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.…

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, t…

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 syst…

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 cy…

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 ???'s "??? ?? ??? ??" (I Like Seoul An…

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 re…

Having just been to Los Angeles for the first time in the two years since I moved from there to Seoul, I ask what these ever-changing cities can learn from one another. How much does Los Angeles remain a metropolis that "makes nonsense of history and breaks all the rules," in the words of architectural historian Reyner Banham, and to what extent ha…

With Kurt on vacation, I talk to Na Seung-yeon about six distinctive characteristics of Seoul’s urban space as a whole, including its high-rise apartment complexes; its short-hop “village buses”; its culture of rooms, or bang (?), purpose-built for singing, watching movies, and playing board games; its outdoor eating and drinking spots known as poj…

We ride the brand new Ui-Sinseol Light Rapid Transit (or Ui LRT), Korea’s very first driverless light-rail subway. Running from the center of the city out to Bukhansan on its northeastern edge, the line stops at thirteen stations, many of them designed as gallery spaces to display artwork old and new. None of it has to compete with ads for rider at…

Building on a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books Korea Blog, we talk about the development of Seoul as you can see it over sixty years of television commercials. These spots advertise things like Lucky household goods, the 63 Building (subject of our first Seoul urbanism segment), the Kia Pride, the 1988 Summer Olympics, the ill-fate…

We visit the very first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, a months-spanning celebration and an exploration of how cities across the world have found innovative ways to use, preserve, and improve their urban and natural “commons.” At one of the Biennale’s main exhibitions at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, we learn from more than fifty diffe…

We go just south of the Han River for a nighttime journey — punctuated by cats, coffee, ukulele riffs, tap dancing, and showers of sparks — through Mullae-dong. There an established generation of industrial operations now coexist with a new generation of cultural venues, putting metalworkers and craftsmen right alongside artists and baristas. We’re…

We talk about my recent Guardian article on the branding of Seoul and the city’s efforts to resolve its ongoing identity crisis: hiring place-branding consultants, importing foreign architectural prestige, launching high-profile urban regeneration projects, putting up posters that encourage Seoulites to feel good about their city, introducing sloga…

We make the journey to Yongma Land, a long-abandoned neighborhood amusement park in eastern Seoul that has recently drawn such crowds as couples on dates, engagement photographers, Instagrammers, and no small number of music videos and television drama shoots. But though it has become beloved again, the question remains: who abandoned Yongma Land, …

We pay a visit to the well-known institution of the Noryangjin fish market — or rather, to both of them. After beginning near downtown Seoul in the early 1920s, Noryangjin moved in the early 1970s into a larger concrete complex just south of the Han River, and there became both a thriving commercial center as well as a popular tourist spot. In more…

We get up above Seoul Station and onto quite possibly the city’s most anticipated urban development of the decade: Seoullo 7017. Previously known as the Seoul Skygarden, the project has permanently shut down a freeway overpass and turned it into a walkway park featuring not just a variety of Korea’s plants and trees, but snack shops, foot baths, tr…

We join urban explorer Jon Dunbar of Daehanmindecline for a walk through an old neighborhood called Bamgol Village — or what’s left of it. Urban redevelopment never stops in Seoul, and when it happens it scrapes whole communities off the map, usually in order to replace clusters of low-rise buildings with another set of the high-rise tower blocks t…

We head down into the Euljiro Underground Shopping Center, a nearly two-mile-long subterranean street running beneath downtown from the City Hall to the Dongdaemun History and Culture Park Line 2 subway stations. Initially opening for business in 1983 at the same time Line 2 itself did, its ever-changing selection of shops supply everything from ta…

We’re joined by German-Korean architect Daniel Tändler of Urban Detail Seoul for a walk through Ikseon-dong Hanok Village, a 1930s-era housing development near downtown that has in recent years seen an influx of restaurants, bars, cafés, shops, and studios putting its traditional Korean residential architecture to whole new uses.…

We spend a day riding on Seoul’s buses, which form a transportation network even more impressive, in its way, than the world-class Seoul Metropolitan Subway. We reveal three of the lines that provide the best tours of the cityscape a thousand won or two can buy, point out the kind of attractions you can spot out the windows along the way, break dow…

Known locally as the “gold tooth,” this iconic, gold-glassed skyscraper beside the Han River opened in time for the 1988 Olympics, providing a piece of the background for the torch-lighting ceremony that opened the games. Designed by architectural mega-firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, it became a public attraction from the first day of its reign…