{"id":2320,"date":"2014-07-14T06:21:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T13:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2014-07-16T05:32:24","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T12:32:24","slug":"my-five-part-urbanists-tour-of-korea-at-the-guardian-begins-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2320","title":{"rendered":"My five-part &#8220;urbanist&#8217;s tour of Korea&#8221; at the Guardian begins today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/static.guim.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2014\/7\/10\/1405020109112\/26956d60-4e76-4ea6-93b8-7a28c1f88ff3-460x297.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"460\" height=\"297\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Today begins <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/cities\/2014\/jul\/14\/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-a-glimpse-into-the-future-of-world-cities\">An Urbanist&#8217;s Tour of South Korea<\/a>, a five-part series at the\u00a0<em>Guardian<\/em> chronicling my experience of urban life eating, sleeping, walking, cycling, and riding a hell of a lot of trains in Seoul and well beyond.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Since at least the 1970s, we\u2019ve turned to East Asia for a look at the urban future. Thirty years ago you\u2019d have found it Tokyo, but the prolonged economic malaise that beset Japan after the postwar boom that made its capital such a thrilling vision has turned the country inward. Many westerners now seem convinced that the future \u2013 urban, rural, or otherwise \u2013 looks, speaks, and (given all that industrialisation) smells Chinese. Yet China\u2019s vast size, still-authoritarian government and enormous ballast of poor people make it, to my mind, an unlikely contender. No, to experience first-hand what lies in store for world cities, you\u2019ll want to book a flight to South Korea.<\/p>\n<p>First and foremost, I mean Seoul. One can hardly overstate this nation\u2019s capital-centricity, which makes England look like it just happens to have a big city called London. Americans must imagine a metropolitan area that somehow combines New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, swallowing up a handful of other respectably large towns in the process.<i>Ollagada<\/i>, the Korean-language verb for making a trip to Seoul for a day or a lifetime, translates as \u201cgoing up\u201d;\u00a0<i>naeryeogada<\/i>, the one for returning to your hometown, translates to \u201cgoing down\u201d. A young South Korean looking to make something of himself has, in recent history, faced two options: go over to America, if possible, or go up to Seoul.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You can read the whole essay <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/cities\/2014\/jul\/14\/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-a-glimpse-into-the-future-of-world-cities\">here<\/a>. A new one will appear each day this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today begins An Urbanist&#8217;s Tour of South Korea, a five-part series at the\u00a0Guardian 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\u2019ve turned to East Asia for a look at the urban future. Thirty [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2320"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2331,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions\/2331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}