Guy Sorman has an absolutely fascinating article in the City Journal about Asia’s megacities, and I can’t bear to bury it in a link list. He takes a very negative view of Shanghai, citing its deputy mayor for finance’s candid admission that it’s a “costly facade to maintain,” and blasts Beijing for its never-ending ring roads, among other things.
But halfway through the article, he takes up the issue of Seoul, and each paragraph is more interesting than the last. He describes the transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy thusly:
Democratization has helped transform Seoul into a more livable city in an extraordinarily short time. Before democracy, the authorities pursued economic growth at virtually any cost: real estate operated with little constraint, the number of private cars swiftly exceeded street capacity, public transportation was shoddy, and public spaces were basically nonexistent. But Seoul’s mayor during the 2000s, Lee Myung Bak—formerly the CEO of the Hyundai Construction Company—understood that Seoulites wanted a city center, plazas, gardens, and spaces to shop and stroll, and he led a dramatic reshaping of the city, preserving what was left of the past but making huge improvements in urban amenities. He won the nickname “Bulldozer” for good reason. Among the projects undertaken while he was mayor: the Han’s banks, formerly devoted to parking garages and freeways, became accessible to pedestrians; an ancient stream, the Cheonggyecheon, which once flowed through Seoul until buried by a freeway, was restored, helping vivify the central city; and rapid-transit buses joined the city’s transportation system. During his mayoralty, too, formerly abandoned industrial areas transformed into gentrified neighborhoods, Korean versions of New York’s Meatpacking District. These popular changes helped propel Lee Myung Bak to the South Korean presidency in December 2007.
From there, it only gets better from a market urbanist viewpoint. This part, at the very end, is emblematic:
Will the towers and sky trains actually materialize? The Korean opposition on the left generally isn’t enamored with any chaebol enterprise. But this isn’t North Korea, which means, as Oh observes, that “eventually, the market will decide.”
Of course, he must be exaggerating to at least some extent – I refuse to believe that South Korea has dodged all of the anti-density interventions of the West and that the market is in complete control of Seoul, but it sure does seem a lot more accepting of density than we are. I rarely (if ever?) hear much about urbanism in Seoul, and I feel woefully uninformed about urbanism in general in East Asia. (Which reminds me – why does the word “Tokyo” appear nowhere in the article?) Embarrassingly enough, before I read this, I knew more about urbanism in North Korea than I did in its southern cousin. Anyway, I can’t recommend the article highly enough – I knew that the world generally overestimates China, but I didn’t realize how much we’re underestimating South Korea.
Paul Barter cites Seoul as an example of a city that did not do anti-density and pro-car interventions, together with Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Instead, those cities restricted cars, tacked externality taxes on them, or just didn’t engage in pro-car urban planning. Barter explains Seoul’s development differently, saying that it developed more compactly because the military dictatorship invested in industry and not transportation.
The article engages in many sleights of hand that confirm my skepticism of anything in City Journal. For example: the Chinese internal passport system is not nearly as totalitarian as the article makes it seem. In practice, the only rule today is that you’re not allowed to migrate to the city without first proving you have a job there. The goal is to prevent the formation of huge slums, i.e. to keep the poor out of sight and out of mind.
It sounds to me from your first excerpt that Lee Myung Bak was an interventionist of a sort, just a more restrained, selective and enlightened one. He sounds a little like Ken Livingstone, the sorta-socialist former Mayor of London, who was known for both encouraging more housing supply at higher densities and for seeking imposing tougher requirements for affordable housing and design standards. Similarly, in transport he both imposed a congestion charge and spent a lot of public money on buses and trains. I’d suggest the lesson is that city governments often don’t fit into neat categories of ‘pro-market, pro-density’ versus ‘anti-market, anti-density’. The better mayors recognise a role for markets and intervention.
It is an interesting article, though the polemics on Shanghai and Beijing are rather overdone. Though I don’t like the Beijing ring roads, they seem as much over-extrapolations of a native planning tradition than a western import. If you contrast with say Xi’an, you can see the hutongs and the city wall were a horrible loss. However the structure of the streets is still there – Beijing is laid out on a Ming dynasty grid plan with the Forbidden Palace at the centre:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=forbidden+palace,+beijing&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.489543,86.044922&ie=UTF8&hq=forbidden+palace,&hnear=Beijing,+China&ll=39.900255,116.386414&spn=0.480412,1.867676&z=10
The historic parks are still there too – strange to hear . The air is pretty awful, due as much to factories on the outskirts and desertification in Inner Mongolia as planning choices in the city itself.
The Seoul part is interesting, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the biggest pop-culture producers in East Asia are also its rich democracies – S Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The article doesn’t give enough detail to say whether Lee Myung Bak succeeded via democratic localism replanning or by unzoning and deregulated mechanisms though.
correction – historic parks are still there – strange to hear *otherwise*
correction – historic parks are still there – strange to hear *otherwise*
The internal passport system of China bears a suspicious resemblance to the one in South Africa pre 1994. Interesting they don’t howl against China about it. And can you imagine what the outcry would have been, if South Africa had imposed a “one-child policy” on its blacks? O the hypocrisy!