Paradox of Public Space (2005.10)

The Paradox of Public Space in the Asian Metropolis

Germany-Korea Public Space Forum, Deutsches Architektur Museum
Korean Organizing Committee for the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005, October 14, 2005
KIM, Sung Hong, University of Seoul

Reprinted as the ttile of "The Paradox of Public Space in the Korean Metropolis," In Limin Hee, Boontharm Davisi, and Erwin Viray Eds, Future Asian Space: Projecting the Urban Space of New East Asia, Singapore: NUS Press, 2012, pp.31-40.

Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, presents a peculiar urban landscape to outsiders. It appears neither traditional, post-colonial nor modern seen from the canonical definitions and historical perspectives of Euro-American architecture. To say that it is eclectic and hybrid is perhaps an understatement. Wong Yunn Chii described Asian modernity as “a mongrel [which has] inherent exuberance without recourse to ready-made expectations, external and sanctioned measurements.”  Korea’s capital city seems to fit that description. Kang Hong Bin, a former Vice Mayor of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, once noted that Seoul’s public appearance is the by-product of the paradoxical combination of “too much planning” and “too little planning.”  An understanding of this statement and indeed of the state of public space in Korea requires a careful uncovering of the many layers of foundation upon which public space has been built. History, politics, economics and technology each have had their trowel in the mix.

History and Politics: Three Influences

When founded as the capital of the Chosun dynasty in the 14th century, Seoul was constructed on the canons of Chinese cities, although it did not embody their strict principles. Geometrical regularity and symmetry applied only to the main streets, palaces, royal shrines, and government buildings. Behind the major streets, the city was constructed on a trial and error basis from the perspective of modern planning. The royal families and high-ranking officials occupied the most privileged spaces in the city, usually deeply recessed from main streets. Alleys were produced as middle class officials and artisans later filled remaining areas [Fig. 1]. The placement of shops on the main streets concealed the inner residential space. The result was the formation of a unique spatial pattern, with shops to the front and houses to the back in a linear and planar configuration [Fig. 2]. The horizontal juxtaposition marked a division between the upper and the lower ranks of society, where the ruling class commanded the privileged space while consigning merchants to an extremely limited territory adjacent to but never within the sacred area.

Although the main street housed merchant shops, it was not distinctively 'commercial' in the manner of medieval European or Chinese cities. It was rather a setting for stately display. The commoners receded from the main street and took their places as spectators instead of participants in everyday urban life. Buying and selling on the main street did not serve to make the city's economy a public event. Hence Seoul’s old shop streets are not comparable to the medieval market streets in European towns, where a direct link between the private domain (the home or place of work) and the public life of the town were formed. And while the planning principles of Kaifeng in the Chinese Northern Song dynasty had major influences on the foundation of Seoul, there is much dissimilarity between these two as well. A painting of Kaifeng’s urban scene is in sharp contrast to the picture of Seoul’s immense boulevard that does not reveal intimate commercial activities [Fig. 3]. The shop architecture was to be controlled, managed, embellished, and seen, but not participated in. The shop was the architectural facade of the city; it was the city’s ‘paper folding screen’, a decorative panel with paintings, calligraphy and embroidery set in a traditional Korean house. J.B. Jackson once quoted Spengler in saying that “[the houses] in all Western cities turn their facades, their faces, and in all Eastern cities turn their backs, blank wall and railing, towards the street.”  While this rightly speaks to the distinction between introversion and extroversion, a closer look at the Chosun Dynasty’s Seoul additionally reveals the sheer wall of architecture that existed between the front and the back. This space, which was as much governmental as it was commercial, essentially encapsulated the public into secluded urban areas, in sharp contrast with the piazza or agora in European cities, which were purposely carved out to bring the public together in the middle of the urban fabric.

The collapse of the Chosun Dynasty eventually led to other influences on Korea’s conception of public space. It is important to note that the Korean word for ‘public’, gong-gong, is a combination of two phonemic letters borrowed from the Japanese. They in turn had adopted it from the ancient Chinese word using the same characters, but with a totally different pronunciation, kou-kyou. Korea converted the word into its own alphabetical letters, but with the same pronunciation and without Chinese intonation. The transference of meanings from an ideogram to syllabic letters to phonemic letters generates a common platform for the three cultures, but at the same time reveals fundamental disparities in perception about what ‘public’ means in East Asia.

In ancient Chinese the first and second ‘gong’ have close to the same meaning,  in which the first means ‘openness’ and the second is defined as ‘togetherness’ or ‘sharing’ [Fig. 4]. Japan took this combinatorial word from ancient Chinese literature and defined it her own way, closer to a more obscure definition meaning ‘something related to the state and government’. This was a time when Japan prepared its march to imperial aggression and colonial exploitation. Consequently, the idea of ‘public’ was considered by the colonized Koreans as something to deny, resist, and overturn.

