This year marks the 20th anniversary of the June 10 civil uprising of 1987, and the 10th year since the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We have prepared a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. We hope our readers can gain some insights into the nation's future from these articles. -- Ed.

By Laura Nelson

If you are reading this in South Korea, there's a one-in-two chance that you are within 70 kilometers of Seoul's City Hall. In fact, almost half the South Korean population lives in the Seoul Metropolitan region. Another 21 percent live in Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, Gwangju, or Ulsan -- all cities of more than a million residents, and a total of over 80 percent of the South Korean population lives in cities of at least 150,000 people. To be South Korean today essentially means to be an urbanite.

But historically, Korean society was rural. Even 100 years ago, when Korea had just fallen under the Japanese "protectorate," 19 out of 20 Koreans lived in the countryside. Most lived in small hamlets, supporting themselves through farming or fishing, and few people ever ventured further than the nearest market town -- which itself was likely to be not much larger than their home village. It was only with the rude push into industrialization that rural Koreans began to move to cities to search of jobs and opportunities. At that time, Seoul was a walled city of about 200,000 that had grown neither in territory nor population in 300 years. A person could walk from the west gate to the east in well less than an hour, and most movement in the city was pedestrian. But Korea was on the cusp of dramatic cultural, political, economic, and demographic change that would be reflected in, and facilitated by, the development of cities.

During the Japanese colonial period, mass relocation from the countryside reconfigured the spatial distribution of the Korean population, yet even at the end of the colonial period, more than 85 percent of Koreans were country folk. The process of urbanization accelerated after the division of the peninsula, as refugees from the north settled in cities, but it was the industrialization policies of President Park Chung-hee in the 1960s that ignited the explosive growth of Seoul, as well as Busan, Daegu, and new manufacturing cities such as Ulsan, Pohang, and Anyang. In a single generation, South Korea "tipped" from an agricultural, rural nation to one that was industrial and urban.

The simple word "urbanization" masks a complex experience of cultural, environmental, and economic transformation. Urbanization sounds like a technical process, whereas in fact it involves wrenching personal and societal changes which can be voluntary or imposed, enriching or impoverishing, or combinations of or passages through various states.

In the case of South Korean urbanization, much of the initial growth of cities was due to policies that pushed farmers and fishing families out of their traditional roles and away from their homes. Colonial-era urbanization, for example, was largely a result of the immiseration of the colonial agricultural sector, and the same might be said of much of the urbanization during President Park's administration.

In this context, urban migrants often tried to replicate the cultural and social patterns of their childhood. Some neighborhoods grew up around provincial identities -- for instance, many of the spontaneous neighborhoods (neighborhoods constructed by poor migrants who lacked land rights) that were built on the rough hillsides of Seoul were populated by people from one particular province, such as South Jeolla, and the accents, dialects, and food culture reflected the residents' predominant origin. But in other cases, urban migrants came in search of the fulfillment of dreams of wealth, modernity, or even anonymity. These new urbanites embraced and created novel social patterns.

South Korean cities are no longer growing at the breathtaking pace of the previous 40 years. In fact, the two largest cities, Seoul and Busan, lost population between 2000 and 2005 -- admittedly largely due to intraregional resettlement to new developments in the surrounding metropolitan regions. One important corollary is that the majority of residents in most cities are now native-born. While just a generation ago,most city dwellers were at the same time learning to live a city life and coping without the support of their extended families, now most South Koreans have no idea how to transplant a rice seedling. Of course,this can (and does) lead to grumbling from the older generation about the loss of "Korean" culture and values.

Urbanization and cultural identity

In fact, the pace and degree of urbanization generates a cultural identity conundrum for South Korea. South Koreans often present "Koreanness" to themselves and to the outside world as a cultural heritage rooted in the countryside. Whether the focus is on the Confucian honor of the yangban class or the honesty of the modest farmers, South Koreans produce idealized symbolic images of Korean cultural authenticity that emphasize the rural past rather than the urban present.

The elders' complaints that something significant has been lost are not entirely ungrounded, since cultural traditions that functioned on a variety of levels in the countryside are no longer meaningful in the same way for urban residents. For example, taking care of a family's ancestral burial site is now likely to be seen as a burdensome and time-consuming chore, whereas, in the past, care of the myo brought together an extended family, and reaffirmed generational interdependence through cooperation and sharing a special meal.

Farmers' rituals seem empty in an urban context, and so, are shaky ground on which to establish national identity. Yet the shallow history of urbanism in Korea makes it difficult to establish a Korean identity that reflects the urbanized reality and yet is not simply global, cosmopolitan, and generic. To some degree, the desire for some authentic Korean identity has been cultivated by the national government and by major business interests to elicit cooperation in the pursuit of economic growth, but it is also a cultural legacy of Korea's history of colonization and civil war. Whatever the causes of the yearning for a belief in authentic Koreanness, urbanization has made finding it, or describing it, much more elusive.

