Not Blueprints, but Relationships
Two days after the design-competition conversion plan was announced, the task force gathered in a separate meeting room on the third floor of City Hall. The name on the paperwork was a mouthful — the "Citizen-Participatory Restoration Design Competition Task Force" — so everyone simply called it the Competition TF.
The composition was a little strange. Two members from the Citizen Space Design Division, two from Citizen Communication, one from the Public Information Office, one outside consulting architect, and two citizen representatives with a stake in urban issues.
On official documents, they were described as "a public design partnership performing planning and participation simultaneously."
The early atmosphere was awkward. Citizens had been invited to policy planning meetings before, but this was the first time they'd been seated at the table from the very first draft of a policy's design.
In particular, the first question out of one of the citizen representatives was memorable.
"We're not just here to give opinions that ultimately get ignored, right?"
A brief silence followed. Jeong Jin-wook, a staff officer in the Citizen Space Design Division, raised his head.
"Of course not. This time it's real."
He meant it sincerely, but something in his expression looked stiff. The citizen representative caught it and smiled slyly.
"You do know that saying 'real' too often erodes trust, right?"
Laughter spread through the meeting room, and the mood loosened a little.
That day's first meeting focused on establishing the principles of the competition. The old format was familiar: the administration set the conditions, experts submitted designs, and civil servants along with outside judges did the evaluating. This time, they decided to change the order itself. The citizens would draft the competition brief themselves.
Questions like these, for instance.
— What will the density standards be for the commercial district adjacent to the stream?
— How should the pedestrian-priority zones and green corridors be laid out?
— What criteria will separate buildings slated for demolition from areas to be preserved?
The Citizen Participation Corps would organize answers to these three questions through workshops, and experts would submit their designs to match those criteria. Even within the TF there were people tilting their heads at the idea, and Park Ji-hoon, a staff officer from the Public Information Office, put it bluntly halfway through the meeting.
"At this point... aren't the citizens doing all the work instead of us?"
The consulting architect Yoon Yi-hyun fielded it with a light laugh.
"No, not all of it. You set the conditions, and we'll do the design. Though I can't complain if you're demanding about it."
The room lightened with laughter once again.
Around then, my eye caught someone quietly typing on a laptop in the corner of the meeting room.
A face I hadn't seen before. A neat bob, black-rimmed glasses, quiet hands. My gaze, flipping through the meeting materials, stopped for a moment.
"Ah, that."
Section Chief Cho Yeon-woo pointed at the document in front of me.
"Jeong Ye-na compiled that. She's the working-level officer for the Citizen Space Design Division."
I picked up the paper, then looked back at her. The moment our eyes met, Jeong Ye-na froze — then shot upright out of her seat.
"Um... Mayor, if the font is too small or the spacing is uncomfortable... I can fix it right away."
Her voice was small, but there was a strange mix of wariness and tension inside it.
So that's her type. Someone who moves to organize the situation before she even speaks.
I smiled and nodded.
"It's fine. It reads beautifully."
Only then did she blink behind those round glasses and bow her head.
"Ah... thank you. I'll have the card-news materials for the next meeting ready as well."
The room fell briefly quiet at that small exchange. Someone nodded; someone else glanced at her once more. Having one person who simply worked, silently and without complaint, was an enormously reassuring thing for any organization.
Flipping through the documents, I murmured to myself.
Aside from Cho Yeon-woo, more people I like keep showing up. I should remember the name Jeong Ye-na.
And so, according to the Competition TF's plan, the "Yeojin Citizen Design Participation Corps" was formed — one hundred citizens centered on the stretch of the Yeojin Stream slated for restoration.
Recruitment was balanced across age, neighborhood, and occupation, drawing a remarkably varied crowd: from young people to the elderly, merchants, housewives, even retired civil servants.
Their first meeting wasn't in a conference room at all. It began in the field. The front line of the schedule prepared jointly by the Citizen Space Design Division and Citizen Communication Team read as follows.
[Field observation and map-based walking meeting.]
In plain terms: grab a map and walk together.
The first gathering was held along the northern section of the future Yeojin Stream restoration site. The participants assembled at the neighborhood community center, received a short orientation, and then stepped out into the streets with the small maps, colored pencils, and checklists each of them had been given.
"What does 'check the road width here' mean?"
"They said we're supposed to walk it and feel for ourselves whether this street is narrow or dangerous."
"Wow, it's an actual walking simulation."
"Oh my, don't I look like an urban planner today?"
"Miss Planner, your map is upside down. You flipped it."
Everyone laughed at that. From a distance, the people walking with maps in hand might have looked like tourists — but in truth they were people walking in order to feel the city.
One citizen stopped mid-walk and spoke up.
"I always thought this empty lot here was just a scrap of leftover land. But everyone who passes by pauses here for a second. Wouldn't one bench in a spot like this change everything?"
Another pointed at the narrow road beside the stream.
