On Asian Streets and Public Space

FROM THE ARISTOCRATIC TO THE COMMERCIAL

FROM THE ARISTOCRATIC TO THE COMMERCIAL KIM SUNG HONG CHONGNO STREET IN SEOUL FROM THE ARISTOCRATIC TO THE COMMERCIAL The ingredients of a main street are a microcosm of the larger city. Every major world city seems to have a main street whose mere name instantly conjures images and memories of the city. In Seoul that street is Chongno. With more than six hundred years of history, Chongno is a prominent reference in the urban and architectural history of Seoul. But the relationship between the commercial street and the change of Seoul’s urban fabric has not been a rigorously studied subject. The history has generally been the history of the architecture and urban artefacts of the ruling classes: the focus has been on the formal, constructional, and aesthetic aspects of palaces, and the cosmological and symbolic aspects of traditional urban planning. One of the consequences is that the commercial architecture has been understood in economic, legal and technical terms devoid of understanding of the relation between architecture and urbanism. Although colonisation, war, and rapid economic development have destroyed most buildings built before the twentieth century, the urban spatial structure has persisted for more than six centuries and it still functions as an underlying logic to generate building morphologies. Today, the old urban layouts are threatened with extinction as the government and developers seek to reformulate them and build high-rise commercial buildings in the Chongno area. This paper examines and characterises the spatial transformation of Chongno, the oldest and one of the busiest streets in the historic area in Seoul. The question is to what extent we can understand the complex visual urban landscape in relation to the less complex spatial logic of urbanism. The paper develops a theoretical framework by investigating how the street-commercial spaceresidential spaces are related in the urban space and how they have been transformed in the process of commercialisation and urbanisation. The arguments of the paper are based on a comparative analysis of the chosen area in two different periods: between the late fourteenth century and the present. It was in the late fourteenth century that Chongno was for the first time planned as the official commercial street and shops were constructed. The 1980s and 1990s were characterised by the construction of massive high-rise buildings in the traditional urban areas. The studied area is one of the last renewal areas within the city. As the investigation is confined to the spatial aspects, only by theoretical implication will it expand to cover historical issues of the city. Space syntax is used to build a theoretical framework, however, the discussion of space syntax theory will be limited to the use of its basic concepts presented in a simplified form in this paper. The existing historical studies, research reports, maps, and photos also guide the argument to fill out details. Chongno is the oldest planned commercial street in Seoul. It is an east-west spine at the heart of Seoul, about 40 metres wide and 2.8 kilometres long. In Korean, the word “chong” designates bell tower, and “no” denotes street. From the west end, Chongno begins with one layer of lots on one side, but includes several layers of lots in the middle. To the east end, it extends to several blocks on both sides. To the west, an address refers to a parcel’s location within a CHONGNO STREET IN SEOUL 40 ON ASIAN STREETS AND PUBLIC SPACE 01 - The Street: Transformation and Modernity The paper was originally published at the proceedings of the Space Syntax 3rd International Symposium, with the title “The Linear and the Planar: The Spatial Logic of Chongno and the Morphology of its Commercial Architecture”, by Georgia Institute of Technology, 2001, pp. 33.1–33.12. The Korean version of the paper was published in Chongno: Time, Place, and People with the title “Chongno ui Sangeop Geonchuk gwa Gonggan Nonli” by the Institute of Seoul Studies, University of Seoul, 2002. pp. 221–66. A modified version was published at the proceedings of the 2002 Seoul International Conference on East Asian Architectural History, Seoul National University, with the title “The Spatial and the Transpatial: Two Spatial Paradigms of Chongno Street”, pp. 639–48, and published in Journal of SoutheastAsian Architecture 5–6. (Nov 2003): 23–31, with the title “From the Aristocratic to the Commercial: Chongno Street in Seoul”. consecutive order along the street, like grid plan cities...