[The Editors' Verdict] Jamwon Station Exit 4

Professor Kyung-Hoon Lee, Department of Architecture, Kookmin University

If you are interested in real estate issues and solutions, I recommend getting off at Jamwon Station on Seoul Subway Line 3. You will be surprised the moment you step off. It is unexpectedly quiet. There are only four exits. The scenery you encounter as you leave the exit is even more astonishing. Lush trees obscure the mid-rise apartment buildings. Although the road has only two lanes, there is a median strip adorned with blooming flowers. The hustle and bustle of the city center disappears, replaced by a pervasive tranquility.

The school district is top-notch. Transportation is accessible from all directions. Several large department stores are within a 10-minute distance. The Seoul Arts Center and Sejong Center for the Performing Arts can also be reached within 30 minutes.

The fact that such a pastoral landscape unfolds in the heart of Gangnam, Seoul, was a kind of bug in the early urban planning. This area, created in an era when urban planning was simply drawing roads and dividing land with thick colored pencils, was then the outskirts of Seoul. The apartments around Jamwon Station, which started this way, became a kind of ideal for everyone involved in housing policy, apartment supply, or purchasing.

Every time a housing supply plan is made, the scenery around here acts as an imaginary space and a collective desire. For example, New Town is an attempt to make the Gangbuk area like the surroundings of Jamwon Station. Since Gangbuk already has existing infrastructure, low-rise residential areas are replaced to create the lacking green spaces and parking lots. New towns are the opposite. They can build ample green spaces and parking lots. Since it takes time to fill all other facilities, they add transportation systems to complete the apartment complexes.

What is actually missing in the apartment complexes around Jamwon Station is a consideration of urban housing. Since this is where real estate problems begin, the solutions lie here as well.

First, it must be realized that the area around Jamwon Station is not urban housing. It is neither possible nor desirable to make all of Seoul like this. Moreover, the apartments around Jamwon Station have been endlessly replicated, and each time they have moved a step further away from urban housing from the original. To make all units face south, the floor count increased despite the same floor area ratio. Thanks to allowing balcony expansions, even small units commonly have four bays. Parking lots and green spaces have grown in scale, and everyone commutes and shops by car.

As the number of pedestrians decreases, local businesses collapse, and neighbors and communities disintegrate. It has transformed into an American-style suburban housing pattern. American urban scholar Professor Melvin Webber warned that new transportation technologies have broken the long-standing bonds between local communities and people, and urban spaces are being replaced by non-places. This means that these ambiguous spaces, neither urban nor rural, isolate themselves and lose the advantages of living in a city.

Here, the role of the public sector is important. It is the public sector’s role to contemplate and plan long-term urban structure and development directions. They must also propose urban housing types that can replace apartment complexes. It is important to demonstrate examples of equal housing types with dynamic vitality, different from the quietness and tranquility of nature.

The greatest responsibility may lie with architects. They entrust important urban housing designs to the vague “market” designer and then take their hands off. Are architects too noble to be interested in multi-family housing? Do they lack opportunities? Or do they also desire the area around Jamwon Station as an ideal urban residence?

I recommend everyone get off at Jamwon Station.

Kyung-Hoon Lee, Professor, Department of Architecture, Kookmin University