Walking the World: Seoul
walkingtheworld.substack.com
walkingtheworld.substack.com
These cities are a bit like slamming NYC, SF, and LA together into a single megacity. And yet rent prices there are generally much lower than the most comparable big cities in the US.
Not to mention you would have NIMBYs block the development of such cheap housing.
That said, one of the biggest criticisms of this approach to zoning in the city is that it leads to a faster pace of gentrification which can price people out of the areas, so it's not all peaches.
I think the premiss is not true. They cannot build whatever wherever. They have different zones, which determin, what kind of buildings are OK to be build in them. See for example this video: https://invidio.xamh.de/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk
But there does seem to be some increased flexibility.
Surely you mean outside the city center?
But going off the spirit of what you meant, even if you compare city center to roughly city center, Tokyo is still much cheaper than places like NYC or SF, I believe.
And of course like you mentioned, going out of the city it gets even cheaper.
I wouldn't consider those close to downtown though. If you're into night life downtown and you want to go home at 3am it will cost $100 to get home (though I guess with the money you saved on rent you can do that every weekend and you're still ahead! :P )
If persuading people to adopt such zoning in your area matters to you, then you probably want to describe this more accurately as "zoning that blocks nuisances but does not micromanage"
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
Seoul is one of the most intensely aesthetic places on the planet. It's ugliness wraps all the way around into a kind of brutalist cyber punk thing that I find to be one of the coolest aesthetics of any city anywhere. I don't think I've ever found brutalist stuff to be beautiful outside of Seoul
Really grateful for the countless hours of my life I've gotten to spend walking around Seoul between 3-6am
This resonates. Didn't realize it until now though.
LINE was the first messenger app to roll out stickers. Those stickers, mostly cartoons, do a vastly better job of encapsulating expression, especially online, than GIFs, Emojis, and Emoticons do.
Stickers are commonplace messages in Korea. Stickers in America, on the other hand, have not caught on. If I had to speculate, it is because the art is shallow, soulless, and an commercial grab.
From Arnade's piece:
> If you make anything and everything a lovable character, that dampens the edges. Makes a life of buying and selling stuff a little less dreary. A little less pointless.
You could say the same for every culture. If you talk to Koreans, they cannot fathom America's addiction to hyperbole, whether it be in everyday conversation or in advertising.
Examples:
"That was an amazing meal."
"It was to die for."
"Absolutely."
"You are the best!"
"What a killer deal!"
Now let's transform Arnade's original observation:
> If you make anything and everything a hyperbole – "perfect" or "the best" – that dampens the edges. Makes a life of buying and selling stuff a little less dreary. A little less pointless.
It fits, no? Would I describe American hyperbole as cope? No, it's merely how we encode emotions into language. Cartoons are the same for Koreans.
Edit: I'd like to proffer a different reason for their prevalence: many cartoons are government-sponsored and are ways for the government to signal that they are welcoming to children as a response to the declining birth rate. You could interpret this dystopically – I just see it as cute.
Take the Jongro logo, for instance. Here’s its origin:
> It was developed and donated free of charge by the Environmental Design Research Institute of Kookmin University in 2001; through opinion surveys and expert advice, it was born in a friendly, resident-centered form that cannot be found in other local governments.
How in any way could you ascribe it’s existence to a deep emptiness?
Postwar Japan has done a lot of preparation for natural disasters but has had essentially no civil defense measures against military threats. That might be changing, though. Just a couple of weeks ago, for the first time, the city of Tokyo designated 105 subway stations as emergency evacuation sites in case of missile attacks [1, in Japanese]. This was prompted not only by the continued threat from North Korea but also by what has been happening in Ukraine.
[1] https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/34fd48f39ee9b8a78197f350e8...
I am tempted to speculate that the average Japanese civilian is more worried about the threat of North Korea than the average Korean civilian.
They have exactly that threat from North Korea. But I suspect that the culture of "rampant consumerism and materialism" is part of how they deal with that (also the cuteness thing he mentions possibly plays a part)
Cuteness out of emptiness you feel inside is also for me fall short. My reading(armchair psychology, yes. But as a Korean who thought about this a lot) is that this is more to do with patriarchal culture where man and woman appeals there take-careablity(woman: man would want to take care of me/man: I could be a good protector). In confucious culture there's lot of emphasis on who takes care of whom and familial analogy is applied to every relationships.
I guess I didn't read it as him saying "the young are more materialistic" but more as "the young are dealing with the fallout of a culture of rampant consumption and materialism". The young are generally too young to have built the culture of rampant consumption and materialism, but it's all they've known.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210820145247/https://sittingon...
> “monotonous ruins of a nation-state… perfectly realized in the name of capitalism.”
> Urban isolation and rapidly advancing technology have helped erode reality in favor of representation. Connection with real human beings becomes less desirable; cartoon characters to which you will never be held accountable become ideal friends.
> a cartoon dog, soft and cuddly, with no blood, no fragile network of organs, no accountability and no ability to hold others accountable.
Korea is not a particularly pretty country in general. I think people got there for the culture, people and food.
Contrast this with Japan which is stunning almost everywhere. But with a very different culinary and cultural experience.
I like both countries, but if it was natural or urban beauty it is Japan hands down.
Edit: another thing that really sticks out as adding to the charm is the more diverse usage of building space. You might find businesses on floors other than the ground floor and many of them are much smaller than you'd ever find a similar business in Europe and especially not the US. It gives a feeling that there are always things to discover.
I don't see any good reason why it's so rare to have businesses on more floors. I wonder if it's a zoning or simply a cultural thing.
