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Why Does Seoul Change When the Mayor Changes?

Through Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga, Park Kyung-sun shows how Seoul’s urban spaces have repeatedly been recast as political assets under shifting mayoral leadership.

시장에 따라 도시가 확확 바뀌는 게 당연해?

SisaIN · By 차형석 기자 · 17 June 2026 · read the original in Korean →

Why does Seoul change when the mayor changes? This is the subtitle of Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga. Park Kyung-sun, a researcher at Seoul National University’s Institute for Korean Regional Studies and the author of the book, had originally intended to use that subtitle as the book’s title. Having majored in architecture at university, she worked at an architecture firm and studied architecture and urban design at Columbia University in New York. After completing her master’s degree, she worked at a design office in New York and wanted to work on cities from within the public realm. Beginning in 2015, she spent ten years as a fixed-term civil servant for the Seoul Metropolitan Government, experiencing the administrative front line of urban space. She felt firsthand the immense influence political leadership exerts on urban space. After leaving the city government, she wrote her doctoral dissertation this year. Using the concept of the “political assetization of urban space,” she examined how urban space is produced according to the ideological policies of local government heads and becomes a political asset.

She traced the transformations of Seoul over more than twenty years under Mayors Park Won-soon and Oh Se-hoon. When she told acquaintances the subject of her dissertation, she often heard, “Isn’t that just what always happens when the mayor changes?” She wrote the book because she wanted to speak against that taken-for-granted common sense. By carefully following the shifts in policy around Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga, she wanted less to present an answer than to make the question at the very beginning arise. I met researcher Park Kyung-sun on June 2, the day before the local elections.

The phenomenon of urban space being replaced when the head of a local government changes is not unfamiliar. In Seoul, the starting point seems to have been the tenure of former mayor Lee Myung-bak. Is that right?

It seems that the public felt the impact of policy most strongly under Mayor Lee Myung-bak. The Cheonggyecheon restoration and the New Town policy were examples. At the time, not only in Korea but globally, cases in which a single piece of architecture revived an entire city were in the spotlight. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, for example, lifted the declining Spanish city of Bilbao into the ranks of global cultural tourism cities. I think such cases became lessons for leaders of other cities as well. Civil servants went there often on study trips, and Bilbao became known as a city to learn from.

What was different about Seoul before Mayor Lee Myung-bak?

I think there was no room to think about trying to do something through urban-space policy. In the early period of popular elections for local government heads, the Seoul Metropolitan Government was influenced by the policy direction of the central government. When Mayor Cho Soon took office, the Sampoong Department Store collapse had occurred just before his inauguration, and the Seongsu Bridge collapse had happened the year before that. More attention had to be paid to safety management. Mayor Goh Kun took office at a time when the whole country was struggling through the IMF foreign-exchange crisis. Seoul was also busy carrying out a national task with the hosting of the 2002 World Cup. National tasks and Seoul’s own tasks were not clearly separated, and the local government could not help but put national tasks first.

Why focus in particular on Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga?

Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga are spaces that both Mayors Oh Se-hoon and Park Won-soon made campaign pledges about. Over the past twenty years, they are places where discontinuity and conversion in policy have appeared clearly according to mayoral terms. They made it easy to observe the changes during the period when the two mayors alternated in power. The two places also differed in ownership structure and locational conditions. Nodeul Island is city-owned land, an island in the Han River. There are relatively few surrounding interests, and in a sense the city is the client, so the will of the city administration can be projected onto it with comparatively few constraints. Sewoon Sangga, by contrast, is privately owned land in downtown Seoul, a space entangled with complex interests among tenants, landlords, and landowners that have formed over a long period of time. I paid attention to the two spaces because they allowed me to watch how mayors carried through their will under such different conditions.

How would you explain the changes in policy around Nodeul Island?

Nodeul Island, located where the Hangang Bridge crosses the river, is an island created during the Japanese colonial period and was privately owned by a construction company. Under Mayor Lee Myung-bak, the city purchased it, saying it would build an opera house there. An international design competition was held, and under Mayor Oh Se-hoon the winning entry was selected. If construction had proceeded according to the original winning design, the estimated cost would have exceeded 500 billion won, so many questions were raised about the expense; environmental groups also opposed it because the island was habitat for the narrow-mouth frog, an endangered species. As Mayor Oh pursued the “Han River Renaissance Project,” he held a new design competition that would keep the opera house but add a cultural complex citizens could use. That was the “Han River Arts Island” project. The project failed to advance because of excessive budget requirements and concerns over the destruction of the narrow-mouth frog habitat, and the ordinance related to its core funding source, the Nodeul Island Arts Center Construction Fund, worth about 286 billion won, was abolished by the Seoul Metropolitan Council, then led by the Democratic Party.

Mayor Park Won-soon, who took office in 2011, scrapped the existing Nodeul Island project. His idea was not to build a huge landmark, but to discuss with citizens what kind of space Nodeul Island should become and to make the process itself central to the decision. While new uses were being discussed, Nodeul Island was used as a temporary vegetable garden. Seoul also devised, for the first time, a project method of “selecting the operator first, designing later,” but midway through, revisions to the relevant law, the Public Property Act, created difficulties in contracting with the operating company. The city decided to create a user-centered space and held a competition for the facilities; this was called the “Nodeul Dream Island” project. It also sought to reveal ecological value by planning the relocation of the narrow-mouth frogs as a citizen-participation program. In 2019, after many twists and turns, Nodeul Dream Island opened. But after the opening, COVID-19 spread, and Park’s urban-regeneration discourse, which took ecology, community, and citizen participation as its core values, also showed the limits of how difficult it was to demonstrate stable outcomes when applied to an urban space like Nodeul Island, where ordinary everyday living spaces had not been established.

