Seoul by Ross King

Author:Ross King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2018-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Cheonggyecheon

Unlike Myeong-dong or the immediate back streets of Jongno, Insadonggil presents as a display of purposive urban design. Although it follows an ancient streamline, there is no attempt to acknowledge that past in the design or signiἀcation of the space. The stream is missing. A far more interventionist and comprehensively designed project to transform the boxland of the city center is Cheonggyecheon, a 5.8-kilometer creek in downtown Seoul. Here also was an ancient stream, named Gaecheon (Open Stream), albeit artiἀcial, constructed as part of a drainage system in the early Chosun era, thence to be regularly drained and refurbished throughout various reigns. It was renamed Cheonggyecheon in the Japanese colonial period and was remembered from that era by composer Kang Sukhi (2007), cited earlier; he recalled it running parallel to the city’s commercial Jongno, with women washing clothes in the stream, its life seemingly little changed from the old dynasty. It was also totally polluted, according to newspaper reports of the time (Henry 2014, 158–159). After the 1950–1953 Korean War, rural-to-urban migration turned Seoul into a slum city, and the banks of Cheonggyecheon acquired squatter settlements in flimsy makeshift houses. A twenty-year program of slum demolition and concrete covering of the old watercourse was crowned, in the 1967–1971 period, with the elevated, sixteen-meter-wide Samil highway over the top of it for its 5.8 kilometers. Together with the emblematic Samil Building, it served as a proudly displayed example of economic growth and urban modernization (Park Kil-Dong n.d., 10).20

FIGURE 4.8 Myeong-dong, 2012. Like Namdaemun Market, Myeong-dong is labyrinthine but also upmarket; the indigenous muddle is interspersed with grand department stores and with monuments from the late Chosun and Japanese eras.

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