"Because of the cars parked here, the kids all have to step down onto the roadway. If this is a restoration project, maybe what matters isn't the stream itself — it's how people get to walk beside it."
Yoon Yi-hyun accompanied the group, listening quietly to the citizens. She took notes; she nodded along.
At one point, a citizen asked her,
"Architect Yoon, will everything we say actually be reflected?"
Yoon Yi-hyun answered with a smile.
"Maybe not one hundred percent. But at the very least, a trace of it will remain in our drawings."
"A trace?"
"Yes. To a designer, the words of citizens are... lines an eraser can't touch."
Several of the citizens let out small sighs of admiration at that, and someone quietly copied the sentence into their notebook.
Walking the city was beginning to become an act of speaking and interpreting, not merely seeing and hearing. With every step they took, the participants came to understand that "restoration" was not simply the work of reopening a waterway — it was the process of making people remember a space in a new way.
And that night, the Citizen Communication Team recorded the following while compiling keywords for the workshops.
[Most frequently mentioned words: walking paths, shade, sightlines, pausing, danger, memory]
These were words that rarely appeared in urban planning documents. But from now on, those words were becoming the lines that would redraw the city.
A few days later, a small-group meeting of the Citizen Participation Corps convened in a City Hall conference room. It was the session where, based on the field observations, each group would organize its thoughts and begin drafting the competition criteria in earnest.
A round table filled the room, with fifteen citizens and the working-level staff seated in a circle. I sat off to one side, studying the faces of the citizens one by one. Different ages, different jobs, different ways of speaking. And among them, one person caught my eye as she carefully handed out the meeting materials.
It was Jeong Ye-na. She had come carrying a document bag bigger than her pouch, and she was placing the card-news printouts and notice sheets one by one in front of each person with painstaking care.
"Here's today's summary card and the notice for the next schedule... and this is the link for submitting opinions online."
Her voice trembled slightly, but her eyes were clear. The problem was what came next.
"Then, Ye-na, walk us through the card-news materials for a moment."
Section Chief Cho Yeon-woo passed her the microphone.
Jeong Ye-na brought up the laptop screen and began her presentation carefully.
"Hello, everyone. I've organized today's materials into cards, and the first card opens with this phrase."
The screen glowed — crisp blue letters on a white background.
[Citizens are crappy. The future of Yeojin Stream.]
The room went dead silent. Someone muttered,
"...Mayor, are we crappy now? Heh heh heh."
"Do we become crappy citizens starting today?"
Jeong Ye-na froze solid on the spot.
But a single second later, she seized the microphone again and declared at the top of her lungs,
"Ah— I'm so sorry! Not 'are crappy' — 'draw'! Citizens aren't crappy cit— no, I mean! Citizens... will draw it themselves, beautifully! The future of Yeojin Stream!"
Laughter erupted through the meeting room. Chief of Staff Kang Seol-heon bowed her head, her shoulders shaking, and Section Chief Cho Yeon-woo smothered his laughter behind a cough.
I watched without a word. She must have been more nervous than anyone there — and in the end, she was the first to laugh and the first to fix it.
It might sound strange, but that very mistake made the air in the room far softer. That was Jeong Ye-na's way: clattering and stumbling, yet seeing everything through to the end without complaint.
Toward the end of the meeting, one citizen remarked almost casually,
"A mistake should smell like a person. That's what makes it good. Same with a city, I think."
I nodded at that.
After that day, I remembered the name Jeong Ye-na a little more distinctly.
On the second day of the workshops, Group 3 of the Citizen Participation Corps walked the densely residential area east of the Yeojin Stream, then gathered in a meeting room. Maps lay spread open, and drawings crammed with highlighter marks and handwriting covered every inch of the tables.
None of it was CAD output for urban planning, but it was a terrain map richer with lived experience than anything a professional could have produced.
Yoon Yi-hyun sat in one corner. Her laptop stayed closed; her notebook stayed shut. She simply listened — to how the citizens spoke about space, to their expressions and gestures, to their awkward word choices, even to their silences.
One citizen raised her hand. An ordinary woman in her forties, she had introduced herself earlier as someone who ran a laundromat nearby.
"I don't know anything about design, but... when I walk along the stream with my daughter, there's this one spot where we always stop. No benches, not a café... it's just shade."
She pointed at the map.
"Here. For some reason, this is a place that makes you want to stand still. The way the stream curves, the way the building shadows fall... it's just a spot that makes you want to stop, I guess?"
Everyone looked at the point she had marked. So did Yoon Yi-hyun.
When she finished, another citizen added,
"Isn't that what design is supposed to be? Making the feeling of where you walk, where you stop, where you want to rest... flow continuously, one into the next."
Yoon Yi-hyun turned the words over in her mind, then spoke quietly.
"I've been thinking something similar. In the end, design isn't the act of making space... it's the act of reading sensation out of what people say, and carrying it into reality."
