The Miniaturized Futures of New Seoul

Abstract This essay explores how Seoul became both a stage for urban planning and an actual site of construction in the late 1960s. The city government and its mayor, Kim Hyŏn-ok, avidly proposed numerous brand-new city designs and construction plans through various media, among which a miniature of 1980s Seoul at the Urban Planning Exhibition (1966) and three-dimensional designs of the Yŏŭido Development Plan were representative cases. Further, those construction projects were implemented as ongoing everyday events in association with a specific discourse, kŏnsŏl. This term was a key concept for urban planning then, indicating the whole process that not only embarked on and carried out those city plans but also changed the city's environment from vacant, canvas-like areas that were created by explosive destruction to multidimensional landscapes with structures of steel frames and concrete blocks, such as high-rise buildings, overpasses, expressways, and embankments that literally demonstrated a Seoul under construction.