between China and Japan and a three- hour flight from eight of the world’s top urban centers, it was designed as a major business hub. From central Seoul I take an express train to the airport, then a taxi across a very long causeway to Songdo. Before I arrive I can see the high-rises looming over the waterfront. Scott Summers, who works for Gale International, the U.S. company behind a large part of the Songdo project, takes me up to the 52nd floor of a residential building to look out on what his company has created. As I gaze at the neat rows of high-rise buildings punctuated by small and large parks and bisected by a canal, I realize that this place is the opposite of Seoul. It has ample room for residents to stroll the streets, play in parks and cruise the tranquil canals. “We drew our inspiration from cities around the world,” Summers tells me. “Pocket parks from Savannah, an arts center modeled on what Sydney’s opera house has done for that city, a huge swath of parkland based on New York’s Central Park.” The global financial crisis has made the Songdo project much more challenging than when it was first conceived. As we return to ground level and drive through the streets, it’s hard to assess the project’s success because only a small number of residents and businesses have moved in. Songdo is one of the most intensely planned places on earth. There is no history to contend with. There is only the future. I think about what Seoul residents have made of their city and wonder what Songdo will look like when those same human forces do their work here. If rapid and radical changes in Seoul are any indication, Songdo residents will make something distinctive, living—and entirely unanticipated—out of the raw materials this new city is offering them. EC
The fact that Suh’s work, while cerebral and abstract, had struck a chord with so many Seoul residents confirmed what I’d thought about the power and potential of the many Koreans now returning home. It was appropriate that this point was being communicated in Itaewon, a place with a strange and sordid past that was now home to many Korean artists, designers and architects who had made the same journey Suh had to America and back. Songdo is one of the most intensely planned places on earth. There is no history to contend with. CITY OF THE FUTURE What if the people who erected the thousands of ugly but functional apartment buildings that dot Seoul, who laid down city streets sometimes eight lanes wide, who built this place, as Myounggu Kang told me, out of necessity and not for beauty, could start again and build an entire Korean city from scratch? What would it look like? Just seven miles from Seoul’s international airport, and adjacent to the city of Incheon, is Songdo, an entirely new city built on top of land reclaimed from tidal flats. It may provide an answer. No one lived in Songdo before—the land was covered by the sea. It wasn’t thrown together to accommodate a housing crisis. Located
down the street from where you live and work. You know the people. You know the neighborhood. And it better be good, because you’re going to have to keep looking at it for as long as you live [there].” This rapid transformation of Itaewon also makes me ponder how quickly things change in Seoul. “We have one of the most mobile urban populations in the world,” Myounggu Kang, the Seoul University planner, told me. “About 25 percent of the city’s population seems to relocate each year. And clearly this turnover has a tremendous affect on how rapidly things can change.” He suspects that education is behind this extreme mobility. “Many of our best schools are located in the Gangnam area, south of the river,” he says. “And so it may be that parents are moving there, despite higher prices, when their children are at critical points in their education, then moving back to more affordable areas when they graduate.” After decades of living abroad, Korean expats are returning to Seoul. These returnees are, of course, accelerating the development of a cosmopolitan Seoul, bringing back not just foreign cultural influences, but also examples of Korean culture intermingling abroad: Vatos, a new Itaewon restaurant, serves the kind of Korean tacos that the Kogi truck pioneered on the streets of Los Angeles. During my visit, Seoul residents waited in long lines at the Leeum museum to see one of their own, Do Ho Suh, a Korean-born artist who splits his time between Seoul and New York and whose work explores migration, permanence and what it means to be Korean. Inside the vast exhibition space I see three-dimensional exteriors and interiors of traditional Korean homes, constructed in elaborate, intricate detail, but built entirely out of colored silks that hang from the ceiling.
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