During Oh Se-hoon’s second administration, the city conducted an audit of the overall operation of Nodeul Island, and operating authority was absorbed into the city government. In April 2023, Mayor Oh again solicited designs for Nodeul Island through the unprecedented method of “design first, business plan later.” This was the “Global Arts Island” project. Nodeul Island was divided into vertical layers: the aerial level, ground level, base level, and waterfront level. The new winning plan is conceived as a structure that covers the existing Nodeul Dream Island space. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in October 2025. Over the past twenty years, a different future has been drawn over Nodeul Island again and again.

Design competitions for the same space were overturned and repeated. Is that common?

It was hard to find cases like this. I do not think there is anything quite to this degree overseas either.

What about policy changes related to Sewoon Sangga?

Sewoon Sangga is bound up with a complex web of stakeholders. I wanted to focus on what kinds of spaces the mayor of Seoul tried to plan, implement, and turn into symbols. With the restoration of Cheonggyecheon, policy interest in downtown redevelopment rose sharply, and in 2004 an international design competition for Sewoon District 4 was launched on the premise of demolishing and redeveloping Sewoon Sangga. A winning design emerged, but because of various sources of conflict, including compensation for tenants and relocation measures, it did not lead to the implementation stage. During Oh Se-hoon’s first term, the Sewoon Sangga area was designated the “Sewoon Redevelopment Promotion District.”

Mayor Oh Se-hoon stresses that redevelopment of Sewoon Sangga will create a “green axis” connecting north and south. What does that mean?

If you look at a map, downtown streets run east-west, while Sewoon Sangga appears to block the north-south direction. The idea is to connect north and south with greenery. To say one “dreams of a downtown where a forest of buildings and a forest of trees harmonize” ultimately means occupying the ground loosely while building towers high. Mayor Oh approached it by inducing private development through incentives such as higher floor-area ratios and relaxed height limits.

Mayor Park Won-soon, in 2011, set out a direction for reorganizing the Sewoon Sangga area into an innovation space based on urban manufacturing. At the time, movements to revive urban manufacturing were active around the world. After the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, the real-estate market went through a slump, and it was also an era when regeneration appeared more reasonable than development. In 2013, the city decided to shift the existing plan, centered on wholesale demolition with the goal of recreating the downtown, into an urban-regeneration strategy based on creative cultural industries. In 2015, Sewoon Sangga was designated a leading urban-regeneration area. The key word in the Sewoon Sangga regeneration plan was set as “industry”; the city identified master craftspeople and ran many programs with occupants.

When Mayor Oh Se-hoon returned to office, the budget related to Sewoon Sangga’s hub spaces was reduced and personnel were cut. The strategy shifted back to urban development centered on creating a green axis. If Mayor Park saw Sewoon Sangga as an innovative hub for creative manufacturing industries, Mayor Oh approached it as a dilapidated downtown area urgently in need of redevelopment. Each mayor may have a different perspective and philosophy regarding urban space, but the problem is that those differences in perception operate by erasing everything that came before.

Seoul’s total budget for 2026 is about 52 trillion won, which is large compared with other local governments. You also wrote in the book that, as of 2024, Seoul’s fiscal autonomy stood at 81.2 percent, far above the national average of 70.9 percent, meaning that compared with other local governments it can operate its own financial resources independently according to its own judgment. Are phenomena like “Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga” appearing in other local governments as well?

This is a special case unique to Seoul. To begin with, there is no other case in which two people have alternated back and forth as heads of a local government in this way. Seoul also has a larger budget than other local governments. This is another dimension of the issue, but if, for example, a landmark were built in Gyeonggi Province, would it be seen as the governor’s achievement? I think there is a symbolic particularity to the space called Seoul.

Overseas, are there cases in which a succeeding mayor changes urban-space policy this drastically?

There may be such cases, but the method of development projects differs. Usually, when large-scale development projects are carried out, the public sector does not lead with 100 percent of the budget; they are often pursued in collaboration with the private sector. Because of this, even if the mayor changes, the existing system can be maintained by other actors. In operational terms as well, in the case of New York’s Central Park, where a comparatively large amount of public money is invested, the figures may have changed, but public funding accounts for roughly 40 percent. It has a structure in which a board of directors determines the mode of operation. Because private and public actors cooperate to carry out development projects, it seems possible to maintain the existing system even when the mayor changes. My dissertation adviser said, “Because cases like this are rare, I think overseas scholars would find it interesting if you presented on Nodeul Island and Sewoon Sangga” (laughs).

What measures could solve the problem of policy changing so sharply whenever the mayor changes?

It is not an easy problem to answer. If this keeps recurring within a term-centered political structure, it goes beyond the simple misuse of budgets and restricts the very possibility that citizens can accumulate their lives in urban space. We need to move beyond short-term achievements, establish long-term plans, create governance in which diverse actors participate, and prepare institutional checks on policy reversals. How to do that remains a research question. What is clear is that each citizen’s interest in and affection for urban space makes a better city. We should not simply let it pass by saying, “Isn’t it only natural that the city changes when the mayor changes?”

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