One night, a long time ago, I drove toward Bundang. I don't remember why. Bundang wasn't the familiar city it is today, and all that's left of that drive is a faint memory of a long, dark road. Then, somewhere in the distance, the lights of a huge apartment complex appeared. Everything around was pitch black, but countless windows were lit. It didn't look like an old city, where alleys and shops and houses run on until apartments begin. It looked as if a whole chunk of city had dropped onto empty land. A little dramatically, it felt like an alien city. I think that was the first time I understood the word "new town" with my eyes. Cities usually grow slowly. People settle, roads appear, shops open, and houses fill in around them until one day it's a city. Bundang looked like the opposite. Someone had drawn the shape of the city first, then moved people into it. Why did Korea, facing a housing shortage, build entire new cities instead of just more homes...
I have a soft spot for the horizon. In Korea, it's rare to see land stretching flat all the way to the edge of the sky. Look up and there's a mountain. In the city, there's an apartment block in front of the mountain. So when I see an endless plain abroad, I find myself staring at it a little too long. And this is the country where people started pouring into the cities. The Most Practical Way to Fit Everyone In Most of Korea is mountains, so there was never much flat land to build outward on. Starting with the first apartment complexes of the 1960s, Korean cities grew up instead of out. A French geographer once called Korea an "apartment republic," and this is the landscape behind that phrase. Apartments weren't loved from the start. Cities were growing at breakneck speed, and apartments were the answer to fitting that many people in. Then people lived in them and found them surprisingly convenient. Not One Home, but a Small Village Walk into ...