During the colonial period Korean intellectuals, desperate for a modern patriotic ideology that was decisively anti-colonial and countered Confucian conservatism, spent long hours debating and considering the benefits of the communist ideology of Karl Marx. Marxism met with an enthusiastic welcome from some circles when it arrived in Korea, and remains at the center of an ideological war that still divides Korea today. In South Korea, anti-communist and anti-socialist sentiments (the so-called ‘red complex’) are ever present, making the perception of ‘public’ space even more controversial and value-charged. Note that the second ‘gong’ of gong-gong is the same Chinese character that describes Communism. During the era of military dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1980s, the government took advantage of anti-communist sentiment as a tactic for the suppression of political adversaries. From the dictators’ view, streets were disturbing, contaminated, and violent, thus needing to be under surveillance and control. The masses saw the streets in a different way, as the setting for political struggle and solidarity.

The juxtaposition of these three recent historical realities (colonialism, Communism, and military dictatorship) on modern Korean society has led Koreans to be overly guarded in conceding and negotiating private territory, while being most tolerant to encroachment in the public realm. Put on top of the ground laid by the Chosun dynasty, we can now see how the public domain in Korean cities represents a stratified metamorphosis of conflicting values and ideas. And this phenomenon is not a unique to Korean society. The dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized, the socialistic and the capitalistic, and the state and the individual are latent in many East Asian countries that went through similar suffering and hardship. What makes this dichotomy sharper and more distinctive are the ways in which these socio-historical conditions have materialized and evolved in each particular urban space.

Economics: Hybrid Architecture and Transpatial Urbanism

The era of rapid industrial development brought on after the Korean War saw a reversal of the spatial value system introduced in the Chosun era. The most privileged inner domain was transformed into the least preferable land from the perspective of commercial interests. By contrast, the less preferable periphery on the main streets became the most profitable retail spaces. The pressure of spatial intensification brought about unbalanced development: the peripheral areas were verticalized, with owners trying to take full advantage of the exposure and visibility of their properties. Today in the heart of downtown Seoul, buildings rise from the property line in a continuous facade that conceals irregularities of layout behind the street [Fig. 5]. Each of these buildings embraces the secular and the ecclesiastical together: a Karaoke shop in the basement, a fast food restaurant on the 1st floor, a PC cafe on the 2nd, a plastic surgery clinic on the 3rd, a commercial learning institute on the 4th, a church on the 5th floor, etc. While the chaotic signboards attached to the external walls represent extremely dense but random spatial configurations inside, they do not really reveal the way in which the buildings are perceived and conceived [Fig. 6, 7]. Behind these two to five story complexes, usually on wide frontage and shallow lots, are hidden one-story traditional timber structures.

This development was coupled with the degradation of the inside of the block,  an area that previously enjoyed high status but now was more or less ignored. Owners of the linear-front properties tried to capitalize on their accessibility, even to the extent of facilitating their own private use of the street at the expense of the quality of the public space. As mentioned before, this was not as much an area of concern for the average citizen as the management of their own private space. In that regard, it is noteworthy that until recently the values and revenues accruing from the premium street-front locations were not systematically embodied in planning and legal systems, particularly in the tax system. The land and building tax had been assigned based on official land gradation and price, which is not only lower than the real exchange price, but also does not reflect the micro-locational advantages.  The physical relationship between the public and private is blurred by the disparate relationship between private ownership and the sense of public obligation. Here the independence of real space in relation to perceptual space, and of real space in relation to social organization, known as transpatiality , underlies the architecture and the urban realm.

Like the cities of most developing countries, Seoul has been influenced more by private capital and less by government control over the last several decades. Even the land on which public buildings stand passed into the hands of private speculators. There has been little opportunity for state-operated micro-urban planning strategies to articulate urban landscape. Here perhaps Kang Hong Bin’s paradoxical statement regarding planning starts to make sense. Seoul’s public space lacks the possibility of a cohesive plan exactly because it has been calcified by the powerfully shaping influences of its past and private interests today.
        
