Inside Korea’s Failed New Capital 🇰🇷

Inside Korea’s Failed New Capital - Sejong, Korea

Today we are exploring Korea's new capital: Sejong. They plan to move the capital from Seoul to Sejong for several reasons like decentralizing the economic power or reducing the big crowds in Seoul. Sejong is a planned city, planned and built from scratch and opened around 12 years ago. Many people say Sejong is a failed city and many media reports state that as well. But how is the life really like in Sejong? I am here to find out. So, we are going to spend a typical day here that a person who lives here could also have in order to find out if this is a livable and futuristic city (as promised) or really a failed city. Let's explore Sejong, Korea and find out!

#korea #seoul #sejong
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🙋🏼‍♂️A B O U T M E
I am Ken Abroad, a full-time traveler traveling southeast Asia, east Asia and south Asia. It is my goal here on the channel to visit every country in these Asian regions and bring you along the journey. I strive to learn the most about each country, experience their culture, eat their food, see how they live, witness their daily life, learn about their work, get to know what they believe in and understand their perspective of life
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[HCMCDrives]

Not really "failed". The plan was to have 300k by 2020, it had 350k, above target. The initial population growth was behind schedule but is now ahead.

[totheeast-ul]

I love Sejong city. as an introvert person, I love how peaceful, clean and modern is. after good day's work, going for a jog in the lake park is one of my favorite routines.

[yen_liz]

I've been living in Sejong City for 9 years ^^ I can't see any shops because the place you looked around is a government office neighborhood. Other than that, if you walk around the neighborhood, you will see many shops. Each neighborhood has its own characteristics. Saerom-dong is a private academy and Naseong-dong is an entertainment district and Sejong-si is very satisfied. It's clean and beautiful. People walk around in apartments. The walking paths of the apartments are very well-established

[letmetakeyouhere]

When you first tapped the card on the bus it said "tap only one card at a time" - so the payment did not go through - but when you got off it worked so I guess they charged you for the standard fare
The hairdresser's salon name was "David Hair" - perhaps the english name of the guy who cut your hair is David haha - the English sign next to it was the name of the laundromat - but it's a clever idea to search for that instead and find the salon next door
The first ice cream the guy recommended to you would have been a more "traditional korean" flavour - it's red bean flavoured
The milky drink is called Ambasa - carbonated milk soda - Ambasa is owned by Coca-cola company and there is a more popular brand called Milkis which tastes very similar
You can pay cash on buses in Korea even though most people nowadays use a card - the driver has a box next to his seat to keep the cash and coins for change
Thanks for this vlog - not many would film Sejong city - with so much detail - as a non-Korean who has lived here for 11 years I enjoyed watching you try Lotteria and getting a haircut - very brave of you when you don't speak the local language!

[jamesbartle]

Try avoiding clickbait. As Korean people here say…it’s not failed but in progress

[Mark-yypy]

It’s amazing that the South Koreans can build a city like this from scratch in 12 years. Only a small handful of nations could do that. There are some nations that would still be complaining about the blueprints.

[aliciagbalmer]

Sejong is my favorite city in Korea! So glad you went there. The people are lovely there and there’s loads of pretty cafes and yummy restaurants! ☺️

[MrBdoleagle]

Sejong looks clean and modern, great video.

[hanitvch]

외국인 유튜버 영상으로 세종시를 첨 보다니.. 세상 좋아졌네요. 감사합니다.

[semicollonn]

Love seeing the city where I grew up on YouTube! As a researcher in urban planning who studied in Korea and abroad, I would like to provide some additional nuance:


Unfortunately these concepts weren't fully realised: the inner ring was supposed to have two lanes for BRT and two traffic-calmed car lanes for local traffic, now it's just a run-of-the-mill Korean stroad with BRT lane sandwiched between four car lanes. The land use concept was also heavily watered down; while the key functions (national government, city government, commercial, healthcare, research and uni, industrial...) are indeed distributed across the ring equally, they obviously don't carry the same weight. As both the national government (district 1-5) ánd the central commercial district (district 2-4) are located in the west, the centrality became far too clear in reality.

@5:10 : Dodam-dong is just where it is temporarily functioning as a city centre at the moment, but by no means it is planned as a city centre nor will remain as so. The real central commercial district is located between the government complex and the Geum River, featuring almost 1, 5 kilometres (nearly a mile) of multi-level shopping corridor called Urban Atrium, that now sits mostly empty. (I haven't been back home for quite some years now, so it might be different now!)

