A white guy living in L.A. like it’s Seoul. That’s Colin Marshall. Living in the Koreatown district of Los Angeles, a city where people drive to the park to take a walk, his main form of transportation is his two feet. Marshall recently traveled across South Korea, from Seoul to Changwon to Busan, for six […]
Just as Changwon brands itself the ‘Young City’, other Korean conurbations come with slogans of their own. Seoul, of course, has a few: ‘Hi Seoul, Soul of Asia’ is an awkward English one; only marginally better is the Korean slogan which translates as: ‘The Seoul We Create Together, the Seoul We Enjoy Together.’ But nowhere is […]
Not long ago, so South Korea residents of 15 or more years tell me, taking a bike to the streets of Seoul would have indicated a death wish. But then somehow, in less time than it took to rise from dire poverty amid the wreckage of war to the kind of envy-of-Asia wealth it enjoys […]
With more than half of the country’s population of 50 million living in the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea’s other cities, even those with strong infrastructure and attractive surroundings, can seem eerily hollowed out. Certainly, the farther I travel away from Seoul on my urbanist’s odyssey, the older the average age of the people around […]
The streets of Seoul strike me as a uniquely rich and incongruous mixture of the urban future and the urban past. As soon as I emerge from the city’s subway system – so admirably planned, so meticulously engineered, so impeccably maintained – I step into a reality where street names and addresses suddenly lose their […]
Today begins An Urbanist’s Tour of South Korea, a five-part series at the Guardian chronicling my experience of urban life eating, sleeping, walking, cycling, and riding a hell of a lot of trains in Seoul and well beyond. Since at least the 1970s, we’ve turned to East Asia for a look at the urban future. Thirty […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile district with photographer Mark Edward Harris, author of such books as Inside North Korea, Inside Iran, The Art of the Japanese Bath, and Faces of the Twentieth Century. They discuss filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s introduction to his Iran book, and his rule about always excluding people from his own photographs; the importance […]
지금은 Kickstarter Drive가 시작됐어요! The Kickstarter drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour, that is, a whole season of in-depth interviews with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene all across South Korea, the most fascinating country in Asia today. We need only raise its $5,000 budget in a week, and it […]
This summer, we have the chance to take Notebook on Cities and Culture to South Korea, for my money easily the most fascinating country going in Asia right now. You may already have encountered and enjoyed its rich cultural output in the form of its food, its music (yes, the roots go deeper than “Gangnam Style”; I […]
Vital stats: Format: lessons in the Korean language, Q&A segments, photographic vocabulary sets, explanations of how to say and how specifically not to say certain things, lessons on Korea’s many dialects, interviews, casual conversations, and even English-language discussions of Korean life Episode duration: 1-25m Frequency: weekly regular grammar lessons, with all that other material interspersed […]