She took out her notebook and wrote down the sentence exactly as she'd heard it. Then she smiled for a moment and said,
"When you're drawing blueprints, they seem so clever. But the moment you meet actual people, they're always wrong."
Laughter rippled across the room. One citizen joked,
"So blueprints are the show-off friend, and citizens are the family that barges in every time?"
Someone else added,
"A city is... kind of an embarrassing relationship, isn't it?"
Even at the silly joke, the room grew brighter. Yoon Yi-hyun understood: those words would not end as jokes.
They would soon bend the lines on a drawing, layer color over them, and open up blank spaces where none had existed.
That afternoon, Yoon Yi-hyun sent Yeo Mu-jin a short email. The subject line read:
The email arrived quietly on Yeo Mu-jin's laptop, and he wrote no reply. Instead, he noted the following in the margin of the meeting minutes.
[The first designers of this city are the citizens who speak.]
That sentence never made it into an official document — but it was written, word for word, on the first slide of the design competition briefing held soon after.
A few days later, the moment I arrived at the entrance of the Yeojin Stream restoration site, I stopped short at the scene before me. Two tents along the stream bank, a beverage table, even a mobile whiteboard for meetings.
There were even urban design kits and crayons to hand out to the citizens, sorted by color.
"When did you manage all this...?"
"Mayor, over here!"
Someone waved from a distance. It was Jeong Ye-na. The temporary badge around her neck was soaked with sweat, and her sneakers were smeared with dust. But her face had no room to spare for any of that.
"The wind was really strong earlier! A placard almost blew away, so Manager Park and I taped it down in a hurry. We moved the drinks to the right-hand table, and the kits are color-coded by group number. The meeting materials can be scanned with a QR code too!"
She rattled all of this off without pausing for breath, then bent down and pulled out a measuring tape. I whispered to Cho Yeon-woo standing beside me.
"Who's running the site today?"
"Jeong Ye-na. She just took it on herself. Nobody assigned it to her."
"She's been moving on her own this whole time?"
"Yes. She worked late yesterday, and apparently she was out here by six-thirty this morning."
I nodded quietly. From behind the site, Jeong Ye-na's voice was still busy — but it didn't waver.
"Group 2, over here! One moment, a crayon's missing — I'll bring it right away!"
At that moment, one of the elderly participants said with a chuckle,
"I thought that girl was a bit of a klutz... but she's sharp as anything, isn't she."
I laughed inwardly at the words.
That's right. Clumsy yet capable, prone to mistakes yet somehow finishing everything in the end. That was Jeong Ye-na.
I watched her for a long while, then murmured quietly to myself.
If we put people like that at the center... this city really might change.
Three weeks after the Citizen Participation Corps had begun deliberating together, a presentation was held near the end of the process, sharing the results of those discussions with the wider public.
Besides the corps members, all sorts of people gathered: local residents, merchants, landowners.
Naturally, I attended as well, watching from the audience.
Yoon Yi-hyun slowly raised the tablet holding her prepared materials and brought the screen to life.
The first photograph appeared on the large screen.
The Yeojin Stream of the past. In the near-monochrome image, children were dipping their feet into the water.
One child was skipping stones and laughing; another, trousers rolled to the knees, was catching fish. It was the picture of a blazing midsummer day.
The photograph held memories in it — moments of a life lived alongside nature.
The hall fell quiet for a moment.
Some gazed at the screen as if recalling the past, while others kept their arms crossed and their expressions indifferent. But there was no mistaking the subtle shift in their eyes.
Yoon Yi-hyun advanced the slides slowly. Now the present-day Yeojin Stream filled the screen.
A stream buried under gray concrete. A narrow channel, high walls, and above them the long stretch of road and parking lot.
Cars lined up in rows, and only a few lonely street trees remained along the road.
A space where no life could live — a structure that served as nothing more than a drain.
A sigh escaped. Some residents exchanged glances and murmured quietly to one another, as if remembering anew that this had once been a stream where children played in the water.
And the next photograph was the future — the restored Yeojin Stream.
The scene of a stream flowing naturally unfolded before them. The water was clear, and trees and grasses grew along its banks.
A walking path wound through the landscape with people strolling along it, and citizens could be seen enjoying a moment of ease on café terraces. Nearby, a child reached out a hand, about to dip a foot into the water.
A small but harmonious ecological stream, and around it, a city coming back to life.
No one could object to this vision. It was the ideal everyone longed for, the direction this city ought to take.
After a brief stillness, Yoon Yi-hyun continued in a calm voice.
"This is the Yeojin Stream we intend to build. We will reclaim a space that once lived alongside people's daily lives — not through development, but through true restoration. What we want to create is not a mere concrete structure, but a living, breathing ecosystem where citizens can rest in comfort."
I studied the faces in the room. No one was entirely won over yet, but the atmosphere was undeniably changing. Some nodded; others uncrossed their arms and returned their attention to the screen with new care.
Yoon Yi-hyun advanced to the next page. Now it was time for the more concrete, down-to-earth explanations to begin.