This Is How a City Collapses
Maybe today will be quiet. Maybe I'll actually leave work on the dot for once.
I'd carried that hope with me all through the morning commute, but of course. Somehow, whenever I let myself think it, something always blew up.
For the past few weeks I'd handed over my weekends along with my weekdays, so I was confident nothing was left pending on my desk. That morning, for the first time in ages, I allowed myself the luxury of a slow cup of coffee, idly scrolling through the news on a portal site to pass the time.
"The president said what," "the economy's doing what," "land prices up again."
Then, among the articles I was skimming past, one headline snagged my eye.
…Ha. That mayoral election. Just how much blood it had wrung out of me over the past few months.
There was a project we'd been commissioned on only last year — until the mayor fell afoul of election law and was thrown in jail, and everything ground to a halt. All decisions deferred until a new mayor took office. Months of work, gone into thin air in an instant.
Public servants are already the ones who hold all the cards in any deal, but a mayor — an elected official — holds the whole deck. The bureaucrats who live by his every mood naturally can't decide a thing while the seat sits empty.
I let out a sigh and scrolled past.
I threw together a careless lunch and drifted blankly through the afternoon. Then, without warning, my phone rang.
Ring.
Who is it?
The moment I opened the message, my heart plunged. It was the client contact for the Gongsin District development project — the commission I'd stayed up all night to finish and sent off only the evening before.
"…Oh, for God's sake. What is this."
Tasks 34 through 56 had already been through consultation — the advisory committee, the whole nine yards. And now, out of nowhere, cut them? Someone upstairs had clearly said something.
Clients slapping down work at the last minute without so much as reading it properly — that was par for the course in this business.
Irritation came flooding up. The curses rose in my throat, but you can't let the client see it. Weren't these the same people who'd beamed at me during the final report two weeks ago, saying, "Just wrap it up nicely and we're done"?
"What did I even do to get an answer like this back?"
God, this is infuriating.
Still, for now, I had to respond with courtesy.
Enough to avoid poking the bear, but without groveling any more than I had to.
Ring.
My hands were trembling.
Demanding the materials by eight in the morning meant one thing: he wanted to present them to his department head at the weekly meeting.
Most officials at City Hall arrive between seven and eight, and for the sake of their promotions, if nothing else, they never defy the will of the organization. People assume public servants have it easy, but City Hall staff keep schedules tighter than the military — Mondays mean a briefing with the mayor, so they come in on Sundays to prepare their materials.
And along the way come plenty of infuriating moments. An official who showed up on a Sunday would demand materials we didn't have, or worse, ask us to draft the briefing document in his place. Every time it happened, the same thought rose unbidden: if that's the job, why don't I just become a civil servant myself?
Either way, the materials had to be in his hands by eight. I'd work until dawn, snatch an hour of sleep, and drag myself back up.
This, right here, was the Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri-Fri-Fri life.
I worked at an urban planning consultancy — to be precise, a small planning office I had founded myself. From the outside, it was nothing more than an unremarkable small business: no flashy sign, only a handful of employees.
The kind of firm where a dry spell in contracts made even keeping the office running a struggle. And yet I had poured everything I had into that nameless little place.
People would take my business card, look at my credentials, and never fail to add a remark.
"You finished a PhD and you're not a professor? Why on earth are you working in a place like this?"
I always answered with a smile, but inside, it churned. Because I'd asked myself the same question a thousand times. Really — why was I living like this?
The truth is, I'd had a dream once. Urban planning isn't a simple technical trade. One building, one road, one park — each one changes the shape of people's days, the ties that bind a community, the very atmosphere of a city.
I wanted to make that kind of city.
A city with people at its center. Streets that let you breathe at the rhythm of your own life. Walkable alleys, plazas you wanted to linger in — I wanted to become someone who designed cities like that.
So I majored in urban planning and climbed through a master's and a doctorate, studying cities across the world and digging into what they do to the people who live in them — from the plaza culture of Europe to Asia's dense high-rise housing. I learned to read the hidden intent buried inside a city.
Right up until then, I still believed. That someday, the city I lived in could change like that too.
The moment I graduated, after long deliberation, I chose field practice over a professorship. I joined a planning consultancy on nothing but ambition. But reality soon showed a different face.
Meetings were always rushed; reports were always political. Plans I proposed were neutralized upstairs with a single phrase — "a political judgment call." However sound a plan was, one word from a district councilor was enough to overturn it.
Plans stopped feeling like they existed for the city at all. They felt like trophies for someone's political record, or instruments for dividing up the spoils of development.
And then one day, a thought surfaced.
Was the city I actually wanted waiting at the end of this road?
Reality wasn't kind on that front either. Falling birthrates, population decline, the crisis swallowing regional universities — all of it pointed toward an unstable future. Even a professor's chair wasn't what it used to be.
This was an era when universities had to court students. Enrollment was shrinking, faculty positions were drying up, and research funding was a star you could only reach in your dreams. People said regional campuses would be shutting their doors in droves within a few years.
Rather than force my way through the middle of that red ocean, I decided to build my own road. I quit my job in Seoul and opened a planning office of my own. To everyone watching, it looked reckless; to me, it was a fight worth making.
Honestly, the first few years, luck was on my side. Small projects rolled in one after another, and I landed policy studies and master plan commissions as well.
