A Chance Encounter in Seoul: Rediscovering Friendship Amidst Urban Flux — Epoche C1
In a café built inside a former printing works in Seongsu-dong, on a Saturday afternoon, I heard a laugh I had not heard for fifteen years and turned to find Kim Min-jun, whom I had last seen at our middle-school graduation before his family moved to Busan. What follows is an account of that afternoon and of what I found when I went looking for the reasons behind the three things it seemed to demonstrate: that Seoul reinvents itself, that Ikseon-dong preserves something old, and that a friendship can survive fifteen years of silence. Two of those three turn out to be true in a stricter and more interesting sense than I meant them, and one of them is false. Seongsu-dong: the rent gap that produced the café I was sitting in Seongsu-dong, in Seongdong district on the north bank of the Han river, was for decades the centre of Korea's handmade shoe trade — small workshops, leather merchants, and the printing and light-metal works that cluster around such a trade. Within about a decade it became a quarter of galleries, boutiques and the sort of café that serves single-origin coffee by the pour-over method in a room with its original roof trusses left visible. I had been treating this as evidence of the city's creative energy. It is better understood as the closing of a rent gap, and the theory that explains it is precise enough to have made the transformation predictable in advance. The term was introduced by Neil Smith in 1979, in an argument aimed against the then-prevailing view that gentrification was driven by the tastes of returning middle-class residents. Smith's claim was that it is driven by capital, and that the signal capital responds to is the gap between two quantities. The capitalised ground rent is what a site actually yields to its owner under its present use — a shoe workshop paying a low rent on an ageing building. The potential ground rent is what the same site would yield under its highest-value plausible use. As a district's buildings age and its industry declines, the first quantity falls while the second, driven by the surrounding city, keeps rising. When the difference exceeds the cost of conversion plus a normal return, redevelopment happens — not because anyone's taste changed, but because a threshold was crossed. Seongsu-dong satisfied every condition unusually well. It held obsolescent industrial fabric on flat, well-serviced land, one subway stop and one bridge from Gangnam, some of the most expensive land in the country. High-ceilinged workshop shells are also cheap to convert, because the expensive parts of a building — foundations, frame, envelope — are already there and only the fit-out is new. The gap was wide and the conversion cost low. The pour-over I was drinking was standing on the far side of an arbitrage. The word for the process, gentrification , was coined by the sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964, describing Islington in London: middle-class incomers taking over working-class housing, "until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced". The displacement is the part my original account left out, and in Seoul it has a specific legal shape. Commercial tenants in Korea are protected by the Commercial Building Lease Protection Act of 2001, which caps how far a landlord may raise the rent within a tenancy and guarantees a renewal right for a fixed term. Until 2018 that guaranteed term was five years — which meant, in a district whose rents were doubling, that the small operators whose presence created the district's appeal could be lawfully removed at almost exactly the moment their work paid off. An amendment in 2018 extended the guarantee to ten years, and an earlier amendment in 2015 gave tenants a protected interest in the premium, the goodwill payment a departing tenant receives from an incoming one, which landlords had been extinguishing by refusing to deal. Seoul city itself made Seongsu-dong a pilot for a mutual-prosperity approach in the mid-2010s, brokering voluntary agreements with landlords to moderate increases. So the district's reinvention is real, and it is not the spontaneous flowering I described. It is a transfer, partially and belatedly regulated by statute, from one set of occupiers to another. Ikseon-dong: the "traditional" alleys are a speculative development of the 1920s We walked on to Ikseon-dong, whose narrow lanes of hanok — Korean timber-framed courtyard houses — I described as traditional architecture blending with modern sensibilities. The buildings are indeed hanok, and the second half of that sentence is fair. The first half is misleading by about six centuries, and the truth is a better story. A classical hanok is a post-and-beam timber structure arranged around a madang , an open courtyard, with rooms heated by ondol : a firebox at one end drives flue gases through channels beneath the floor and out through a chimney at the other, so that the heated mass of the floor slabs, not the air, warms the room. That system is ancient. Ikseon-dong is not. It was laid out in the early 1920s by Jeong Se-gwon, a developer who bought up large aristocratic compounds in central Seoul, subdivided them into small standard plots, and built dense rows of compact hanok to a repeated plan using pre-cut components — the first mass housing in Korea, and a commercial response to the pressure of Japanese settlement in the colonial city. Inha Jung's history of modern Korean architecture and urbanism (2013) sets out this urban-hanok type and its industrialised production. Ikseon-dong is therefore closer in kind to a London Victorian terrace or a Parisian Haussmann block than to a palace: a standardised speculative product, built fast, for a market, by a developer with a nationalist motive and a business plan. Which means that when a hanok there becomes a tea house, what is happening is not the violation of an ancient fabric by commerce. It is the second commercial use of a building that was a commercial proposition when it was new.