By Michael Breen
If you walk along the road in Seoul from Namdaemun to the city plaza and look up at the corner by the Hanwha Building, you will notice high up in one tree, stripped now of its last leaves by the November winds, a solitary bird's nest.
Nests are rarities downtown. This is the only one in the whole street. What idiot bird, I found myself thinking, would want to raise its young up in the air like that, with the din of traffic rising into its home and surrounded by buildings where office workers can idly observe their every move?
Birds, I thought, should know better. But not us, for is this not how we live in our Korean towns and cities?
Are a majority of us not stuffed in apartments? Do we not live up in complexes where you can't open the windows on summer nights because the noise bounces off the buildings and gets amplified as it rises up to your lounge? I once lived in an apartment by the riverside road where we couldn't hear the TV if we had the window open.
Do most residents not live amid clutter, in spaces too unattractive to invite friends for dinner and too small for a guest bedroom?
And what about the false sense of privacy in apartments? Are our living rooms not in fact too visible to others? It's easy to forget when you're on the 15th floor that you can be spotted wandering about in your ``ajeossi" underwear or doing naked impressions of Rain. When your view is the apartment block in front of you, it's natural to peek into the lives of its residents. I sometimes see two or three men smoking in the stairwells of different floors and feel like shouting across, ``Hey, there's someone above you."
When we were young, one of my brothers put a poster of a movie star on his bedroom window, facing outward, and cut the eyes out to better monitor the movements of the girl who lived in the house behind ours. He also had binoculars. I bet there's some of that going on in apartment country.
And are the buildings themselves not ugly? And this does not only apply to the cities. You come across apartment blocks in the countryside where, you would assume, there is ample space for people to spread out horizontally in harmony with the surroundings, rather than put their village into one vertical monstrosity.
But that's looking from the outside. What about from the point of view of people who live there?
My current residence is in a complex that does a fine job of contributing to the ugliness of the western slope of Mt. Inwang, an otherwise beautiful spot right in the center of Seoul. But once inside, you don't see the ugliness you create. I have a dense green jungle outside of my kitchen and study windows in the summer and now that winter is upon us, can see the mountain's peak. I can also see a couple of the buildings in the shaman town discreetly located at the foot of the hill.
But the view doesn't explain why I live there
Nor does availability. Apartment dwelling is not a matter of lack of choice. People voluntarily queue up to pay millions of dollars for a small space in the sky in the dull Gangnam section of Seoul. This area is desirable for some peculiar reason. Those who live there seem to walk tall. When people get on or off at the fashionable Apkujeong station, young women in the subway car are guessing if they are actual residents or mere shoppers. Apparently they can spot the difference.
But if you get off yourself, it's hard to see why anyone would want to live there and not in, say, Pyeongchang-dong, on the slopes of Mt. Bukhan, which is, in my opinion, Seoul's top dong.
A big factor is convenience. Houses have taken a long time to catch up with apartments. Also, in apartments, you don't have to do anything. I lived in a house a few years ago and one winter the garden hosepipe burst. The whole place was drenched before the plumber got there. That wouldn't happen in an apartment.
But the main reason is security. While street crime is virtually absent in Korea, burglary is common. Not so, for obvious reasons, in apartments.
If you ask people why they live in them, many will cite safety as the first reason. It is a sad indictment of modern life that fear of other people should determine such an important choice.
Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants Exclusive Partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com