A Difficult Job
The moment they left, Kang Seol-heon and Cho Yeon-woo immediately turned to me with tense expressions.
"Mayor, this is realistically unworkable. Given Yeojin City's current finances, road expansion is simply impossible."
Manager Cho Yeon-woo promptly volunteered to look into securing national funding from the Ministry of Land, but I shook my head.
"Don't waste your energy on something that's obviously a dead end."
"But Mayor, you never know for certain..."
"If we ask for road expansion funding for a city whose population is shrinking, what do you think the Ministry of Land will say? 'The city is in decline, so what exactly are you planning to achieve by widening the roads?' That's precisely the response we'll get."
Cho Yeon-woo looked troubled. He was still mentally anchored to road expansion, but I had no intention of going down that path in the first place.
If national funding fell through, we'd have to tap the city budget, and road expansion costs were astronomical. On top of that, we'd need to secure the right-of-way: purchasing surrounding properties, compensating for structures, reinstalling water and sewage lines. For a city the size of Yeojin, that was simply beyond our capacity.
"Shall we reach out to Assembly Member Yeo Byeong-guk for help, then?"
Cho Yeon-woo asked cautiously. I answered without hesitation.
"Going to Assembly Member Yeo won't change anything."
It wasn't that my father lacked influence. It was that this problem had no solution to begin with. The central government wasn't going to hand out road expansion budgets easily, and local finances couldn't absorb the cost. If we pushed forward recklessly and the project stalled later, every ounce of blame would land on me.
As we talked it through, I turned the question over in my mind. Why were they suddenly demanding road expansion? There had been discussions before, but this time it felt like they were making a show of shouting their demands from the rooftops.
Getting a rough read on the situation, I could see that merchants might push for road expansion out of immediate livelihood concerns, but building owners were a different story. If the road were widened, the surrounding buildings would have to be demolished, and compensation would inevitably follow.
The old downtown commercial district was already in decline with little hope of recovery. With a young mayor now in office, they might be banking on road construction moving forward without resistance, positioning themselves to cash in on the payouts. The thought that these people, who had been collecting rent and operating comfortably all this while, were now making such demands for their own greed regardless of Yeojin City's future, was genuinely irritating.
But I couldn't let on that I'd already figured it out, so I decided to probe Manager Cho.
"I can understand why the merchants' representatives are here, but why did the Landlords' Association show up? Their own buildings might end up demolished."
Manager Cho answered carefully.
"It's because the building owners have land compensation in mind."
"Land compensation?"
I kept my expression curious.
"When land is expropriated for road expansion, compensation is paid out. Some building owners are deliberately inflating property prices in anticipation of exactly that. The recent abnormal rise in old downtown building values is evidence of it."
Kang Seol-heon flinched and looked at Manager Cho.
"If the road is expanded, ultimately only the building owners profit while the street stays exactly as it is. I don't believe it delivers any real benefit to Yeojin City."
"But Mayor, wouldn't foot traffic increase if the road gets wider?"
Kang Seol-heon was still trying to wring every last possibility out of the road expansion idea. Manager Cho shook his head.
"It won't. Widening a road doesn't bring a street to life. Look at the ground floors of what's left in the old downtown. Cafes, restaurants, clothing shops—these are businesses that only thrive when people gather and linger."
In my previous life, I had once stumbled across a fascinating piece of content while browsing the internet. It was a list ranking the most influential urban planners in history, and to my surprise, first place went to Jane Jacobs. What was even more striking was that she hadn't been an urban planning professional at all but a writer. She wasn't someone who had drafted technical plans; she was a citizen activist who had fought New York City tooth and nail.
The man in charge of New York's urban planning at the time was Robert Moses. He prioritized road and highway expansion above all else, obsessively designing the city so that automobiles could move as fast as possible from point to point. Jane Jacobs stood in fierce opposition to everything he stood for.
In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her central argument was that car-centered cities kill streets and ultimately destroy the city itself. The reasoning was simple. People in cars travel straight from home to destination, rarely stopping or detouring along the way. At a glance it seems fast and efficient, but the model harbors a fatal flaw.
Street-level shops naturally lose their customers, and eventually only large commercial facilities—shopping malls and big-box stores with vast parking lots—are the ones that survive. In a country as land-rich as America, there's no compelling reason to build such massive facilities downtown anyway, so they migrate to the periphery while the urban core slowly withers.
Jane Jacobs's arguments went on to profoundly influence urban planners around the world, and today they stand as foundational principles of downtown revitalization. And when you thought about it, the current state of Yeojin's old downtown mirrored that pattern exactly. The roads were wide and cars moved through quickly, but the streets were dying by degrees.
I had no way of claiming I knew this from experience. Yet here was Manager Cho Yeon-woo, remarkably, arriving at strikingly similar conclusions on his own. Was it because he was still young, not yet forty? Honestly, it was rare for someone that age to hold a manager position, so he was an unusual case. For whatever reason, the previous mayor had promoted someone with genuine insight. Probably because the man was sharp.
In any case, if I suddenly pretended to already know all this, it would raise eyebrows. So I kept nodding along to Manager Cho's analysis while quietly working through the problem in my head.
How do I flip the entire frame right here, right now?