This is compounded by the fact that Seoul has become an increasingly cosmopolitan city. For much of the outside world, Seoul is the emblem of South Korea. In 2006, six million tourists visited South Korea, and almost all passed through Seoul. Services increasingly cater to foreigners as well as to Koreans' with progressively more cosmopolitan tastes. In the city's leisure neighborhoods, restaurants offering Japanese, Italian, and Vietnamese cuisine are proliferating. The national government and major business leaders understand that the global reputation of the nation is dependent, in part, upon the impression Seoul offers, and so it is in the nation's economic interest to make Seoul as efficient and as attractive as possible.

In contrast to the haphazard and often ugly buildings that characterized much of the construction from the 1960s through the 1980s, the last two decades have established an architectural standard in the major commercial zones that asserts South Korea's prosperity and sophistication. This has been accomplished at the expense of old buildings and neighborhoods, which have been ripped down and replaced with new constructions that, while usually much better quality and more beautiful, generally exhibit no particular Korean cultural specificity. Ironically, Seoul's prosperity contributes to the erosion of a visible national identity exactly when recognizable national difference is essential to creating an alluring international destination.

Seoul's Korean soul

Seoul's metamorphosis from a scrappy city rising from the ashes of colonialism and war into a world-class financial and political capital may, in broad strokes, have been at the cost of architectural heritage and character, but there are some exceptions.

The establishment of Insa-dong as a pedestrian district took advantage of the desire for commercialized "traditional" experiences that had created a concentration of fashionable tea houses in the area in the late 1980s. Insa-dong now houses a mix of older buildings and more modern ones that often self-consciously attempt to evoke a Korean aesthetic through the use of wood, plaster, and tile.

The Cheonggeycheon restoration project "reclaims" the central waterway of the historic capital, and incorporates reproductions of Joseon-era art as well as native plants to establish local specificity. Four north-south corridors are targeted for historic and "green" development to connect Chonggyechon with the city core. And here and there, individual contemporary buildings gesture toward the architectural past in their use of materials or in the characteristic roofline of old tile-roof structures.

Seoul is, in fact, also attempting to more effectively recapture its Joseon-era architectural past. For example, the city plans to move Gwanghwamun, the great gate at the north end of the avenue leading from Namdaemun to Gyeongbok palace, back several meters to its original location, and to reorient it on the proper axis according to principles of Korean pungsoo (geomancy), and renovations of several palaces are ongoing.

At the same time, however, architectural reminders of a less illustrious history have been systematically removed. The Japanese colonial administration building at Gwanghwamun was demolished in 1996, and the entire military base at Yongsan, occupied first by the Japanese military and more recently the site of the U.S. and U.N. forces, will be razed and turned into a park by 2012, according to city plans. Yongsan Park will be a part of an envisioned chain of green spaces linked throughout Seoul, according to the Seoul Metropolitan Planning Department.

City planners have had both small irritations and critical problems in their sights. For example, in the past, pedestrians crossed streets via overhead bridges or below ground tunnels, but the city has gradually been marking street-level crosswalks -- a boon to elders, the handicapped, and anyone carrying a heavy load. They have a plan to clean up commercial signage to reduce the overwhelming sense of being assaulted by menus, property for sale, and extra-curricular lessons.

But the effects of some changes are eerier: the redevelopment that creates "new towns" in run-down neighborhoods of Seoul provides tens of thousands of needed new housing units, but it also shoves aside communities of poor families who, once moved, are unlikely to afford to live in Seoul at all, stamping the city as the domain of the well-off.

Of course, a city is more than its built environment. Urbanism is also the human experience of being in a city. At over 10 million people, Seoul is a bustling, noisy place, constantly under construction. It is hard to find a spot from which you cannot somewhere see a mammoth crane in motion. Passing through the city, the smells of dust and diesel fumes mix with the more tempting aromas of street food. Young people pass endless hours in coffee houses; in run-down neighborhoods, you can sometimes find older people camped out playing cards on the sidewalk. In even the most anonymous-seeming apartment complex, neighbors acknowledge one another, while the crowding of a subway car frees people to jostle strangers to grab an open seat.

The problem of primacy and uneven development

One of the key questions regarding urbanization in South Korea is whether Seoul's dominance -- in terms of size, economic role, political power, and cultural attractions -- is a net benefit or a problem. Primacy has the advantage of concentrating resources and facilitating communication, limiting transportation costs, and reducing the incidence of duplication of effort.

Conversely, primacy can increase congestion and demand for urban space, driving up land prices (and, therefore, housing and production costs), creating transportation bottlenecks, and debilitating otherwise viable regions by draining talent and investment away from the periphery.

