Disappearing towns

A village in Seoul where local residents get ready to move out to make way for an urban redevelopment project in this July 2020 file photo. Korea Times file

 

Every so often, the Korea Times publishes an article about the destruction of one historic neighborhood or another, usually in a poor district of Seoul. Each piece brings for me a nostalgic pang for the Korea of yesteryear. The intricate alleys and passageways of the city’s older districts are a relic of one of the most important and transformative stages in the country’s history – a time of rapid post-war growth when a people united in the face of a common threat, rebuilding a nation and forging a future together. That future has now arrived in the form of sparkling buildings looming into the sky, and it is destroying the very towns where its progenitors were born, lived, worked, died.

Indeed, I am sitting now in a café on the edge of a series of colossal apartment complexes. They have been completed very recently, in the past year or so, and they tower glitteringly over everything around, including the local mountain. A few years ago I could have stood in the same place (it was a fruit and veg shop then) and I would have been on the edge of a very different neighborhood. No apartments but a sprawling mass of single- or double-story homes: low and brooding buildings laid out in a criss-crossing maze of dirty paths with overhead a Kabelsalat drooping heavily at every junction.

Dear reader, if you have ever travelled in urban Korea for more than ten minutes, you will certainly know the kind of neighborhood I mean. They are legion, but they are disappearing rapidly. And it is bittersweet.

On the one hand, the rebuilding process takes no account of previous buildings or even topography. While constructing the vast new series of apartment complexes near my house, they artificially raised the whole ground level, building stairs and elevators to connect the complex with the outside world, now a literally inferior area. The new has erased all vestiges of the old, even reshaping the very land itself.

And as each historic neighborhood falls, it is replaced by one with no soul, no continuity with the past, no trace of individuality. The town around me has morphed into every other one around the country, populated by the same supermarkets, cafes, ice-cream shops, restaurants, burger joints. As more of these apartments are being built, the physical environment is becoming more and more bland, our visual experience merely a choice of which one of ten or twenty brands we look at.

Even the most hardened capitalist must wince as the bulldozers trundle in to start replacing the old buildings with identikit apartment blocks a thousand miles high. The intricate designs of cranes and hares on wrought metal gates, the green rooftops smattered with drying peppers and ceramic pots of kimchi or gochujang – all gone, all replaced with indistinguishable cells stacked one upon the other in a series of cramped gentrified towers joined together by vast underground car parks.

Yet even as the heart aches and the eye droops, a quiet voice in the back of the head persists: these new ones are better, it says. You wouldn’t want to live in one of those old places.

And the voice is right.

The neighborhood behind me that has just been destroyed was only a few steps above a shanty town. While I might enjoy walking through it, I also hate driving through the cramped streets and I would certainly not want to live in one of the houses there.

Seen in the very worst light, it is possible that my desire to see the old neighborhoods survive has nothing to do with the quality of life of its residents. My feelings could be ungenerously attributed to some kind of touristic desire to see some kind of “authentic” or “historic” Korea.

I don’t think this characterization is fair, but there is clearly a kernel of truth somewhere within it. A more charitable – and accurate – interpretation is that my concern derives from a fear that the country’s history is being steamrollered once again. On the whole, Korea’s post-war industrialization paid little heed to the preservation of history, though admittedly the fact that Seoul changed hands four times during the Korean War certainly helps explain the city’s dearth of older structures.

Perhaps this is a slight tangent, but there is something to be said for the poor quality of construction too. Many buildings seem to start falling apart not too long after they are completed. The industry does not build for the long term, and while this may well be in the interests of the construction companies – it is cheaper and ensures future business – it is not good that homes need to be rebuilt so frequently simply because of the poor standards of previous years. The country is far richer now than it was even twenty years ago, so it would be nice to imagine that builders now are constructing homes to a much higher standard. Sadly, recent collapses in Anseong, Gwangju and Incheon suggests this may not be the case.

But as long as it is done safely and to a high quality, the redevelopment of Korea’s poor areas is surely a good thing. Sentimental desires to preserve the past shouldn’t stop people from living better lives in safer, cleaner, warmer homes. At the same time, there must be a better way to protect Korea’s historical quarters that rose up in the post-war era. They are relics of Korea’s history, and we owe it to the future to preserve at least something. Some kind of photography or film project may be a start, as demonstrated by the programs commemorating Baeksa Village, though there must be a more tangible and enduring way out there, perhaps some kind of preservation project for specific neighborhoods.

Korea’s redevelopment should continue and we should all see the quality of our homes improve, and at the same time the government and civil society can do more to preserve the country’s fascinating history contained within these towns. They are part of Korea’s cultural heritage and should be treated as such. We don’t want to live in the past, but nor should we forget it.

Dr. Scott Shepherd (scottshepherd@chongshin.ac.kr) is a British-American academic. He has taught in universities in the U.K. and Korea, and is currently an assistant professor of English at Chongshin University in Seoul. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.