That is not to say that the construction of newer cities in Korea have demonstrated the will to break clear of these past influences. The vertical stratification of retail spaces and abrupt horizontal transition of land use patterns is found in many of Seoul’s young satellite towns such as Ilsan, which was developed in the late 1980s [Fig. 8]. Ilsan presents a visually different but spatially similar logic. With a backdrop of hundreds of standardized high rise apartment blocks, massive retail buildings form glitzy urban façades on the main streets [Fig. 9]. A visitor would be perplexed, first by the extremely monotonous skylines of residential architecture from the distance, and second, by the excessive and irritating retail architecture on the streets. This new town is a scaled-up version of the old city, only with huge apartment buildings rising up to replace the old residences of the isolated interior in Chosun-era Seoul. The polarization of the two urban morphologies (the front-linear and the back-planar), and of two architectural typologies (the front-commercial and the back-residential) is a fundamental spatial logic that is difficult to erase from the urban landscape. The occurrence of this phenomenon in the modern and postmodern city might be seen as a symptom of social disjunction. Not only does it accelerate extreme commercialization and privatization of space, it does not allow for any in-between space for people to interact, negotiate and compromise in daily urban life. The problem in Korean cities lies not with the decline or erosion of public space, symptoms commonly raised by critics in contemporary Western cities, but with the fact that public space itself has not emerged and infiltrated the dichotomized urban landscape. However, a new socio-technological force emerging today is driving this contradictory condition into a completely different situation, where morphological and typological polarizations are no longer obstacles to daily urban life.

Technology: the Internet and Hyper-density

Today information technology is the latest layer of influence on public space in Korea. But here we are not just talking about the Internet and the creation of virtual space and its impact on physical space; we are talking about an inter-dependence between virtual and physical space in a highly dense urban environment. In recent commentary there is a common premise that the non-visual network in virtual space overcomes the contingency of face-to-face interaction and expands far beyond the boundaries of urban communities. What has rarely been examined is how the virtual network has in turn impacted the way urban dwellers interact in their physical space. This is partly because most of the debate is in the context of technologically advanced but less populated nations such as the U.S. or Canada in North America and Finland or Switzerland in Europe.

Density is one of the most important components in understanding contemporary Asian cities, with Seoul being one of the densest urban areas on the planet. Approximately half of the total population of South Korea reside in the greater Seoul metropolitan area, with about half of that, or over ten million people, living in the capital city proper. Foreign visitors are overwhelmed by the fact that Seoul has more than three times the density of neighboring Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. A comparative study of six world cities, Seoul, Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles  showed Seoul to have the second highest population density behind Paris, but the second lowest building density of typical high-rise residential areas and downtown renewal areas next to Los Angeles. The disparity between population density and building density means that Seoul’s urban density is the highest of all, creating tremendous pressure on spatial intensification, verticalization and amplification of architecture [Fig. 10].

Meanwhile, the ratio of Internet users in Korea relative to population is one of the highest in the world. Data shows that 51.5 percent of the total population of South Korea are Internet users, representing the world’s largest penetration rate as of May 2002. Koreans are also second in online shopping with about 31 percent of South Korean Internet users now shopping online in May 2002, one percentage point behind leaders United States. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swiss newspaper, recently advised Western travelers not to ask whether Internet is available in hotels in Korea because it is considered an insult to Koreans. It is like asking whether a bed is available in the hotel room. The paper added that Korea’s world-leading Internet usage is partly due to the proliferation of standardized high-rise apartment buildings.  

This does not mean to suggest that Koreans simply retreat from the public to these privatized milieus, preferring to live their lives entirely in front of their computers. There is still an tendency for people, especially those living in relative ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, to physically join together and participate in each others’ lives and recognize that they are part of something bigger than themselves. It allows them to relieve their fear of alienation by constantly reconfirming their sense of relatedness. And so it should come as no surprise that a good portion of online communities in Korea end up meeting together in physical public places. Internet users, so called “netizens,” enjoy activities via online communities, cyber cafes, or chat rooms in portals sites that often turn into offline activities. As of March 2001, 1.62 million online communities were constructed in the four major portal sites, and about 51 percent of Internet users participated in offline gatherings.

The strong connection between online and offline activities is not commonly found in digitally advanced but less populated nations such as the U.S. and Finland, or more populated but less Internet-active areas like Europe, or heavily populated but heterogeneous countries such as China. This relationship results from the combination of explosive Internet usage, hyper-dense urban conditions and ethnic homogeneity. The strong ties between virtual space and real space invites us to rethink the two social paradigms postulated by Emile Durkheim.  Durkheim attempted to systematically distinguish the type of solidarity prevalent in relatively simple societies with that found in modern society, calling the first 'mechanical solidarity' and the second 'organic solidarity'. Mechanical solidarity was founded on likeness whereas organic solidarity arose from complementary attributes between individuals engaged in different pursuits. While organic solidarity requires a high degree of interaction between individuals, mechanical solidarity works through categorical similarities among individuals.