People often confused a planning firm with an architecture studio or a civil engineering outfit.
"Land one project worth tens of billions of won and you've hit the jackpot, haven't you?"
But no. All we did was draw the skeleton. Before a project ever broke ground, we conceived the city's direction and structure, built the logic, laid out the scenarios. Simply put: planning. The rough draft. The concept.
That's why planning contracts paid less than design work — and could be changed on a whim at any stage. Even inside that structure, I survived in my own way.
I hired staff, built a team, and traveled from city to city across the country winning contracts. I loved the work itself — unearthing value in places people had forgotten, interpreting what a city could become.
And then… somewhere along the way, a corner of my heart began to stir again.
This time, I want to build the city I want with my own two hands.
Seoul and the capital region had plenty of experts and a finely tuned system. The world turned fine without me.
But the small provincial cities were different. Where the experts were absent, things simply ran without them. Administrative convenience, budget logic, land-price logic — those stood in for urban planning.
I wanted to change one such city. If I was going to do it, I wanted to do it beautifully.
A city where people actually lived.
Streets you wanted to walk. Plazas where you could breathe.
A city with even one bench where an old man could sit in the noon sun for a little while.
That was the city I wanted to build. That was my dream.
In the end, I set up an office in Yeojin City as a branch of our Seoul headquarters and moved down to run it myself.
It was a bit of a stretch, I'll admit. I shrank the head office and poured everything into building up the Yeojin branch, all under the banner of striking out on a new path. Before long, the branch had grown larger than headquarters.
Yeojin was the city where I'd been born, the place I knew better than anyone. I believed that with one well-drawn plan, this city could truly change.
A city no one paid attention to. It looked worn out and listless, but somewhere beneath the surface, possibility was hiding. I wanted to be the one to change it, with my own hands.
At first, things went smoothly. Small urban regeneration projects, district planning, rural improvement, community-building — commissions poured in, and I hired more than ten staff.
The branch found its footing faster than I'd expected. Even in a city this small there was plenty to do, and my experience and network more than filled the gaps.
But after a while, a strange pattern began to catch my eye.
Out of nowhere, a "new town development plan" would be announced for a particular area. Land prices would spike in the same breath. And a few months later, the plan would be canceled as if it had never existed.
And then the commission to tidy up that process would land on my desk. A request for a report.
Some came through City Hall proper, but most arrived from council members' offices without any formal procedure, or through back channels of one kind or another.
The payments always came in on time. At first I told myself it was simply work that helped the region — assistance within the bounds of the law, nothing more. But after it repeated a few times, certainty settled in.
This wasn't urban planning. It was speculation. A con — development baiting. Leak a plan to pump up land prices, cancel it on some political pretext, and while the market was hot, whoever had cashed out slipped quietly away.
The realization that I was the one manufacturing the reports that made it all look legitimate made my skin crawl.
I pulled my hands off. I said it plainly: this was not urban planning, and no city ever changed this way.
And that was when the pressure began. The work started drying up. At first it was small stuff — officials postponing meetings, letting my calls ring out. But over the months, the situation shifted in ways impossible to miss.
Work from Yeojin stopped cold. Gwangseong, the big city next door, turned away in much the same mood. To make matters worse, reports began coming out of the Seoul head office: "Contracts have strangely dried up lately."
I cut the branch staff by half, then eventually let nearly everyone go, keeping only the people I couldn't run without. Even that changed nothing.
It felt as though an invisible wall had risen around me. People at City Hall avoided me, and not a single project flowed my way.
Even then, I chalked it all up to simply lacking the right "political line."
Then I learned one fact.
Since moving down to Yeojin, I had kept up steady ties with the local civic groups.
They opposed reckless development, and as an expert I lent their arguments weight — reviewing their materials, speaking at public hearings, pointing out the flaws in the plans.
And that was the problem.
To someone, my words read as "political resistance."
There was a city councilor in particular — Bang Ji-hoo. He shouted about urban development for the cameras, but in practice he rammed through projects that served his own political standing. A member of the United Korea Party, and part of the faction that had held Yeojin in its grip for a very long time.
Yeojin was a strange city, politically. The National Assembly seat had belonged to the Democratic Republican Party for ages, and its holder's reputation was reasonably decent.
But the mayoralty and the city council were a perpetual knife's edge between the Democratic Republicans and the United Korea Party, and at times the two clashed violently. Personnel shuffled with the stakes, projects were canceled, and a single word from the right person could bend the whole current of the city.
Bang Ji-hoo stood at the center of that fight, and to him I was a thorn in the eye. On the surface he stayed quiet, but the networks connected to him pressed on me and my firm without pause.
There were no outright threats, and nothing was wrong on paper. People simply refused to work with me. One unspoken signal — getting tangled up with that man means headaches — had spread through the entire city.
It was only later that I learned why the Seoul head office, too, had seen its work dry up and slid toward crisis. United Korea Party or Democratic Republican — when it came to real estate speculation, they were all one and the same.
Once they understood that I was tripping things up in the region, the interconnected players raised one voice and squeezed from every direction to keep my firm from functioning.
I understood it far too late. The man who had come down vowing to change the city was being swallowed whole by its darkest truth.
I didn't understand politics. Even the word "faction" felt foreign in my mouth. I was just a city planner who put his head down and worked — and that was all I was.
Nearing fifty, I was still a naive man. And so I lost.