So, with nearly half the South Korean population living in the capital region, is Seoul too big? The jury is still out on that question (studies show both significant costs and significant benefits from Seoul's primacy), but, nevertheless, the national government has repeatedly attempted to redistribute resources away from Seoul. Such policies have often been driven as much by political considerations (cultivation of voters and/or disruption of the political opposition) as by economic ones.

During President Park's administration, the efficiencies clearly outweighed the costs of Seoul's dominance, but Park also directed development to his home region in the southeast. Other policies have been less successful. The greenbelt that surrounds Seoul was intended to limit city growth, but instead, it heated up land prices within the city, and dispersed people into bedroom communities far from their workplaces.

Policies to move national government functions have so far only reinforced Seoul's importance (for instance, the Gwacheon government complex is just a few kilometers outside the city's boundaries), and repeated plans to move government functions further away have not been realized.

Seoul's primacy does not seem to have choked the nation's other large and medium-sized cities. While some cities (generally those with political rather than industrial or commercial foci) have withered, Busan, Incheon, Daegu, Daejeon, Gwangju, and Ulsan have all gained population in recent decades and have experienced similar improvements in infrastructure and prosperity. Each of these cities has its unique charm, and many people who grow up in regional urban centers choose to stay rather than move to Seoul. But these cities compete for investment and development, and secondary city officials worry that it is hard to keep the best talent at home.

On the other hand, the urbanization of South Korea clearly has been accomplished at the cost of social vitality in the countryside. President Park's administration established agricultural policies that impelled a rural exodus, populating the nascent industrial sector; the legacy of these policies can be seen 40 years later in the inferior infrastructure, low income, and skewed demographics of the South Korean countryside. Worst hit was the southwestern region, which Park and his successors froze out of the development process.

And at the same time that farming became less viable, supplemental jobs left the countryside: In 1960, 41 percent of manufacturing jobs were in rural areas, but the current share is less than 5 percent. Rural provinces have seen an absolute decline in population: many able-bodied young people have abandoned the countryside for urban jobs, leaving a gradually-aging community behind.

While about 9.1 percent of the national population is over the age of 65, the average in South Korea's rural provinces is 18.6 percent, and in some of the provinces most heavily dependent on agriculture, over 30 percent of the population is 65 or older.

Given the hardships, farmers have difficulty finding women willing to commit to a rural life. Almost 35 percent of men in rural provinces in their 30s are unmarried, compared to a nationwide average of about 22 percent. Many farming men are turning to international marriage services, and farmers were a large fraction of the 12 percent of marriages between Korean men and foreign women contracted last year. In contrast to the dynamism of South Korea's cities, the countryside is ailing.

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The future of urbanism in South Korea

Perhaps the most pressing issue in the near future regarding South Korean urbanization is how citizens and policy makers will adjust to demographic changes, particularly to increasing diversity. At this point, only 175,000 foreigners live in Seoul, amounting to about 1.7 percent of the population. But while the foreign population is small, it is growing quickly and it is likely to become more significant as greater numbers of laborers immigrate and more Korean men seek foreign brides.

At this point, foreigners, particularly foreigners who look neither European nor East Asian, are often treated with condescension, or worse. This is becoming the focus of a great deal of public concern, but recent proposals to set up special schools for children of international marriages, for example, seem unlikely to foster a welcome space for these new Koreans.

This issue may be complicated by the fact that there is, simultaneously, growing income inequality and increasing geographic separation by class in the Seoul metropolitan area. As old neighborhoods are redeveloped and improved near central Seoul, poor populations are displaced to the periphery, creating an increasingly segregated city.

Jobs, too, are shifting, with higher value-added jobs remaining in the core, and lower value-added jobs moving to the city's outer rings. Since many of the international families are members of the laboring class, without effective policies to prevent it, metropolitan Seoul may find itself creating the kind of ghettos that cities in other parts of the world have tried so hard to eradicate.

The other critical issue is environmental. South Korea is blessed with a magnificent landscape, and its major cities encompass both water and mountains. Yet in Seoul, for example, not only does much of the towering architecture obscure sightlines, but a brown-grey shroud hides the mountains, except on rare days when the sky has been washed clean by wind or rain. Attempts to improve air quality and traffic flow by diverting people from private automobiles to public transportation (including congestion management, subway expansion, and improved bus services) have been only partially successful. And, as for the Han River that flows through the middle of Seoul, the city lacks the authority to manage water quality, as the river flows in from the east.

Meanwhile, towns that lie along the river upstream have every incentive to develop industrial, commercial and residential uses along the river banks, without consideration of the effects on Seoulites' experience. Obviously, the long-term attractiveness and very sustainability of Seoul and of the other major urban centers depends on wise management of these key resources.

Urbanization is a dynamic process, and it constantly presents new challenges. Urbanization is impossible to tame, and the response to policy shifts and incentives is unpredictable. The development of Seoul and the other major cities of South Korea has been a remarkable story, and the future of these cities is the essence of South Korea's future.

2007.08.27