Plan would move capital of South Korea out of Seoul

By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Residents and visitors alike can recite a long litany of complaints about Seoul, a city of 10 million that is as sprawling as Los Angeles and as congested in parts as Mexico City. So the South Korean government has come up with a novel solution: move.

Last week, an evaluation committee designated a patch of land 60 miles to the south as the likely future capital of South Korea. The idea is that the seat of government will move between 2007 and 2030 — an endeavor expected to cost at least $40 billion.

The impetus for the move came from President Roh Moo Hyun's campaign in 2002. But like many campaign promises, nobody took this one seriously until the committee named the new site in rural North Chungchong province as its first choice.

The plan is supposed to be finalized next month, although the mayor of Seoul and others are going to court to block it. South Korea's Constitutional Court decided yesterday to hear a petition by a group of lawyers, bureaucrats, college professors and students who want the president to call a national referendum before moving ahead.

	The idea came from President Roh Moo Hyun.

The designated capital-to-be of the world's 12th-largest economy is in Yeongi county, just outside the small city of Kongju. What's there to recommend it? Nothing. Most of the designated land is covered with rice paddies. Or as the Lonely Planet guidebook to South Korea puts it, there is "nothing to hold your interest for long."

That appealed to the evaluation committee, which wanted to start from scratch to avoid the errors of urban planning made in Seoul.

"The main focus is on building an environmentally friendly city. We want it to be like a garden city, but an intelligent city from the standpoint of computer networking," said Kwon Yong Woo, a professor of urban geography who led the committee.

In this utopian city there would be town houses and low-rise apartments instead of the chockablock concrete high-rises that shut out the sunlight in the current capital. So that the 500,000 or so anticipated residents don't feel the need to flee to Seoul on weekends, the planners want to build museums, theaters and parks.

The concept of sticking a capital out in the boonies is not unlike that of Australia's Canberra or Brazil's Brasília — or for that matter Washington, D.C., which was created out of a swamp.

The last major relocation of a capital was the shift from Bonn to Berlin, which started after the reunification of Germany in 1990. However, this move would turn the logic of what happened in Germany on its head as the South Korean capital is moving farther away from communist North Korea. Although Korean unification by no means appears imminent, many here think it will happen before 2030 — in which case the capital might have to be moved somewhere between Seoul and Pyongyang.

The conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper predicted that if reunification took place before the completion of the move, "the new capital construction site would fall into vast ruin ... (and become) an ugly monument to a past government."

The president wants the government to begin construction in 2007.

The National Assembly approved the move in a little-noticed vote in December — not coincidentally, in the run-up to legislative elections in which North Chungchong province was hotly contested.

Embarrassed assemblymen are now claiming that they voted only to study the idea.

Polls published this week in major newspapers show slightly more than half the population opposed to the move. The reasons have less to do with the possibility of reunification than with the potentially negative impact on their principal investments — private homes they own in Seoul. A disproportionate 46 percent of South Koreans live in the capital or its environs. Apartment prices have risen 70 percent since 2000.

The degree to which everything from politics to culture in South Korea revolves around Seoul cannot be underestimated. Historians say the reason is a Confucian tradition of strong central government, which has meant that anybody who wanted to be somebody had to move to the capital.

Among those areas of South Korea that suffered was North Chungchong province.

Oh Young Hee, the mayor of Kongju, estimates that the city's population has dropped by half since the early 1970s to 140,000.

She is predictably among the enthusiasts for the relocation. "This move is a way to achieve balanced and equal development of Korea."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More nation & world headlines...