Walking along the Juyeop Park Esplanade yesterday in Ilsan in the humid, still evening, I watched the children playing among modernist statuary, parents playing ball with their kids, kids walking to or from hagwon as if they were college students, grandparents strolling, an old woman selling onions and garlic. All around, a rectilinear park-like environment, punctuated by a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise apartment towers of dubious individual architectural merit. This is Ilsan, a city of half a million that didn't exist the first time I came here, in 1991.
Yet unlike so many Modernist planned cities, Ilsan seems to work, at a very fundamental level. Imagine something with all the charm of Cabrini Green (Chicago's infamous 1960's era Modernist housing projects), but inhabited by a mostly Lake Forest demographic. The children play happily amid the soulless buildings, the parents are a bit overwrought, but deeply bourgeois. This is not typical Korea, either, but it feels very much like the future. The future that visionaries such as Le Corbusier and other Modernist "new city" proponents supposedly got so wrong.
Ilsan represents to me the proof of the fact that although most contemporary urbanist thinking seems to focus a great deal on the way that we can influence lifestyles through how we plan our urban spaces, when you get right down to it, there are very few elements of the physical urban space that are guaranteed to make a difference, positive or negative. Density is significant, but Ilsan is probably as automobile-reliant as any American city, if only because of the upper-middle-class status of most of its inhabitants – they need their cars, as aspirational objects, above all else. Perhaps it makes me a bit of a cultural determinist (read: marxist), but what makes urban spaces work has more to do with the socioeconomic position of the inhabitants than with how they are put together.