The crossing-over of people between online and offline communities blurs these conventional paradigms of space and society. Virtual space is open to mechanical and organic groups, both of which are present in the city, and individuals move easily between one and the other. Similarly, offline gatherings are open to both groups. By its nature, the crossover from one to the other not only dissolves the distinction between Durkheim’s two solidarities, but also the conventional categorization of place and non-place networks, creating a new multifaceted and undifferentiated socio-spatial paradigm.

One of the most pertinent examples of this new phenomenon was the outdoor cheering campaign during the 2002 World Cup in Korea. Millions of people camped out on the streets, inside baseball stadiums, and in parks to celebrate en masse the national team's stunning victories. According to police estimates, almost one in seven of the population watched Korea’s last game against Germany in public outdoor spaces. Two aspects of this month-long soccer fiesta were most striking: the structure of the national team support group who orchestrated these events (the ‘Red Devils’), and the spatial distribution of the major cheering places in the city.

First, the structure and operation of the Red Devils club is very similar to that of the Internet. The [net] space is a reticulate network; one part is connected to another part and eventually it is connected to every part of a whole network. When one part does not function, it may affect immediate neighbors, but it never ruins the whole network. The network keeps transforming and expanding. Likewise, the Red Devils’ voluntary participation and activities are operated spontaneously at different levels and places, without organizational or spatial hierarchies.

Second, the capital city's sprawling City Hall Plaza and the nearby Kwanghwamun intersection stand out as being of particular importance among the many cheering spots. The first was the intersection of the boulevard that moved towards the Royal Palace during the Chosun era and the second was the center of radials streets planned as a symbol of restoring royal authority against foreign superpowers before the colonization. After the 1960s, automobiles occupied these streets; pedestrians had no choice but to use inconvenient and complicated underpasses to cross streets in that area. In the 1970s and 1980s, student and civilians protested against military dictatorship and police and other law-enforcement officials cracked down hard on demonstrators there [Fig. 11].

Although these two places became the epicenters for street cheering during the games, there was no spatial hierarchy with other cheering places in Seoul. The events in these places were not planned but spontaneous, and the relationship of these places was not through linear linkage, but through point-to-point connection. Different locations were linked together less by spatial proximity but more by conceptual cohesion. Just like an IP address on the Internet, each place is a part of both a spatial and transpatial network.

[Tran]spatial Strategy and Spatial Tactics

We live in the age when radical urban transformation is not possible. The city is often spatially disconnected, thus lacking psychologically reassuring qualities of place and linkage. Any proposal to make a city physically continuous and evenly distributed would be naïve. But more naïve would be to believe that information technology and the automobile will eventually be a substitute for everyday encounter. The phenomenon of fragmentation and decentralization seems partly unavoidable today. Yet, there is the potential to search for a relative degree of affinity, clustering, and localization different from separation and segregation. The two street cheering sites in Seoul demonstrated that the concept of place-ness plays a more significant role in an environment where population concentration and spatial intensification give impetus to social dynamism. The nodal space works as a kind of epicenter having a ‘ripple effect’. It is a milieu for programmed public activities and congregation, and at the same time for unprogrammed interactions and the natural sustainment of mutual awareness. What needs to be given more attention are the fringe areas of these nodal spaces, which have been neglected in the horizontal disjunction of the front-linear and the back-planar morphologies, in the stark vertical stratification of the commercial and residential, and in the unprecedented transpatial linkage between the virtual network and real space.

Asian planners and architects have long ignored this specific urban reality. It is time to question and rethink the paradox in which we have been trapped. In the search for ‘tradition’ (which is often regressive and ethnocentric ideology) we have disguised our fundamental urban conditions and even ignored our recent cultural experiences. We have been ruled by Euro-American architectural and urban paradigms, more particularly by the mixture of the suburban dream in American urbanism and the production and reproduction of iconographic images of European architecture. It would make no sense to intellectually reconstruct a setting upon which we could triangulate a way into unexplored territory. Instead, there is room to move between the two polarities, where we do not eliminate the tension between the two but rather activate it in ways that enrich our awareness of urban conditions as well as our awareness of cultural meaning.

The ideas from three papers were adopted, modified and merged here: “From the Aristocratic to the Commercial: Chongno Street in Seoul,” Journal of Southeast Asian Architecture, Vols. 5 & 6. November 2003. MITA(P) 191/03/2004, pp.23-31; “From Online to Offline: The Emergence of a New Urban Community In the Age of Information Technology,” presented at the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, (Un) Bounding Tradition: The Tensions of Borders and Regions, Hong Kong, December 12 -15; “Online @Offline” at the catalog of “City of the Bang,” at the La Biennale di Venezia, 9th International Architecture Exhibition, Korea Pavilion, September 2004.