The Streets Belong to the People Again
It was autumn.
Six months ago, under the blazing sun of midsummer, the changes had begun. Now, slowly, they were bearing fruit.
I stood in the middle of the old downtown district. I passed through the car-free stretch, walked along the restored section of Yeojin Stream, and strolled unhurriedly over sidewalks that had been widened only recently.
The scenery around me had unmistakably changed. Without anyone needing to explain it, I could feel it beneath my feet, before my eyes, in the very air.
The first thing that caught my eye was how people moved. The streets where cars had once barreled past like threats were gone, replaced by crowds strolling together in twos and threes. Terraces had appeared naturally in front of shops—people laughing over coffee, families pulling strollers on leisurely walks, an elderly couple sitting at a table soaking up the sunlight.
The expressions of the people lingering on the street had changed too. No longer wary or hurried, they wore the faces of people breathing easy, staying a while. This was a transformation that no spreadsheet could capture.
Even the small rest areas beneath the street trees had drawn people in without anyone telling them to. Some passed the time on their phones, others read books or shared snacks with their children.
"So what we gained by emptying the road was never just a corridor for foot traffic."
I had imagined it, planned it—and yet I found myself surprised all over again. A street doesn't exist solely to be walked. It should exist for dwelling, for meeting, for conversation.
Now and then, young buskers played on one side of a terrace. At the sound of a guitar and a song, footsteps stopped naturally in their tracks. Children clapped and sang along, and passing citizens smiled. This was the first time a culture of dwelling had ever taken root in the old district of Yeojin City.
I watched it all quietly from a distance. We hadn't torn down a great deal or poured in a fortune. We amended an ordinance so terraces could open, cut a lane, widened the sidewalks a little, and made the streets pleasant to walk. Those small changes were rewriting the rhythm of the city.
Of course, there was still a long way to go. Aging buildings and cramped alleys remained scattered everywhere, and there were trouble spots where cars still swung across the sidewalk. But what mattered was the direction. The city had begun moving toward embracing people, not shutting them out.
I walked on. At an open-air café, a young couple sat on the terrace sipping coffee and taking photos. A family with a child in tow wandered a back alley at their leisure. An elderly man in a wheelchair traveled along the sidewalk entirely on his own, without anyone's help.
The numbers did not lie. The evidence that Yeojin City was changing was undeniable.
Traffic accidents had dropped first and most visibly. Compared to six months ago, accidents in the city center had fallen by 38 percent—pedestrian accidents by nearly half. We hadn't rebuilt the roads or spent an enormous budget. We had simply removed a lane, widened the sidewalks, and lowered the speeds. The results couldn't have been more different.
Citizens felt it in their bones.
"Crossing the street doesn't scare me anymore."
"Even when I'm walking hand in hand with my kid, I worry about cars a lot less."
"We used to just sprint on faith in the light, but now I see drivers stopping first."
The reactions from the elderly were especially striking.
"The lights used to change so fast that I'd get stuck halfway across."
"Cars blew through on the signal alone—it was always dangerous."
"These days the drivers go slow, and we can walk with our minds at ease."
Creating crosswalks without signals, cutting lanes, adding speed humps—these were what had driven the change. Drivers now always cruised slowly with the thought, someone might step out at any moment. Instead of leaning on traffic lights, they looked around naturally.
Nor had traffic flow collapsed outright. There had been some confusion early on, but after about a month it gradually settled. Overall vehicle speeds dropped 10 to 15 percent, but hard braking and jackrabbit acceleration fell with them, so traffic noise actually decreased dramatically.
When we ran a citizen satisfaction survey, the results were even clearer. Satisfaction with the pedestrian environment in the old downtown had risen 24 percent compared to six months prior, with the largest gains among residents over sixty, wheelchair users, and families with strollers.
"Pushing a stroller out the door used to be a genuine ordeal. Now it's easy."
"I can go out in my wheelchair and go far. I never even dreamed of that before."
The commercial districts were changing as well. One survey found that since the open-air terraces appeared, customers visiting the shops had increased by roughly 15 percent, with sales climbing most sharply in stay-and-spend businesses like cafés, restaurants, and household goods stores.
"Once the tables went outside, people walking past would glance over and come in."
"Lots of customers sit down, look at the menu, and end up staying for a meal."
The change showed clearly in the numbers, in the streetscape, and in people's faces. Looking at it all, I was certain.
Giving the streets back to the people—that is the answer. Make cars a little less comfortable, and people a great deal more so. That, in the end, was the path that revived the entire city.
But as the changes continued, another voice began to grow louder: the bureau directors of City Hall. Men in their late fifties, most of them just a few years from retirement.
At expanded executive meetings, they delivered their perfunctory reports, but whenever I issued concrete directives, they were always left on the outside. The real work was being carried out by section chiefs and team leads in their early thirties. I communicated with them directly and threw them straight into the field. Speed was everything, and there was no time to argue point by point with executives wedded to the old ways.
But that friction accumulated, and at some point the resentment began leaking out in hints and innuendo.
"I hear the Mayor only works with the young staff."
"What are we, furniture?"
"He's trampling on decades of experience."
At first I tried to ignore it. Then the grumbling began to spread through the organization like a quiet undercurrent.
The civil service is a world of rigid hierarchy. No matter how much the times have changed, if veteran bureau directors feel shut out, the middle managers inevitably start to waver. I paused to consider it. I even wondered whether their complaints might be unfair.
But honestly? I saw them as a necessary evil. Not because they were bad people. They had entered public service in the late eighties or early nineties, when the culture of the military dictatorship still hung thick over everything.
