The New Capital plan: a South Korean case

Abstract

Current debates about relocating the ‘national administrative city’ in South Korea have their genealogical roots in the division of Korea during the early 1950s. Through relocation of the central city, South Korea has persistently reinvigorated plans that proposed an administrative and political centre in a place safe from any North Korean threats. This article investigates one of these attempts by studying the New Capital plan blueprinted in the late 1970s. Drawing upon both modernist spatial strategies and bureaucratic interpretations of ‘tradition’, the plan expresses a top-down nationalist ideology, crucial to ushering in political stability, and induced a fixed reading of space. In the process, the New Capital plan reflected the imagination of both the elites and bureaucrats, where the planners' role was that of technocratic experts complicit with the authoritarian versions of the city. As a space for selective memory, the New Capital plan resulted in a paradoxical urbanism that incorporated both ‘continuity’ and a ‘break’ from the official version of national history, only to contrast this with the democratic demands of the people whom planners of the New Capital theorised as a vital element of the plan.