Tearing Down Walls, Designing Communication
A typical mayor might have spent the early months of his term lying low, but that thought never crossed my mind. I had already shoved through the Car-Free Street, the public bus takeover, the restoration of Yeojin Stream — and come out the other side standing tall. There was no reason to start watching my back now.
And this time, I was about to begin an even thornier job.
Remodeling City Hall and restructuring its interior.
Honestly speaking, it seemed like a task with no good answer. Most mayors only push something like this late in their term, and even then it tends to fizzle out. Touching the interior layout of City Hall provokes fierce resistance from the civil servants, and budget issues pile on top, making any real progress difficult.
But I had judged it better to settle this problem early in my term, precisely because I still had political capital to spend.
Frankly, the state of the building was far worse than I'd expected. From the outside it looked pristine, but the interior was the worst possible environment for the people who actually had to work there. The former mayor had preened endlessly over his glass palace, celebrating it as his personal achievement, while the suffering of those working inside it was beyond anything he could have imagined.
Civil servants, by their very nature, rarely let dissatisfaction show. Speak up carelessly and get branded a "complainer," and you can kiss your promotion goodbye — worse, you'll find yourself quietly ostracized within the organization. So I concluded that this had to be dealt with immediately. In a small city like Yeojin, with a population of barely a hundred thousand, the role of the civil service is absolute.
Roughly 1,200 public employees worked at City Hall. Counting their families, that came to at least five or six thousand people — and once you included extended relatives, there was scarcely a voter in Yeojin with no connection to the city government.
Ordinary citizens only set foot in City Hall to pick up documents at the district office or get a passport issued, so they had little idea what kind of environment city governance actually ran in. But it was these 1,200 civil servants who kept the city turning — handling water and sewerage, roads, transit, welfare, culture, education, every field imaginable. Giving them an environment where they could do their jobs properly wasn't mere administrative reform; it was restoring the functioning of the entire city.
Moreover, this was a strategically important move politically as well. One of the reasons I'd been able to become mayor in the first place was that the previous administration had launched massive projects, dumped the blame for their failures onto the bureaucracy, and reaped a flood of internal whistleblowing as a result. Public opinion turned, and I rode into office partly on the reputation of being the young candidate who offered new hope — a candidate the civil servants felt they could trust.
And how do you keep that trust? You make them genuinely feel that their workplace is one where real work gets done.
So I refused to see the City Hall remodel as mere "administrative building improvement." This was an investment in the organization itself — an indirect form of welfare for every citizen in the city.
And at the same time, it was a crucial piece of groundwork for my re-election campaign the year after next. Caring for these people now was, in the end, how future choices would get made.
If a job has to be done anyway, it's best to finish it fast.
I called in the facilities team lead. He sat down across from me, glancing nervously at my face, though he seemed to have a pretty good sense of what was coming.
"Mr. Mayor, what can I do for you?"
I got straight to the point. "We're remodeling City Hall. The interior structure needs work too."
The facilities team lead visibly faltered. A proposal like this normally went through months of review, a feasibility study at the very least, before anyone dared say it out loud — and I had just tossed it out like I was ordering lunch.
"Um... what exactly did you have in mind, sir?"
I answered with a light smile. "From a civil servant's perspective, it might sound like pure lunacy. But it has to be done."
And so the City Hall remodeling project began.
The relocation of the mayor's office to the first floor was already underway. When I first announced the plan, there had been no small amount of internal pushback. The mayor's office conventionally sits in the upper reaches of the building — fifth floor or higher. That way, outside visitors find it hard to reach, and an invisible barrier forms that keeps junior officials from casually knocking on the boss's door.
I had never intended to follow that playbook.
"I'm moving the mayor's office to the first floor."
When I first said those words, the consternation among the staff was plain to see.
"Mr. Mayor, there are security concerns... and altering the existing structure won't be easy either."
"Security can be handled by hardening the access control system. And structural changes — if not now, when?"
I was resolute. There was no law saying the mayor's office had to be upstairs. On the contrary, being on the first floor meant I could communicate with citizens more often, with far better accessibility.
Besides, I could do away with useless vanity spaces like the VIP waiting room and put that square footage to practical use instead.
And so the first-floor relocation of the mayor's office was already a settled matter. Now it was time to install the additional facilities we needed.
I turned to the facilities team lead. "We're not just moving the mayor's office. We need to redesign the first floor so citizens can actually make use of it."
The City Hall building, which the former mayor had erected like some personal Versailles, had been riddled with problems from day one. When private companies build glass towers, they use thick, high-performance glass and invest heavily in insulation. Public institutions, for some reason, always seem to leak money somewhere along the way — and end up plastering the facade with thin glass that insulates nothing, all for the sake of a respectable-looking exterior.
"Mr. Mayor, no matter how hard we run the air conditioning, the offices are unbearably hot in summer."
"And in winter?"
"In winter it gets so hot even without the heating on that we have to open the windows."
It was an utterly absurd state of affairs. The building faced south, so solar heat poured straight into the interiors, and even with the AC blasting, the rooms stayed hot. The north-facing offices had it no better — sweltering in summer, and freezing to death in winter.
"Nobody thought about any of this when it was being designed?"
In truth, this problem would never have arisen if the most basic principles of architecture had been followed. Place the corridor along the south-facing windows and put the offices behind it. The corridor would sacrifice the open view — a wall right outside the window could feel a bit confining — but the offices would stay cool in summer and warm in winter, and honestly, that made it easier to concentrate on work.
But the former mayor had designed the building for show, not function. The result was that his staff had no choice but to work in the worst possible conditions.