Their mentors were a generation that worshipped absolute top-down command. Dissent got you marked down; moving creatively got you noticed—and crushed. To survive inside that machine, they had learned to do only what they were told. They had no choice. It wasn't their fault.
The problem was simply that the era had changed. I needed change. The city was changing, and its administration had to change with it. That was why I had begun working boldly with young field officers who carried the desire to do things.
One stroke of luck: under the previous mayor, capable young civil servants had already been promoted into section-chief posts. Thanks to them, I could tap the right people immediately and make fast decisions. One meeting to reach a conclusion, orders handed down, teams deployed to the field at once. That velocity was what allowed Yeojin City to show the first signs of transformation within mere months.
The price, of course, was that some bureau directors felt sidelined. But I had no intention of accommodating every last one of them.
Try to please everyone, and you'll achieve nothing.
That was my resolve. The organization had to change, and sometimes change demanded accepting a little friction. Courteous, but firm. That was the approach I had chosen.
I didn't expect miracles from the young officers, either. I never demanded grand planning or flawless documents from day one. There was only one thing I wanted from them: people who weren't afraid of change.
Administration is, by nature, a conglomeration of inertia. Propose anything new, and one hundred times out of one hundred, the first words out of someone's mouth are: "There's no precedent."
But the MZ-generation chiefs and team leads were different.
"We'll find a way, however long it takes."
That was how they answered. Sometimes their work was rough around the edges—but the attempt itself was what mattered.
The Walkable City Division, the Citizen Space Design Division, and now the Ecological Environment Division as well. Around these three departments, I built a "small alliance." The moment my orders landed, they moved. They redrew plans, sprinted to the field, stood before citizens and explained things face to face. At times they got buried in complaints and had to read the moods of hostile executives—but still, they moved.
I valued that above all else.
"The Mayor forces everything through one-way."
"Isn't he just grandstanding to get in the Mayor's good graces?"
I heard the whispers that trailed through the organization, and paid them no mind. Once results appeared, the mouths closed on their own.
And the results came quickly. The car-free street, the bus subsidy program, the restoration of Yeojin Stream, the improved pedestrian environment—every transformation passed swiftly through the hands of those young civil servants. They planned on their own, executed on their own, and began to take pride in changing the city themselves.
I often thought about it this way: a mayor isn't the person holding the gun. A mayor is the person who makes the bullets. Each policy was a bullet, and the young civil servants were the ones who fired it. I handed them the ammunition, and they pulled the trigger themselves. That was the engine driving Yeojin City's transformation.
Before I knew it, the last of the autumn leaves had fallen—late autumn now, with winter about to begin.
Walking the old downtown, I found myself stopping more often than I used to. People seated on small roadside terraces, merchants waving greetings to one another, the unhurried footsteps of citizens out for a stroll. Lift your head just a little, and the golden ginkgo trees and the newly planted young saplings swayed together in the breeze.
It was a scene that would have been unthinkable barely half a year ago. Yeojin City had been a different place then. Cars ruled the streets, and people couldn't even walk the sidewalks properly. The chaotic signage, the indifferent illegal parking, the desolate old-district roads—everyone accepted it all as simply the way things were.
But small resolutions had piled up, one upon another. The street that permitted terraces. The alley that declared itself car-free. The road whose possibility had been unlocked not by tearing up asphalt but by a single ordinance. The sidewalk wide enough to walk slowly beside a bicycle. The school zones guarded by the city's elders.
Each of those moments had changed the city, bit by bit by bit.
Citizens sensed the change quickly. The soft air you felt with every step, the streets where traffic noise had faded, the roads in front of schools where children could walk hand in hand with easy hearts. The people of Yeojin no longer needed to explain in words that the city had changed. They simply walked. They lingered. They laughed.
The press had opened with anxiety and criticism, but as time passed, denial was no longer possible. The streets had come alive, customers had returned to the shops, and daily life had grown noticeably more comfortable.
The merchants' association representative said with a smile, "These days, we tend the space in front of our own shops. We don't just wait for people to show up—we make them want to come."
One elderly woman, bringing her grandchild along, murmured quietly, "It's so pleasant walking around here now."
Young people sat at open-air café tables drinking coffee over their studies; mothers pulled strollers and chattered with friends; the elders occupied the sun-warmed benches and passed the hours. Every change was taking root quietly, but deeply.
The citizens were coming to understand it too. A city is not its buildings, or its roads, or its developments. The city is the people breathing, laughing, and walking within them.
Now and then, I walked on purpose. The Yeojin Stream restoration site, the car-free street, the new sidewalks—I walked every one of those routes myself. And everywhere I went, I felt the same thing: we're on the right track.
In this small city, I had never harbored the arrogant dream of changing the world. I had only wanted people to live their days a little more comfortably, a little more joyfully. And that small dream had created a transformation this large.
In my previous life, no matter how I pleaded, no one had listened. Unless a project involved budgets in the trillions, or at least hundreds of billions, no one paid the slightest attention. But here, small work was rewriting the daily life of Yeojin City.
I never sought credit for it. Few would remember who had done the work. But I was fine with that—as long as the citizens grew happier, that was enough. That was why I had chosen urban planning in the first place. Cities are made by people, and I had merely helped set the beginning in motion.
Now Yeojin City was running on its own—slowly, but firmly.
What had changed was more than the streets and sidewalks. People's expressions had changed, the merchants' attitudes had changed, the very way children walked had changed. A small movement to fix what was broken had, in the end, rewritten the rhythm of the entire city.
I still had much to do, and there were plenty of problems left to untangle in the remainder of my term.
But this autumn, I could say it with certainty.
Yeojin City had changed.
And it would go on changing.