Not long ago I sat down with reporter Jason Strother at a tea house in Ikseon-dong, a hanok village in downtown Seoul, for a conversation about the neighborhood’s development, revival, and future. He used it for a segment on Monocle magazine’s podcast The Urbanist which they describe as follows: “This week we head to Seoul to visit a neighbourhood that’s beaten the odds. Ikseon-dong was the country’s first real-estate development project back in the early 1930s – but there’s not much left in the city from that period.”
This follows up, in a sense, on the Ikseon-dong segment I did on TBS eFM’s Koreascape last year. Back in 2013, I made my first appearance on The Urbanist to discuss Los Angeles with host Andrew Tuck, and the year after that, I went to London and interviewed him for Notebook on Cities and Culture. Given that Monocle played an instrumental role in raising my own professional interest in cities in the first place, I suppose it makes sense that I’d subsequently have these encounters with it over over years in a different one each time. Where, I wonder, will the next one happen?