MUST READ!!!!
Seoul mayor and potential next president of the Republic of Korea Lee Myung-bak has to be happy after TIME lauded Seoul as a model for other Asian cities looking for greener futures:
Seoul—a city long synonymous with unchecked urban development, where Parks were more commonly found in the phone book than on the streets—is growing green. Besides the restored Cheonggyecheon, which opened last October, the city has helped plant some 3.3 million trees since 1998 and recently developed Seoul Forest, a $224 million patch of urban woodland comparable to London’s Hyde Park. A cutting-edge, clean-running transit system is slowly weaning Seoulites off their auto addiction. New museums including the Leeum, which houses Samsung’s corporate art collection in a stylish building designed by three different world-class architects, are feeding the city’s growing appetite for culture. And when soccer-crazed Seoulites gather by the thousands in front of City Hall this summer to cheer South Korea’s performance in the World Cup, as they did in 2002, they’ll be celebrating on a neatly trimmed lawn called Seoul Plaza. “When the Korean economy was just trying to get back on its feet after the war, having these parks was a luxury,” Lee says. “But now we try to achieve a balance between function and the environment, and whenever we have to choose, we try to put the environment first.”
The greening of Seoul has ramifications that go beyond the mountains that ring the city. If this concrete jungle can shift into clean, sustainable urban development, then there’s hope that other messy, environmentally challenged Asian cities like Beijing, Bombay and Jakarta can do the same. The South Korean capital’s example could be especially instructive for its fellow Asian Tiger Hong Kong, where short-sighted political leadership has allowed the environment to degrade alarmingly (see story, page 21). “Seoul is an interesting model in terms of a megacity,” says Karl Kim, an urban-planning expert at the University of Hawaii who has traveled back and forth to Korea for the past two decades. “There are lessons to be learned here about environmental management and sustainable development. You want to be able to not just do business, but to live in these cities.”
In the two years that I’ve lived in Seoul, the living environment has noticeably improved, and you can feel the effort the authorities have put into making the city a nicer place in which to live.
14 Comments
Sorry, bored at work, that’s why I’m commenting on every post
There should be a campaign to put plants on rooftops in Seoul, since more development=more ambient heat from concrete. Also, ban diesel buses and trucks from the city.
Cheonggyecheon is kind of a dubious achievement since it must use up mucho energy to pump water down that glorified ditch.
I think there should a campaign (besides the NORK’s) to totally level Seoul, raze those ugly all-look-alike apartment buildings, and plant trees over one and all.
I admit Seoul has made efforts to “green” the city but I don’t think it is not anywhere near an example for other cities to follow. More has to be done to educate the population about littering especially those picnickers that leave their trash. The picnickers are so bad they are banned from the Cheongyecheon because the local government knows they would pollute the stream. A better example are megacities in Japan which are much cleaner and greener IMHO.
I have heard the same comment on the water pumped into Cheonggyecheon by a Yonhap reporter as Michael mentions. Seoul is a very long way from even being as green as many cities in Japan, (including Tokyo) which *are* much greener in comparison.
The older, smaller houses in Seoul with gardens are being “re-developed” into “one-rooms” and concrete apartment buildings at such an rapid pace that all of these many pockets of green space are being paved over completely, thus lost. This is despite an alleged law that requires developers to build in greenspace nowadays. This has lead to many pathetic, tiny concrete encased flower beds that have little to offer. Small, shallow squares of dirt with a dying spruce stuck in them is not green space!
I think all of you are missing the point of the article. The point is that Seoul, as ugly and polluted as it was, it’s making some concrete steps in the right direction to rectifiy some of the problems - which could be used as a lesson for some others to follow. The point wasn’t that Seoul was the mother of all green environment.
Seoul is a model for Hong Kong, not Tokyo.
GI Korea said on Nomad’s blog that people near his base throw trash off a bridge into a creek. I’m not picking on Koreans, but they seem to need education about not littering, like he said. There’s also something seriously wrong with trash collection in Seoul, when restaurants leave bags of rotting food in front of their places and people just toss garbage onto the sidewalk. That’s a third world mentality.