After listening for a long while, I finally spoke.
"If widening the road is meaningless anyway, what if we just make it impossible for cars to drive through at all?"
"I've been thinking it over while listening to Manager Cho, and it seems to me that the decisive measure for reviving the old downtown right now isn't cars passing through—it's people walking."
Kang Seol-heon stared at me with wide eyes. I smiled slowly.
"Chief of Staff, I know it sounds absurd, but isn't it worth a shot? If the old approach doesn't work, we have to find a new one."
Of course, they had no way of knowing I already held a doctorate in urban planning, and they had no particular reason to trust my judgment on the spot. But the mayor had given a direct order, so they had little choice but to comply.
"Instead of debating this, prepare my solution. Just do exactly as I say."
The two of them studied my face for a long moment, then cautiously nodded.
"You mean... you'll take full responsibility for this, Mayor?"
"Yes. So proceed as I've instructed."
A week had passed. During that time, while juggling the usual demands of office, I fed Manager Cho Yeon-woo a steady stream of detailed instructions. The core directive was simple.
"One week from now, Sunday at 2 AM. Bring in excavators and tear up both the entrance and the far end of the street where they're demanding road expansion. Make it absolutely impossible for any vehicle to enter."
Cho Yeon-woo was visibly startled.
"Mayor, what are you saying? They're demanding road expansion, and you're telling me to block the road?"
I explained calmly.
"The merchants currently believe that widening the road will bring more foot traffic. But the reality is the exact opposite. It's only by cutting off vehicle access and creating a proper pedestrian environment that the street comes back to life. What I'm about to do isn't 'expanding' the road—it's 'transforming' it."
After hearing the full explanation, Cho Yeon-woo deliberated for a long moment before finally conceding. But agreeing in principle and actually executing were entirely different animals. He was a career civil servant, principled and meticulous by temperament. Not the type to voluntarily pull the trigger on something this risky.
So I drove the point home.
"There's nothing to worry about. I'll shoulder all of it. If merchants or residents protest, just tell them one thing: 'This is the Mayor's directive.'"
Cho Yeon-woo still looked uneasy.
"If we proceed this way, at first everyone will assume it's routine road construction and let it slide. The merchants will think, 'So they're finally getting started on the expansion.' But after a few days, something will feel off. Then they'll demand another meeting."
I smiled.
"When that happens, just tell them then. 'Let's turn this into a Car-Free Street.' And lay out directly what the benefits would be. Oh, and don't breathe a word to Vice Mayor Jin Mu-gyeol. Just follow my direct instructions. If you get bogged down arguing with other people, all you'll do is burn time. I'll say it one more time—I'm taking full responsibility. Just move."
When I finished, Manager Cho let out a long, deep sigh and rose from his seat. Then he quietly bowed his head and left the mayor's office. His mind was almost certainly churning.
No, churning was an understatement—it would be outright chaos in there. And understandably so, because he had never in his career anticipated a situation like this. Mayors of the past wouldn't have made such an unorthodox call in the first place. Even if a similar conflict had arisen, a typical politician would have taken the safe route: realistic compromise, deflected responsibility, business as usual.
But this time was different. I had no intention of dodging accountability as mayor. On the contrary, I intended to solve the problem with my own hands. From Manager Cho's perspective, that had to be nearly impossible to process. He was probably clutching his head right about now, muttering, What on earth is happening?
But this policy wasn't some reckless stunt. It wasn't something that could be copy-pasted onto every district in the city—it was tailored specifically to Yeojin's unique conditions. Blocking traffic this way on a major arterial road or along the city's outskirts would be idiotic. But the old downtown we were about to transform was a different beast entirely. A place where the street could only come alive if people walked it on their own two feet. A place where money moved only when people—not cars—chose to stay. This kind of intervention was only possible in a place like that.
And at last, the day of reckoning arrived.
2 AM. The city lay in deep slumber. The cars that had coursed through the streets hours earlier were gone, and a heavy silence blanketed everything. Only the faint amber of streetlights touched scattered corners, and even that glow flickered intermittently, dissolving into the dark.
Then a raw mechanical roar tore through the stillness. An excavator rolled forward and began gouging into the road's entrance. Steel teeth split the asphalt's surface, and the compacted pavement ripped away, helpless against the assault. Little by little, yet with terrible certainty, the road was being unmade.
The work crews said nothing. Only the growl of heavy machinery filled the air, breathing rough and hot across the empty street. The excavator sheared through the road bed, and diggers carved deep into the earth, tearing open massive gaps at intervals until no vehicle could ever cross. The city slept on, oblivious, while beneath the streetlights a colossal change was quietly taking shape.
Hours of unrelenting mechanical noise and the thick smell of turned earth passed before the final cut was made. The excavator reversed and fell silent. The street was no longer a street. It was something else entirely.
I stood in the middle of it all and looked around quietly. The road stretched empty in both directions. No car would ever pass through here again.
When night gave way to morning, I could already see it: the chaos and the shock, the fury and the backlash. People would be blindsided by what they found. No one in Yeojin City had imagined anything like this could happen here.
I slipped both hands into my pockets and let a slow smile spread across my face.
"Now, all hell's going to break loose."
The city was about to wake up.