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In the 1960s, it became clear that the dominant housing type of the colonial period, the urban hanok, would be incompatible with the urban development already underway in Korea. In response to the overcrowding of Korea’s large cities, new forms of housing that could be built to higher densities began to appear—apartment houses and multihousehold dwellings, as well as a new type of detached house known as jipjangsajip, or spec house. Building new housing would become the focus of the urban expansion of the developmental period. Decline of the Urban Hanok Beginning in 1957, the Korean government began to build more durable public housing than the makeshift adobe houses and cement block houses it had previously constructed for homeless refugees and victims of the Korean War. Entrusted with the supply of thousands of houses, the Korea National Housing Corporation developed several standard plans ranging in size from 44 to 66 sq m. The most prominent characteristic of each standard plan was the interiorization of the traditional madang, or courtyard, which was replaced with a living room. Although the kitchen could not be separated from the master bedroom, because the traditional underfloor heating system, or ondol, was still the main source of heat, these houses were a clear departure from the urban hanok of the colonial period, and as such they provided a basis for the development of the spec house in the 1960s and 1970s. While urban hanok continued to be constructed until the end of the 1960s, they eventually gave way to new housing types because they were regarded as unsuitable for contemporary lifestyles based on new standards of hygiene, new ideas about respecting the privacy of individual family members, and convenient access to vehicles. Younger Koreans, having imbibed foreign ideals, aspired to Westernized housing because it symbolized their escape from an impoverished past and was a promise of an enhanced social standing still to come. Moreover, the high-density construction going on in the downtown areas of large cities put the old neighborhoods of urban hanok under increasing pressure and made it difficult for their occupants to sustain a comfortable environment. With decreasing activity in the conventional construction trade, hanok artisans capable of building the traditional wooden structures began to disappear, and the areas where the urban hanok had once flourished were increasingly targeted for renewal. With the decline of the urban hanok, apartment houses gradually became the dominant form of middleclass housing in the developmental period. Nowadays, over 50 percent of all Koreans live in apartment houses, irrespective of whether they live in the city or the country. At 476 persons per sq km, Korea ranks third in the world in population density, and congestion has been a constant factor in its urbanization. Since there has never been enough land to build large housing New Urban Housing Chapter 5 Fig. 5.1 Number of permits for housing construction in Korea (Census of Statistics Korea) New Urban Housing 71 estates filled with detached houses, Korean planners sought to make high-rise apartments an attractive alternative by surrounding them with urban amenities and the open spaces that are rarely found in cramped cities. The provision of those amenities has greatly influenced housing preferences,1 especially with the decline in number and quality of detached houses after the government ’s 1985 revision of the Building Act, which allowed owners of single-family homes to convert their property and build multihousehold dwellings on the same site (figure 5.1). Spec Houses Before the 1970s, detached houses of many types were available in Korean cities. But they were eventually replaced, for the most part, by jipjangsajip, or spec houses, which first entered the scene in the 1960s. A spec house is a single-family detached unit, built on speculation , in the hope that a buyer will turn up. It accounted for a great portion of the housing construction of the postwar era until large numbers of apartment houses and multihousehold dwellings began to be built. Since small-scale developers were mainly responsible for the spec houses, their design and construction method were usually dictated by the real estate market. The size varied according to the site but typically followed the maximum ratios allowed under the building code. Spec houses were built for the middle class; they appealed to popular taste rather than the refined notions of the wealthy. Throughout the 1960s, approximately 22,000 spec houses were built in Seoul each year, increasing to approximately 36,000 annually from 1970...

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