I love the little shop down the street from my house. A really nice Korean family owns it. I asked the father if he missed living in Korea, and he did. I asked him why he left and he told me that Seoul was too crowded and he couldn’t find work there. He loves his country but left because Seoul was too crowded and there was no work for him.

I am not in favor of government regulation compelling people to live in Seoul, nor am I all that pleased with efforts to force them out of Seoul. They’ll live where they want to live.

Given that everyone seems to want to live in Kangnam, I say let ‘em. Let ‘em live on the 90th floor.

“Having more large-scale, corporate theme parks than most any other place in the world will not encourage tourism either. Would I trust a Korean third-party to evaluate the impact and benefits of these ventures upon the locale?”

Wholesale change has to occur before you can attract people to come to Korea. As long as the Koreans have the “Kill my neighbor’s pig” attitude, people will not come.

I wonder just how large these parks would be and what their impact would be upon the surrounding areas. I wonder if this is really the best way to bring in economic benefits to these areas.

Having more large-scale, corporate theme parks than most any other place in the world will not encourage tourism either. Would I trust a Korean third-party to evaluate the impact and benefits of these ventures upon the locale?

No, not really.

Do you really want to see 30-50-story tombstone apartment buildings in Seoul?

Not tombstones, but yes — we need to build a lot taller in Seoul. The tombstone apartments are a direct response to edicts the government made from the 1970s to very recently about how to build a “good” apartment. And those edicts were wrong, and still are wrong in many ways.

As it is, when large areas are rebuilt with “tombstones”, the neighborhood is effectively dead since there is little or no sense of humanity therein, little multipurpose building of different scale unless one walks *out* of the tombstone-designated area.

Sure, but that’s a failure of regulation. The answer is not more regulation. Hong Kong’s humanity comes from the fact that the first two-to-four levels of any residential property near a thoroughfare tends to be occupied by commercial uses. I also think Korea could learn a lot from Singapore in this regard — hell, even Jakarta!