@4:25 : Amazing guess, because a metro ís indeed planned, though it is rather an afterthought. The BRT system was already at its capacity, so it was about time they actually introduce some proper rail transportation to the city. The BRT was a successful implementation nevertheless, just not enough for a city with projected 500.000 residents.

@7:54 : These shades are indeed lifesavers in summer, but also has been one of my biggest pet peeves living there: most of the time they are placed right above bicycle paths. Korean pedestrians are notoriously bad when it comes to respecting bicycle paths, and to be fair the local traffic code is also very blurry in that regard, but still, the path is separated for a reason eh. Where I'm living now, you'll be rightfully yelled at by everyone if you dare to stand on a cycle path!

@14:50 : Haha that tower. It was built before the city's construction started to give investors and visitors some idea on how the city would look like in the future. Now you just see some flats. For tourists I would certainly never recommend there. Nowadays there are also rooftop café's in the aforementioned central commercial district (District 2-4, on top of one of the towers shown at @21:30) where the view is much nicer. Haven't been there yet, but I can already see that the coffee there would be wonderfully overpriced, so be prepared :)

@18:10 : Compared to other run-of-the-mill Korean town planning at the time, it is indeed relatively walkable; but compared to other (non-North American) developed countries, certainly underwhelming. Right-turn-on-red is still permitted, 6+ lane stroads are horrendously common, and neighbourhood shopping streets are rarely pedestrianised, often with signalled, 4 lane roads where at least two lanes are de facto street parking lanes. This abundance of car infrastructure is one of the reasons why it feels dead and empty; despite the fact, some Koreans still manage to complain that the roads are "not wide enough" unironically, while finding themselves in an apartment block surrounded by four- to six-lane stroads on all sides. Oh the irony.

@19:50 : That part of the city is probably the architectural armpit of the city lol. The first neighbourhood (district 2-3, Hansol-dong) is the only exception, built with strict urban design concepts and guidelines, making it more human-scaled and interesting qua urban design (uninterrupted pedestrian walkways, European block styles enz.). Unfortunately that's not the case in other parts of district 1 (in the video) and 2. The newer parts (District 4, 5, 6) are much better, as the urban design is taken more seriously again. These are way more architecturally pleasant compared to the ones featured in the video of course.

And a small correction: the city itself is planned to house 500.000, not 1 million. The municipal vision indeed projects roughly a million (800k) by including surrounding countryside and small development projects, but this is really not something to be taken seriously. There's a famous urban planning joke in Korea: if you add up all the population projections of every municipality, South Korea will be a land with 100 million residents in no time. All while the birth rates being record low.

@21:20 : The landscrapers you're seeing are the (national) government complex: aligned with the city's broader concept, it is designed to be de-central, open, and less "authoritative" and hierarchical. So instead of the conventional office towers, they opted for a landscraper model spanning the entire district and fully connected by walkways. The rooftop of the ministries is a massive garden open to the public (on reservation basis). Despite some practical issues (i.e. efficiency, since it requires walking nearly a kilometre between ministries - still a fairly valuable daily exercise imo; and security, which is why the rooftop garden access require reservation), I find the concept coherent and worthy as a model overall.

Aaaaand then later the Ministry of Interior wanted to add its own building at the centre of the complex. They went full-on authority and efficiency, completely against the whole design concept of the district ánd the city. The result is that perky blue box thing you see in the middle of the complex. The whole selection process of the international design competition was a hot steaming mess, as in, the voice of the Ministry was overrepresented to the point the chief of the board of juries (who was an architecture professor) quit in protest. There's a runner-up design that you can find online that fits much better with the whole concept of the city.

Fun fact: back in the early 2010s when the government complex just started operation, there was literally nothing around the complex: no restaurants, except the canteens at least, no shops, and definitely no shopping mall. The solution was the private "restaurant buses" that transported thousands of bureaucrats to restaurants in nearby cities, which at one point so commonplace that it almost created its own little traffic jam in the middle of the day. Lunch is a serious business in Korea.

@31:26 : In fairness, the area you're in is not really residential nor commercial; you are in the government complex. The complex was supposed to be mixed-use, but the commercial functions sadly never came (yet) and the space is now temporarily being used as, you've guessed it, car parks. You can still sometimes find street food vendors in public squares near BRT stations, but mostly in winter when demand for street food skyrockets.

