South Korean Geography

South Korean Geography

by Gregory C. Eaves

Aug. 9, 2017

 

 

People from the U.S. sometimes ask, “What’s life like in South Korea?” This is my standard response.

 

First, imagine the population of all of California and all of Illinois — around 52 million people — squeezed into a mountainous square of land barely the size of Indiana, or about half the size of Nebraska or South Dakota. It’s a huge population squeezed onto a tiny postage stamp of bumpy, mountainous land, with few flat spots or river plains on which to build.

 

Second, give this crammed population a huge economy, about the size of California’s economy, give or take Ohio. Economically speaking, this place does everything, but most famously, of course, it bends metal. Korea bends metal amazingly well and into all sorts of things: cars, steel, container ships, TVs, stereos, smartphones. There’s also a lot of oil refining, nuclear energy, coal, construction, plastics, chemicals and pollution: blue-collar factory workers and grey polluted skies. There are some hotels, IT firms, wind turbines, TV/ movie production companies and banks, but mostly the economy just focuses on bending metal cheaper than the Japanese and better than the Chinese.

 

Combine these two points: a dense mountainous square of land, and the fact that it’s home to lots of factories and lots of economic activity. The entire country — about the size of Indiana, remember — has the density of Manhattan, or at least of Queens. That’s around 39’000 square miles (100’000 square kilometers) of dense, dense economic activity, 24/7, 365: asphalt, cement, factories, stores, smokestacks, businesses, glass & steel, hustle & bustle. However, it’s even more concentrated than that because 70% of the land here is uplands and mountains. All these humans and all these factories have to be squeezed onto only about 30% of the land, making the cities — the centers of human activity — even more dense.

 

Focus on the cities now. Try to imagine one large urban center that’s a combination of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York, all as one. That’s Seoul. This one metropolitan area, connected by a nest-of-snakes subway system, produces all your movies, writes all your software, has all your tech, all your media, and is home to all your national politics. All your movie stars live here, all your billionaire plutocrats live here, all your celebrities live here, in one city, all within a two-to-three-hour driving radius. It’s one metropolis that constitutes 48% of the people and 52% of the GDP. Seoul is the center of the spider web. Expressways and train tracks all head out from the center. The country’s small, so you could theoretically drive everywhere in about two or three hours. However, what stops you is concentrated human activity.

 

With such highly focused geography and highly focused urban centers, human activity is highly concentrated, like a magnifying glass turning normal sunshine into burning fire. Human activity is concentrated on weekends, concentrated on holidays, concentrated at the commute hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., and concentrated in certain CBDs.

 

Any chores, errands, government filings or doctor appointments have to be handled on weekends or after 6 p.m., but that can’t be done because all the offices are closed at those times. The labor market is still old-fashioned like that. This makes it hard for normal citizens to get anything done. Therefore, people tend to skip work to get things done, which reduces productivity; or, most families have one adult who doesn’t work and who does errands, which also weakens the national economy.

 

At 3 a.m. on a weekday morning you could drive across the entire country (210 miles/ 340 km) in under three hours. However, the normal drive from Seoul to Busan — for normal people, during normal daytime hours, on a normal weekend — is about five hours because of this concentrated level of human activity.

 

This physicality — highly focused geography, highly focused urban centers, concentrated human activity — has a strong influence on “culture,” i.e., on human behavior. In this Petri dish of existence, culture begins to be influenced by these physical factors. A certain physical curtness is developed. One’s personal space bubble is nonexistent. Alcoholism, smoking and processed food proliferate. Marriages decline. Babies are few. Suicides increase. All graduates apply for the same job at the same time. Whether it’s welding or theoretical physics, you know all the other candidates. You all had the same professors and went to one or two of the same schools. You all know which jobs are where, and you’re all applying at the same time. It’s enough to make you just want to become a barista, which is actually often the only realistic employment choice. The “idiot in the news” story each morning is always some poor bastard lashing out at this constant pressure.

 

With those restrictions — high population, small amount of land, lots of economic activity, concentrated hours of human movement, concentrated human activity — the citizens would be marching in the streets if the government didn’t provide a safe, professional and modern commons.

 

So things tend to work here. From public transport, to garbage pick up, to free delivery offered by stores or restaurants: all this human density leads to professionally managed common space. For example, each individual gingko tree along the street in my neighborhood has a custom-forged, individually shaped iron grid over the roots and dirt patch at the bottom of the tree. Each iron grid is uniquely shaped for that tree, and is individually numbered. The neighborhood office — like a U.S. county, but even smaller and closer to the citizens — has a folder for each tree’s iron grid, to keep track of maintenance, watering and tree health. That is an intense amount of governance that is only feasible in an environment that has a high population, a small amount of land, lots of economic activity, and a concentrated human presence.