"To fix this, we'd have to install a separate layer of insulating glass on the exterior walls. The budget for that would be substantial." The facilities team lead, who apparently wasn't aware of my intentions, spoke cautiously.
"There's no need for that."
My answer left him bewildered. "Mr. Mayor, if we leave it as is, these problems will just keep repeating themselves."
"There's no need to spend budget swapping out glass. We just rearrange the space."
The solution was simple. By swapping the layout of the offices and the corridors, we could block the sun's heat from pouring directly into the workspaces.
Typically, to preserve openness toward the south side, large windows are placed right beside the offices. But in an office with floor-to-ceiling glass, sunlight streams straight into the workspace and the internal temperature climbs sharply. A simple shift in thinking solves this: don't put the office right next to the south-facing glass — put a corridor there instead.
All we had to do was change the layout. Then the blazing sunlight would fall on the corridor. Yes, the corridor would be hot — but the offices behind it would become markedly more comfortable and cool.
Too often, civil servants reach only for the budget to build something new, never for the resources they already have. Of course, we couldn't convert everything at once. So I decided to pilot the new layout on the floors where departments were being shuffled anyway as part of the reorganization.
That way, the staff who experienced it firsthand would feel the difference, and the change could then spread naturally to the other floors.
"Let's start as an experiment, confirm the results, and then scale up gradually."
Civil servants are far more practiced at securing new budget lines than at coming up with ideas that save money. I was the opposite. There were more than enough ways to maximize what we already had while still delivering real results.
Now was the time to put them into practice.
We also decided to remodel floor by floor according to each department's wishes — removing the partitions and opening up the workspaces.
The truth is, partition-walled administration has been a chronic disease of civil service organizations everywhere in South Korea. Each department hoarded its own work, sharing nothing, processing only its own queue. Even within the same division, different teams barely exchanged a word.
Isn't there some way to fix this? My past self had agonized over that question countless times, and eventually arrived at an answer.
"There isn't one."
It was simply a problem written into the fate of bureaucracies the world over. The communication breakdown wasn't a matter of personality. Workloads were so crushing that nobody had the bandwidth to look after anyone else's business. Lines of responsibility were crystal clear, so meddling in a colleague's work risked dragging you into obligations that were never yours. And the organizational culture itself had calcified around a single unspoken rule: do your own job well, and leave it at that.
Countless attempts had been made to change this, and not a single one had ever fundamentally succeeded.
So instead of trying to solve it outright, I resolved to find a way to at least make some minimal communication possible. And in doing so, I noticed one common thread: in almost every department, bookshelves and partitions stood between the desks, building complete walls.
"That's where we start."
I began persuading the departments one by one. "We're opening up the space and restructuring it so communication between departments flows more smoothly."
Naturally, there was resistance at first.
"Mr. Mayor, nobody will be able to concentrate like that."
"If the departments are packed in too close, won't we just get in each other's way?"
I shook my head. "Communication that's completely blocked is the bigger problem. When you stack up walls the way we have now, people can't talk even when they need to."
We couldn't make everything fully open-plan, but the goal was to tear down the walls between departments and guide the space toward more generous, shared use.
"If it doesn't work after the change, we can adjust it back. But first — let's try it once."
In the end, we agreed to roll it out first in a handful of departments as a trial. The feedback from staff who experienced it directly would let us build a more realistic improvement plan.
What truly mattered was finding some way — any way — to get the departments talking to each other. And that beginning was, quite literally, tearing down the walls.
Behind this remodeling idea, in truth, lay a deeply personal experience.
In my previous life, when I worked at an urban planning consultancy, every project ran against a deadline — too much work, too few people. At one point, part of the office interior had to be reconfigured, and in one section, the partition installation was accidentally left out.
By rights, we should have rushed to reinstall it. But that period was beyond hectic.
'Bit inconvenient, but whatever — let's just live with it.'
Amid the chaos, the staff let it slide like that, and a few days on, the section simply stayed open.
Then, as time passed, something strange became apparent. In the partition-less section, conflicts between employees simply didn't occur.
Was it coincidence? No. As the weeks went by, I grew certain. In that section, everyone roughly knew what everyone else was working on, so helping each other came easily, and when misunderstandings arose, they dissolved quickly. People could make eye contact and talk, so tension never had the chance to build.
The partitioned section, meanwhile, erupted in conflict nearly every day. Nobody knew who was doing what, so suspicions accumulated. With no communication, distrust swelled — until even the smallest things set people off.
After that, when we moved offices, we consulted every employee and decided to remove all partitions across the board. We furnished the space with a more refined interior and redesigned it for a wide, open feel.
The results were astonishing. The atmosphere softened considerably, teamwork improved, and conflict all but vanished. That was the first time I learned that the "office where everything just works" you see in dramas and movies could actually exist in reality.
The experience had stayed with me ever since. That's why, in overhauling the interior of City Hall, I'd said: start with the partitions.
Of course, not every job lends itself to an open layout. Some people need to concentrate, and some departments handle work that demands quiet thought. So I made separate provision for that too — a dedicated focus work space on one side, quiet as a reading room, where people could write and organize their documents in silence. Instead of partitions, we offered a choice of work environments.
In the end, this was never just a remodeling project — moving desks and hauling out dividers. It was a small beginning toward restoring communication between people and changing the culture of the organization itself.
From the civil servants' perspective, there was probably a mood of reluctant compliance — the mayor says do it, so we do it. But I believed.
"Try it once, and you'll understand."
Just how fundamental this change was to the way real work gets done.