I’ve read it costs $2 million a year to pump water down Cheonggyecheon, which is a glorified drainage ditch that doesn’t remotely look like a real stream. Imagine if that money was spent on educating people and putting some trash cans on the streets.
> it’s making some concrete steps…
Heh. That’s so true. Cheonggyecheon, the concrete stream.
And why does the mayor get credit for returning the stream to its historical glory (that never was) when a couple hundred hanok, right beside the Blue House, have been razed since he came to power (if anything, at an increased rate)?
(OK, that’s not exactly green, but I think it is in the same neighborhood).
The destruction of hanoks is another blight on Korea, since they are about the only indigenous architecture outside of the temples. I’ve lived in big cities most of my life and it takes a lot of ugliness to get to me, but I have to say Seoul has some of the ugliest architecture in the world, mainly the soul-killing apartment blocks that are lined up like tombstones.
Space (Korean architecture magazine) has editorialized about this many times, and architects here are aware of the issue, but the chaebol don’t care about making interesting, sustainable housing, they only want the cheapest construction possible for the most profit.
Those multiple, identical apartment blocks (”commieblocks”) are starting to look cooler these days, I think…they add a lot of character when they’re sprinkled across the city. But the more “commie” and gray they look….ugh.
I definitely agree about the hanok… very exotic to my eyes. I’d like to see them, or that style, stay for a long time.
Those commie blocks are horrible for interesting streetlife, just like the ever larger real estate developments here in China (which are the urban equivalent of polarizing gated communities in the US suburbs).
The Koreans are amateurs when it comes to throwing trash onto the street. I actually wish the streetsweepers here were not so good at their jobs, so that the Chinese could see just how much crap they trhrow on the streets and in the parks over a course of a few days.
As Michael points out, the real culprit is a serious lack of education in Korea regarding so many quality of life issues that many of us, from other countries, take for granted. Education is still the key (IMHO) for raising the quality of life in Korea to a higher level but this is difficult when those who should teach do not understand what “quality of life” means. Koreans — like too many people elsewhere in the world — need to have their noses rubbed into a problem before they feel the need to address a problem. This is called “hindsight”.
The concrete stream downtown and the lack of concern regarding the hanok do not reflect well upon this current mayor
presidential candidate.A cutting-edge, clean-running transit system is slowly weaning Seoulites off their auto addiction.
As Michael noted, the diesel buses throw this assertion off a little. What is this article anyways, a press release from the mayor’s office?
The concrete stream downtown and the lack of concern regarding the hanok do not reflect well upon this current mayor presidential candidate.
I think the whole ‘presidential candidate’ angle is what this is really all about. When you think about what most presidents have been able to accomplish in their 5 year terms and compare it to Park Chung-hee’s legacy (the more pleasant side of it, I mean), they end up looking like they’ve done very little. The race to finish Cheonggyecheon (”Ancient ruins? Just bulldoze them!”) was part of a desire to look as if something has been accomplished in Lee Myung-baks short term as mayor. No one’s going to complain too much about many of the things he’s done - A ’stream’ is better than a freeway, a grass patch is better than a traffic rotary, and crosswalks are better than underpasses. But I do wonder about the location of one of those grass patches - in front of city hall - as it makes it so much easier, when all these festivals, and the ice rink, and the fountains are there, to remember who made it all possible.
Not for nothing was I unable to pass directly in front of city hall the night after the stream opened - everyone was stopping to greet the mayor, who was impossible to miss with that huge smile plastered on his face…
It is actually Seoul that should learn from Hong Kong and not the other way around.
Despite being a famously duty free port, Hong Kong imposes high taxes on automobile ownership, which of course makes sense because Hong Kong actually understands that it is a densely populated Asian country (or special administrative region). Hong Kong also has lots of parks, trees, trash cans on the street, and real architecture by big names like I.M. Pei.
In contrast, Korea seems unaware that any alternatives to the US car-centered infrastructure even exist, despite being a densely populated Asian country like Hong Kong and not a low density country like America. I can’t imagine, for example, any other similarly densely populated country stupid enough to mandate free parking for every apartment by law just to subsidize the domestic auto industry.