That being said, indeed the street vendors are far, far less common in Sejong than other cities. And that's the thing with Korean city planning: it is very utilitarianist, top-down and normative. There are many cases of vital functions missing or neglected by the planners - even formal features like diverse housing supply (both small and large) and autogas (LPG) stations. Small hostels and hotels are also not allowed in the whole city as they are grouped with motels, which are not very family-friendly. No way one can expect informal urban functions to be there. In retrospect it would have been indeed nice if the streetside kiosks are regulated and integrated into the streetscape, but well, at the time, planners saw such street vendors more as a nuisance. Instead in Sejong, you can find those vendors in food trucks (often parked illegally at bus lay-by's and zebra crossings, to maximise foot traffic) or as an actual store in neighbourhood shopping arcades, often with minimally cladded interiors that are rarely better than the unregulated counterparts aesthetically.

@39:07 : In my opinion Sejong will never be an actual tourist destination of its own, but rather a day-trip destination in the region. Nearby Gongju has rich Baekje-era historic sites to visit, and Cheongju and Daejeon are also pretty decent day trip destination on its own (Daejeon maybe less so, but at least their bakery is a must-visit). By that time Sejong will also have some more stuff to see, including the completed Central Park, National Botanical Garden, Circular River Bridge, multiple national musea (2027) and the national library shaped like a (bent) book. By 2025 (as far as I remember) the regional BRT network will be mostly completed, including services to Gongju and Cheongju (Daejeon is already pretty well-connected), so by that time it will be probably worth it to stay in Sejong and visit nearby cities. Think of it more as a polycentric region like Randstad or Ruhrgebiet.

@41:02 : If you come again in 5 - 10 years, you can perhaps cover the Smart City pilot project currently under construction in District 5-1. Set aside for some obvious gimmicks (i.e. autonomous pods, good luck with that lol) it is quite a promising project to see nevertheless.

[딸기맛코딱지-qe]

세종시에 9년째 살고 있어요. 저는 세종시에 만족하고 있습니다. 영상에서 처럼 깨끗하고 녹지가 많아 저녁이 되면 산책 하는 분들로 꽤 붐비기도 하지요. 살기는 좋은곳 인것 같아요..하지만. 노잼인건 팩트.

[jillleong]

Peace and quiet space for you to explore.Generally it looks like a city whereby it will developed further.I'm in awe of your walking around this city despite the warm weather.Have a safe and pleasant flight to your next destination Ken.Looking forward to the next one.👍💕🇲🇾

[임뚜두]

Oh, I've never expected that you would come sejong city! I've lived sejong for 5 years. Before living here, I lived in seoul most of my life.. My parents moved here so I moved too. Compared with Seoul, Sejong is really quite and peaceful city. I love National library and running tracks the most, but I feel bored very oftenly :( So I have a plan moving to seoul someday. The people who like peace and not-crowded place would love this city.

[MrEpicrider]

Instagram short video brought me here and I really enjoyed your video!

It's pretty interesting for Koreans to see a tourist vlog in Sejong because, as you said, it's obviously not a city for tourists.
But as someone who has lived in Sejong for around one and a half years (I was born and raised in Seoul for 26 years),
I can confirm that Sejong is a pretty decent city to live in. There are plenty of parks near the city and the beautiful Geum River flows around the city, much like the Han River in Seoul. Lastly, the city is clean and relatively populated with young people, so I personally feel that the city is less congested than Seoul but at the same time has a youthful energy.
Now, I have moved to a new company and left Sejong but I definitely would be willing to move back to Sejong one day if I have the chance.


Thanks for the video and enjoy your trip in Korea! :D

[장로마나]

I'm living in Sejong city.
I'm very glad to see your video clip.
This city is clean and comfortable. And not too far from Seoul.
I love this city.
I was really sorry that you couldn't find out the entrance of hotel. I had same experience with you.
Have a wonderful time in Korea.

[minwoo]

I love this video better than the videos about other famous tourist areas from other channels. It is very good.

[chaw]

What an interesting walkabout in Sejong City...truly enjoyed it. Yeah, it's very clean, peaceful, modern and very green too. Great that you enjoyed that fast food meal. A nice haircut and you always look so much younger 👍😃 Well, what an interesting and eye pleasing video. You are so awesome for sharing and showing it to us. Good job, Ken.

[jalgong]

헉~~ 반가워요
세종시 출범이후 근11년째 거주와 부동산중개중인데 이렇게 외국분영상으로 보니 새롭네요 잘보고갑니다🎉🎉🎉

[박현주-er]

세종시. 말로만. 들었는데. 덕분에. 이렇게. 보게되네요ㆍ고마워요😊

[Frank_Reijnen]

I’m planning on going to Korea in September, so these videos are a great source of information for me! Thanks Ken