Seoul Urbanism on TBS eFM's Koreascape Colin Marshall

With the end of Koreascape comes the end of Koreascape's Seoul urbanism segment, and so we look back at all we've covered over the past two years. We also ask what the future holds for some of our past destinations, from the 63 Building to Ikseon-dong to Seoullo 7017 to Sewoon Sangga, and what they say about the likely direction of the city itself. Have a listen and you'll surely gather at least a few ideas for your own urbanistic journeys in Seoul to come.

This month we explore Sewoon Sangga, the concrete megastructure that has survived half a century of change in Seoul and is now the subject of a revitalization effort like no other. Originally commissioned by Seoul mayor Kim Hyon-ok (nicknamed "The Bulldozer") and designed by famed architect Kim Swoo-Geun (known for works like the Olympic Stadium, the SPACE Building, and the Freedom Hall), Sewoon Sangga opened in 1968 as Korea's first large development mixing both commercial and residential space. Now, with the eight original buildings reduced to seven and much of the business for its electronics shops lost to other parts of the city — but plenty of activity still going on in its labyrinthine interior and on it wraparound public decks — the Dashi Seun (or "built again") project is rethinking, remodeling, and augmenting Sewoon Sangga for the 21st century in an effort to bring together the expertise of the older generation already there with the enthusiasm of the younger generation of "makers" only just discovering the place.

We talk to Nikola Medimorec, co creator-with Andy Tebay of Kojects, an English-language site covering all manner of urban developments in Korea, with a focus on transport and public infrastructure. Nikola has recently got a lot of attention with the aerial photos of Seoul, Busan, and Daegu he has enhanced with the lines of those cities' subway systems. They show all these rail lines not in the abstracted form we've grown used to on standard subway maps, but as they really are, the way they pass through their real geographical environments. Executing the project in Seoul revealed to Nikola a few interesting qualities of the city's urban rail and its prospects for further development.

This month we talk about Seoul's chances of becoming the next great cyberpunk city, following the likes of the future Los Angeles imagined in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Chiba City imagined in William Gibson's Neuromancer, and New Port City (or Hong Kong) imagined in Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell. Expatriate photographers have found much of cyberpunk's "high tech meets low life" sensibility in Seoul's cityscape, especially on rainy nights in the parts of town full of old neon, crumbling alleys, and visible technological infrastructure. We ask what else Seoul needs to achieve proper cyberpunk status, and whether certain other cities in Africa or India might get there first.

This month, as summer begins, we discuss four recommended books about Seoul, three in English and one in Korean: Janghee Lee's “Seoul's Historic Walks in Sketches,” Jieheerah Yun's "Globalizing Seoul: The City's Cultural and Urban Change," SPACE Books' "Beyond Seun-sangga: 16 Ideas To Go Beyond Big Plans," and 오영욱's "그래도 나는 서울이 좋다" (I Like Seoul Anyway). Each of them offers new ways to perceive and consider the city — political, economic, architectural, artistic — and paves the way for other writers to approach Seoul from their own points of view in the future.

This month we walk the Gyeongui Line Forest Park, which cuts across four miles of Seoul on part of the path of the Gyeongui Line train, which back in the colonial period ran all the way to Manchuria. Spared from the high-rise development that now exists immediately alongside it, the area of the Gyeongui Line’s old tracks has become a linear park replete with bike paths, art installations, bookstores, and open spaces for members of the communities through which it passes to complete as they see fit. Beginning just south of Hyochang Park, it ends in the center of the Yeonnam-dong, a neighborhood that has in recent years become hugely popular among young people not least due to the Gyeongui Line Forest Park itself — whose lively Yeonnam-dong section its many young habitués now call “Yeontral Park.”