Seoul.
It’s an economic powerhouse, and renowned for its food, culture, and NewJeans.
But we’re not here to talk about Seoul, we’re here to talk about Sejong City: the
new guy replacing Seoul as South Korea’s administrative capital.
Like Seoul, Sejong has an economy, and I’m sure at least some of their jeans are new.
But if you’ve never heard of it before, it’s probably because it was just a bunch
of peach farms until the South Korean government whipped it up into a capital city about a
decade ago.
But how did they do that?
And why?
Our journey begins on the presidential campaign trail in 2002.
At this point, things have been going pretty well in South Korea for a while: they’ve
hosted the Olympics, they got into the UN, and the GDP’s as high as it’s ever been.
And as such, people are starting to think less about making the country richer, and
more about making sure everyone gets a slice of the national money pie.
Because, the money pie is very much in Seoul.
The Seoul Capital Area—comprising the city itself, plus Incheon and the Gyeonggi Province—has
just under half of the whole country’s population on under 12% of its land, and the income gap
between there and everywhere else is widening.
So out on the campaign trail, candidate Roh Moo-hyun floats a big idea: take a bunch of
the people and jobs in Seoul, and push them somewhere else.
Because, come on, Seoul has enough going on without the government kicking around.
Sharing is caring, right?
So when Roh gets elected, he sets his big move-the-government plan in motion.
But not everyone’s into it.
It’ll disrupt a lot of people’s lives, plus there are certain operational conveniences
that come from having the country’s financial, cultural, and administrative capitals in the
same place.
One not-into-it party, namely the oppositional Grand National Party, filed a complaint with
the Korean Constitutional Court, which ruled in 2004 that Seoul’s capital status was
so universally understood that it was part of the “unwritten and customary constitution.”
And sure, an “unwritten and customary constitution” is, by definition, nothing, but turns out
robe guys can say whatever.
So now the government has three options: get a written Constitutional amendment passed
to call Sejong the capital, ditch Sejong entirely, or adjust their plans a bit.
They did the last one.
Under the new plan, Sejong would be the administrative capital, home to most of the government’s
ministries, while leaving a few back in Seoul, along with the presidential residence and
the legislature.
Roh’s term ended in 2008, and South Korea got a new president, who happened to have
been Seoul’s mayor and very anti-Sejong.
He briefly tried to rally people around sending companies like Samsung to Sejong instead of
the government, but that was even less popular, so they kept going with the revised plan from
Roh’s administration, and work began in earnest in 2011.
The site chosen for Sejong was here, a rural spot in the central Chungcheong Province,
conveniently located between Seoul, Busan, and Gwangju.
Before it got Extreme Home Makeover’ed, it was called Yeongi and was home to just
eighty thousand people—about as many as Parma, Ohio.
And if you’re not familiar with Parma, Ohio… exactly.
To develop Sejong, they flattened out the hills, laid down a grid system for the streets,
stood up some shiny high-rise apartments, and built the office building that would draw
everyone there: the Government Complex Sejong, a roughly two-mile or 3.2 kilometer-long building
snake covering more acreage than Disneyland.
By the time the government started moving ministries there in 2012, the new city had
restaurants, schools, and a grocery store, as well as high-tech amenities like automatic
trash collection, zero-waste food disposal, EV charging, CCTV security, and more.
And if that makes you think “Wow, they thought of everything!”
Well, not quite.
Because young Sejong was missing some stuff people like, such as a movie theater, and
a museum, and a hospital.
The transit system was also pretty bad—the nearest high speed rail station is a 25 minute
drive away, and Sejong City doesn’t have its own subway or tram.
It does have bus rapid transit, but it’s not great—the routes have never been good
enough, nor the buses frequent enough, to meaningfully pull people away from cars.
Which is just baffling to me, because as far as I’m concerned, the whole point of building
a city from scratch is the electric thrill of throwing down train lines willy-nilly before
anyone stops you.
Today, Sejong’s bus system only provides seven percent of the city’s transportation,
less than half the average for a metropolitan city in South Korea.
So that’s not great.
As the government moved itself to Sejong, it didn’t exactly siphon population away
from Seoul the way they’d hoped.
In fact, many workers just commuted there from Seoul, even though weekday rush hour
commute from, let’s say, the presidential residence in Seoul to the Government Complex
Sejong takes over two hours.
But to many government workers, it’s worth it to stay in Seoul rather than move somewhere
that’s kind of, well…
Seoul-less.
In fact, as Sejong’s grown, it’s pulled a lot of its population from around its own
province, rather than from Seoul itself.
Think about it this way: if your banger house party’s getting a little crowded and running
out of snacks, you don’t just start a second, worse party at another house in hopes people
will leave.
You order a pizza, open up some bedrooms, and move the furniture to make space.
Because the truth is, nobody wants to leave a good party—they just hope other people
will.
And look, it’s not a perfect metaphor for the Seoul/Sejong situation, but in fairness,
I don’t get invited to a lot of parties, and in both the party situation and the city
one, the solution is more housing.
But despite all the controversies and bad-vibes accusations, South Korea is still moving forward
on making Sejong their administrative capital, and it’s not even going that badly.
They’ve opened up libraries, a stadium, a nice park, and more shopping.
In 2020, they hit their two hundred thousand-person population target, and are heading towards
a goal of five hundred thousand by 2030.
It’s also made itself a great place to raise kids, with daycare centers in each apartment
complex, cash rewards worth over a thousand dollars for each kid you have, and highly
subsidized caregiver support for new parents.
And they’re making the bus free, so that’s nice.
In all, Sejong is walking in the footsteps of other purpose-built capital cities before
it: joining Canberra, Australia and Brasilia, Brazil on the list of “places where the
most interesting thing about them is that they’re the capital instead of somewhere
more interesting.”
Well that, and the fact that it was built to move people away from Seoul, and yet both
cities have added tons of people since this whole twenty billion dollar project started.
Oh well!
The daycare thing is cool!
So, if you made it to the end of this video, I’m gonna make two assumptions about you.
One: you have amazing taste.
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