November 18th, 2010
What amazed me most about Cheonggyecheon was its freedom. Here was a stream running through the middle of Seoul, one of the world’s largest cities, and it gurgled as contentedly as any country creek. You can walk next to the water, sit next to it, wade in and feel its sharp chill on your calves.
It becomes all the more remarkable when you realize that, ten years ago, it was little more than a sewer running beneath a traffic-clogged highway. For decades, Cheonggyecheon was buried under an expressway; it was famously restored in the early 2000s. (David Maloney wrote an exhaustive account of its history a few years ago.) When I visited Seoul last year, it was one of the things I was most eager to see, and luckily enough, I happened to be staying a short walk from it.
After the expressway was demolished, a six-kilometre linear park was built along the stream, from the business district near Gwanghwamun in the west to another river, Jungnangcheon, in the east. The stream runs several metres below street level, and descending towards the stream is a liberation from the noise and exhaust above it. Late at night, I sat next to the water and watched two couples wade into the stream, pants rolled up, giggling as they splashed around. During the day, kids played on stepping stones that traverse the water.
Cheonggyecheon is one of the best-designed examples of urban nature I have encountered. Its impact has been fare-reaching. Fewer cars enter central Seoul now and public transit use is up. Summer temperatures around the stream have been reduced by several degrees since the stream was restored.
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July 15th, 2010
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.
In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.
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January 4th, 2010
Sunday shopping in Myeongdong, Seoul’s most popular retail district.
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October 10th, 2009
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September 8th, 2009
Seoul feels a bit like the world’s largest college town. With 34 universities and hundreds of thousands of students from across Korea, large swaths of the city have been dedicated to the amusement of students, teenagers and people in their twenties. Each of these youth-oriented neighbourhoods has a similar feel — lots of multi-storey cafés and soju-fuelled BBQ joints — but with some thematic variations. Hongdae is full of offbeat shops, bars and nightclubs; Daehangno is Seoul’s centre of independent theatre; Apgujeong is where the rich kids hang out.
Edae, which is found outside the gates of Ewha Women’s University, is probably Seoul’s most gender-specific district, with block after block of shops selling women’s fashion and accessories.
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April 11th, 2007
Today, in the subway, I stood beside a young woman who thought it would be a good idea to place her caramel macchiato in the overhead compartment. Predictably, the cup fell over and spilled its sticky java contents all over two men wearing fairly nice looking suits. One of them quickly gave the girl a used tissue, demanding that she wipe off the coffee from his back. Nosey ajumas (older Korean women) on the other side of the train, dressed in their best hiking outfits, reached over to provide the humiliated young lady with a seemingly endless supply of tissues and moist towelettes. At first, judging by their stern faces, it seemed like the ajumas wanted the young woman to know that they were disappointed in her. As she set about the arduous task of cleaning up her mess, though, the old ladies smirked.
It was just another day in the Seoul subway, the best place in the city to watch the interaction of everyday Koreans of various ages and social classes. Seoul’s subway system is one of the most extensive in the world. It consists of eight lines, spanning 287 kilometres, connecting virtually all neighbourhoods within this massive metropolis of over 20 million people. There are currently 266 metro stations, from the Incheon International Airport near the coast of the Yellow Sea, to the distant northern suburb of Uijeongbu, down to the posh “new cities” of Gangnam (the district south of the Han River) and then out east to a rusty, Soviet-like area called Sangil-dong.
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February 8th, 2007
Restoring a six-kilometre stream that has been covered by an expressway for over fifty years is not an easy task. The job is even more difficult when the stream happens to meander through one of the world’s largest and most densely populated cities. The Cheonggyecheon, or the Cheonggye Stream restoration project is without question the most ambitious urban renewal scheme to have ever been undertaken in the history of Seoul.
The aims of the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, completed in 2005, were first, to rectify a severe public safety problem caused by an expressway that threatened to collapse at any moment; second, to address Seoul’s deteriorating environmental conditions by creating an environmentally friendly place in the centre of the city; third, to pay tribute the history of the 600 year old Korean capital; and fourth, to spur redevelopment in the surrounding neighbourhoods, which at that time lagged behind other neighbourhoods in the central city.
To fully appreciate the significance of the Cheonggyecheon project to the Korean people it is necessary to know a little bit about Korean history, particularly as it relates to Seoul. The Choson Dynasty, led by Emperor Taiju, chose the land on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon near its intersection with the mighty Han River as Korea’s capital in 1392. Monk Muhak, on behalf of Taiju, selected the site after an extensive two-year search for a location that satisfied the principles of feng shui. According to Muhak, the site possessed powerful Earth energy that was enhanced by a prominent mountain directly to the north, another to the south and two other mountains situated to the east and west of the site.
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November 15th, 2006
Seoul’s Myeong-dong district is the ninth most exclusive shopping district in the world, according to an annual study of shopping streets published by the real estate analysis company Cushman & Wakefield. Retail space in the bustling shopping area in central Seoul costs about US $376 per square foot, or €3,169 per square metre. The study finds that Myeong-dong is the fourth most expensive shopping district in Asia, after Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, Ginza in Tokyo, and Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall.
Rents in Myeong-dong have risen 3.4% between June 2005 and June 2006, which is a continuation of a trend that has seen rents in the area rise steadily for some years. “Demand for prime retail space (in Seoul) is currently exceeding supply”, according to Richard Hwang of Cushman & Wakefield Korea. Mr. Hwang goes on to say that there is significant demand for a Myeong-dong address amongst local food and beverage businesses, international fashion brands looking to set up their flagship Korean stores, and large department store chains wanting to increase their presence in the Korean capital.
Not everyone has been able to manage the rise in real estate costs in Myeong-dong. ‘Unacceptable rent hikes’ forced coffee giant Starbucks to retreat from the neighbourhood in May of 2005 when the company closed what was Asia’s largest coffee shop and relocated to a less expensive part of the downtown core. The four story Starbucks has since been replaced by an outlet of the Italy based Caffe Pascucci.
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