Design
Why Koreans Shun the Suburbs
In cities around the world, harried urbanites look to the suburbs for more space or a nicer house for their money. But in South Korea, the city apartment is still the dream.
Jun Myung-jin thought he saw the future.
Now a professor of urban studies at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Jun was a graduate student in the United States from 1988 to 1993. He was studying at University of Southern California in Los Angeles—a place more like a patchwork of neighborhoods than a city, beset by traffic but stocked with roomy single-family homes. That was totally different from South Korea at the time. Koreans were flooding into Seoul to live in apartments next to factories, offices, markets, and everything else.