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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 […]
1. Cuban dissident blogger (as in, living in Cuba) Yoani Sánchez describes the state of the Cuban real estate market, and discusses new rules that apparently legalize buying and selling houses, though she has her doubts that the government will allow the overt displays of inequality that would undoubtedly occur once the market is liberalized. 2. The NYT Magazine has a profile of a physicist who claims to have mastered the mathematics of the city. Hmm, where have I heard that before? He’s got some positive things to say about cities over suburbs and Joel Kotkin seems to disagree with him (always a plus in my book), but at the end of the day there’s something about him and his context-free pronouncement about “cities” writ large that really rubs me the wrong way. 3. A preservation vs. development story in the NYT about Seoul’s traditional “hanok” houses, with the chief preservationist being a white foreigner who doesn’t approve of interior redesigns or added basements or second stories. Something tells me he proably wouldn’t be a huge fan of my “development as preservation” theory.