates of this myth, alleges Thrift, are Harvey (1989); and Virilio (1993).
39. For an extended exploration of such issues, see W. Mitchell (1995).
40. I have previously documented a similar, also distanced juxtaposition of formal-corporate and informal-entrepreneurial realms in Cyberjaya vis-à-vis Kuala Lumpur, in the case of Malaysia (King 2008).
41. “Seoul’s New Solar-powered GT Tower Boasts a Mind-bending Wavy Façade,” Inhabitant.com, http://inhabitat.com, accessed 30 April 2012.
42. On Seorae and its distinctive French character, see Lee Seung-ah, “French Town in Seoul Exudes Exotic Beauty,” http://www.korea.net, accessed 29 July 2015.
43. Dobongsan is a three-peaked mountain in Bukhansan National Park; the station is named for it. The walking trail to its peak (at 740 meters) brings its own confrontation with the relics of obliteration: bunkers from the Korean War. It also presents Cheonchuksa Temple, the oldest in the region, and several other temples.
44. Dongducheon, like Dobongsan, also presents as a space of (potential) annihilation: it is close to the DMZ and houses the main camps of the US Second Infantry Division. However, the city also presents as emblematic of Koreans’ resentment toward the US presence, as it has long been embroiled in the conflict over US retention of its bases (Rowland and Yoo Kyong Chang 2015).
45. Home Plus is a South Korean / British discount store retail chain jointly owned by Samsung and Tesco. It is the second-largest retailer in Korea, just behind Shinsegae Group, which was also previously linked to Samsung.
46. This information is from the attribution board at the shrine, placed by the Lee clan and the city of Incheon, observed 16 April 2012. It is also summarized in “Woninjae, Incheon Yeonsu-gu: The Official Mansion of Incheon Lee Lineage,” Moe Girls’ Korean Story, blog, http://moe-hankook.blogspot.com.au, accessed 30 July 2015.
47. The majority stake is held by Gale International, with 61 percent; Posco with 30 percent; and Morgan Stanley Real Estate with 9 percent.
48. A no-doubt bitter irony is that it will not be Korea’s tallest building: that is the unἀnished ghost of the trouble-plagued Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. Furthermore, even in South Korea, it would be exceeded by two projects in the Yongsan Business Hub—if they are ever implemented.
49. See Songdo IBD’s home page, http://www.songdo.com, accessed 20 May 2011.
50. The Incheon City government had established a master plan for Songdo New City in 1992 at the time when ἀve new towns were also being planned for Seoul. In 1997 Incheon City invited three architectural ἀrms to submit proposals for a new master plan. From this process Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture was chosen. The Koolhaas proposal was truly revolutionary in a Korean context: there would be seven programmatic “bands”—business, media, university, culture, commercial, leisure, research—that would intersect but also leave a space of voids whose uses would evolve with the passage of time and ideas (see, for example, Jung Inha 2013, 128–129). This was abandoned, as the city wanted immediate success rather than evolution. Hence the turn to Gale International and KPF. 284
51. “New Songdo city: Atlantis of the Far East,” Independent, 22 June 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk, accessed 20 May 2011.
52. Also on New Songdo as a city without people, see Arbes and Bethea (2014).
53. “Hello Kitty” is another instance of Japanese neocolonization, as an aspect of Japanese kawaii (“cuteness”) culture targeting preadolescent females. Hello Kitty was introduced in Japan in 1975, created by Yuko Shimizu and produced by Japanese company Sanrio. The image and its products run like a rhizome through Korean urban space.
54. Kim Donyun, pers. comm., 27 August 2015.
55. Paju is the bleak, desolate urban setting for Park Chan-ok’s 2009 ἀlm of that name. The much acclaimed ἀlm Paju, part of the Korean Wave (chapter 5), explores the political tensions around the North-South divide, the present gentriἀcation of Korean cities, and the violence of development. Park described that, to her, Paju is always foggy and the urban expression of mystery (Park Sun-young 2009).
56. See “Paju Book City 1,” Davey Dreamnation, blog, 25 February 2011, http://daveydreamnation.com, accessed 15 June 2011.
57. The sort of urban elegance expressed through small-scale boxlike forms and found in Insadong, Paju Book City, and Heyri Art Valley (to follow), held up as a mirror to back-street, boxland Seoul, was also ἀnely displayed in the photo exhibition of new architecture, “S(E)OUL SCAPE: Towards a new urbanity in Korea,” in Florence and Barcelona in 2008. See http://www.arqchile.cl, accessed 31 May 2012.
58. Yi Ki-Ung, “City to Recover the Lost Humanity,” http://www.pajubookcity.org, accessed 4 May 2012.
59. For a ἀne collection of images of Heyri Art Village as both theme park and fun park, see http://pilgrimwithapassport.blogspot.com, accessed 12 July 2016.
60. There is a substantial literature detailing the failure of Seoul’s various new town projects; for example, see Ha Seong-Kyu (1998); Berg (2012); Jun Myung-Jin (2012); and Lee Sang Keon et al. (2015). The last of these gives a good history and assessment of Korea’s various essays in new town development. The program’s abandonment was announced in January 2012.
61. There is a certain temptation to impose a structuralist-Marxist ontology and critique on the ἀrst of these Deleuzean dimensions, seeing the expressive end of the axis as merely referencing the superstructure, thence to subsume assemblage thinking into critical political economy (also see McFarlane 2011, the response from Brenner et al. 2011, and the counterresponse of Dovey 2011). Instead, Deleuze seeks a distinctively different ontology, of the becoming of things rather than their being; so to see things as assemblages is to ask how are they constantly coming about, how are they working, how are they constantly becoming something else?
62. Assemblage theory is close to but not coincident with Actor Network Theory (Latour 2005; Farías and Bender 2010); it shares with ANT a preoccupation with the microscale, microeconomic, and microspatial. So the difference with structuralist-Marxist thinking is in part one of scale—the walker in the street rather than the visionary from on high (de Certeau 1984, 92–93).
63. Multiplicity also manifests in time or duration: “The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers” (Deleuze 1988, 38). Identity shifts across various scales of duration—it is multiple (we are multiple). For Deleuze, assemblage thinking is part of a much broader philosophical endeavor, namely to think a radically new ontology to do with possibilities—How might one live? (May 2005; Boundas 2010). “The concern is 285with multiplicities, possibilities, difference…. If things don’t have strict borders of identity and if the relations among them are not reducible to natural laws, then we can no longer be sure of what a body [a city] is capable. Perhaps there is more going on in our world than is presented to us” (May 2005, 72).
64. My understanding of the ethnic minorities of Seoul and their communities (as assemblage) has been greatly assisted by discussions at the University of Melbourne with Choi Sung Jun.