Journal article
Restoring and Re-Restoring the Cheonggyecheon: Nature, Technology, and History in Seoul, South Korea
Environmental history, v 24(4), pp 736-765
01 Oct 2019
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project (2003-5) was an ambitious urban initiative to restore a 5.8-kilometer stream in central Seoul by demolishing elevated highways and peeling back the decades-old concrete pavement. A massive civil engineering project in itself, the restoration work caused heated debates on whether it brought back "an environmentally friendly civic jewel'' or resulted in a humongous "fish tank'' with an artificial water supply and meticulously engineered vista. This article examines the design, implementation, and critique of the restoration project by taking an envirotechnical position that restoration is fundamentally about negotiating nature, technology, and history. First, the designers and engineers struggled to determine how much nature and how much technology should constitute the new Cheonggyecheon so that it could recover its original state. Second, planners and officials deliberated which parts of the city's past the restoration should reference and display. It turned out that a distant, dynastic era was brought back while a recent, contested history of rushed industrialization was pushed away, both physically and symbolically. Even as the critics of the restoration project pushed for a new "re-restoration'' project, the central dilemma of finding the right reference for restoration remained unresolved. The Cheonggyecheon project shows that restoration is a never-ending effort that mobilizes what is available at the moment in the repository of nature, technology, and history.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- Restoring and Re-Restoring the Cheonggyecheon: Nature, Technology, and History in Seoul, South Korea
- Creators
- Chihyung Jeon - Korea Adv Inst Sci & Technol, Grad Sch Sci Technol & Policy, Technol & Sci Technol & Soc STS, Daejeon, South KoreaYeonsil Kang - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Environmental history, v 24(4), pp 736-765
- Publisher
- Oxford Univ Press
- Number of pages
- 30
- Grant note
- 2018R1A5A7025409 / National Research Foundation of Korea - Korea government (Ministry of Science and ICT)
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- History
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000509579500012
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85083895212
- Other Identifier
- 991019167448304721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Environmental Studies
- History