I just went over just for the day during a trip to Japan, but it certainly convinced me that Korea should be the destination for a future trip.
I was particularly fond of buying beer and sitting at the little tables in front of the convenience stores on warm summer nights, just enjoying the sights.
He also mentions the number of scooter deliveries, something that blew my mind at the time, was when we ordered delivery, someone would arrive on a scooter and drop the food off and it was all on re-usable plates wrapped in plastic. When you were done, you put the dishes in a bag in-front of your door and the delivery person would come back later to pick the dishes up. I wonder if that still happens.
It’s all one-use plastics now as delivery apps like Yogiyo replaced most of in house delivery drivers.
You'd love the coffee and beer culture in Hanoi =)
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-electric-motor-scooters-...
This wander through Yeonam-Dong at night is a great introduction: https://youtu.be/hrZRqN6s9Kw
This is also why Seoul or many Japanese cities look so individualistic and mosaic like from one lot to the other as the author describes in the article.
American suburbia with it's endless strip malls and parking lots is not pretty either. I don't think we have a lot of room to criticize.
In the very first line, he says "Seoul is not a pretty town." I live in San Francisco, conventionally thought of as a pretty place, and I would say: I think Seoul was pretty. It wouldn't have occurred to me to say it wasn't.
Go back and look at the article again. The first few photos, showing commercial and chintzy/cheap shop districts - that's as ugly as Seoul gets. That's what passes for 'urban blight' there. Now go to your city, and take a few photos of urban blight, the ugliest city areas you can find. I'll bet you, easily, that in terms of beauty, Seoul wins that competition hands down.
As an American, what really strikes you about Seoul is how clean and well-run it is. Related, you also notice how polite and pleasant it is: no one screaming, either randomly at nothing, or at you, to get in line or do things a certain way or whatever (something I noticed when I flew from Seoul airport back to USA airport, and immediately some worker was yelling at us to get in the baggage line). There's no piles of trash that have been forgotten for weeks, there's no neglected areas that are just falling into worse and worse disrepair.
The overall feeling is this. Have you ever thought, "Why can't everyone just be reasonable and nice?" Seoul is a place where it feels like that came true; if you want to know what that would be like, go there. So it's 'pretty' (without question, to me) in the way that a building or an office is pretty, that people work to keep clean and crisp and well-organized. That's a form of beauty which Seoul has in spades.
Also: the thing about "but there's no religion" is a cheap shot, and apparently untrue, as someone else has pointed out (Seoul has the largest churches in the world by attendance). There are more cute things, but that's neither here nor there; I totally disagree that Hello Kitty has replaced Jesus, if that's the implication. People like Hello Kitty type images & toys there, but it's an overstretch to pretend like Hello Kitty is their God, or something equally ridiculous.
I haven't spent much time in Seoul but that sentence describes by feeling of Japan and Singapore where I have spent > 10 years. I know American's (and Europeans) get defensive about this and try to start pointing out the negatives of both places of which there are plenty but, it's hard to come back to the USA after being away so long and just see how much everyone is only out for themselves, being dicks in one way or another. Some are small (I see people not waiting their turn at the signal and blocking people's who's turn it is), Some less (saw some guy eating a bowl of chicken, pulling the lettuce out and just throwing it on the sidewalk), (Seeing people blaring their stereos to what showoff? not really sure what's up with that one except to show you have power over others by showing you can do something, blair your stereo, and they can't do anything about it), Some awful (all the car break ins and packages stolen and the attitude that it's the victim's fault)
This is why westerners love these countries because they get to enjoy the orderliness while benefitting of their foreigner status which exclude them from any expectations.
If they were held by locals to the same expectations they'd have a different opinion of these societies.
The largest churches in the world by attendance are in South Korea:
In 2007, five of the ten largest Protestant churches were in South Korea. The largest megachurch in the world by attendance is South Korea's Yoido Full Gospel Church, an Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) church, with more than 830,000 members as of 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch
I wonder if this means there aren't a lot of church buildings because they tend to gather in large numbers in a few very large venues instead of gathering in smaller groups in more numerous smaller buildings?
My impression is that this author doesn’t have a particularly great sense of photography - he just faces a storefront and snaps a photo.
I enjoyed reading someone else’s perspective, though.
This stood out to me within the article as a rather dumb statement to make. Like writing, "nobody ever seems to drive through this plot of land that has no roads."
[edit] Some Koreans are interested in extending the method of Chavruta (friendly debate) into general education: https://www.timesofisrael.com/talmud-inspired-learning-craze...
More on Chavruta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa
But then again, books purporting to teach you how to live your own life have always enjoyed a steady demand in Korea, and Talmud (at least as seen in Korea) fits the mold very well.
I would rather buy grocery once a week with a huge load put in the trunk and drive back home, instead of buy a little bit every next day and walk home carrying the bags. I don't want to carry a gallon milk or a Watermolen, or push/drag a cart on the street.
I think people who envy this kind of environment just don't know how inconvenient it is for a working family with a few kids. But it is kind of OK if you live with grandpa / grandmom, who will do grocery almost everyday, or if you don't do grocery just eat in restaurants or buy food online.
I'm now raising my kids in the Bay Area, and I'm fortunate because the kids' schools are within walking distance, but that's a luxury not enjoyed by most people around here.
And this is in a smallish town, one advantage of which is that things cannot be that far away in a town that takes an hour to walk across.
now, the kid might decide that he wants a huge SUV and to drive to the store every 1-2 weeks, that's going to be interesting. But for me, the parent, I like it.