Conditions of Technology, the Prelude to Negotiation
At that very hour, on the ninth floor of the Gwangseong City Hall main building, the windows of the Environmental Safety Policy Division's conference room were shut tight.
This was usually the season when a soft spring breeze would drift through, but right now no one dared let in the outside air. Open the window, and 'that smell' would follow them in and linger through the entire meeting.
The Gwangseong incinerator, which had once operated without a single complaint, had been completely shut down since the fire last month. A temporary waste storage yard had been set up as a stopgap, but it couldn't keep pace with the volume — and the results were disastrous.
In the past week alone, more than four hundred odor complaints had poured in. Half of them came from residential districts with high schools, elementary schools, and daycares.
An anonymous school principal's post on the city hall website had spread across local social media, and the regional press had spent days hammering the same phrase into their headlines: "The city where children take classes wearing masks." The city's face was crumbling fast, and the mayor's leadership was crumbling with it.
"Deputy Mayor, we've heard from a Seoul newspaper as well. A society desk reporter from the JoongAng Ilbo. They'll be on-site for reporting before long."
The head of public relations let his sentence trail off. The Deputy Mayor sat with his head bowed over the desk. Neither press releases nor explanations were working anymore.
Concluding that the matter could wait no longer, they had begun sending 'requests for cooperation' to neighboring municipalities starting yesterday. One of those letters had just landed in Yeojin City.
Gwangseong was operating under hard physical constraints. The city's southern flank fell within the airport's height-restriction zone, ruling out any alternative site. The north was already packed dense with housing and commercial facilities, effectively sealing off any location for an unpopular facility.
Worse still, the technical review had come back concluding that the fire had destroyed most of the existing incinerator's infrastructure, making short-term restoration impossible. In other words, Gwangseong had become a city with nowhere left to build anything.
The real problem was that while the administration failed to fill the void, the citizens had taken action. An online petition had launched, centered on the local moms' café, and signatures had already passed thirty thousand.
Titled "Demand to Relocate the Incinerator and for the Gwangseong Mayor's Apology," it was spreading all the way to the Blue House's national petition system and to press tips.
Before anyone noticed, Gwangseong's garbage problem had stopped being a mere odor issue and gone nationwide, framed as a story of local government incompetence.
The Gwangseong mayor remained silent even now. The emergency press conference had been postponed; internal meetings were held on repeat. Within those meetings, 'conditional distributed processing' had emerged as the only viable solution — but the problem was that no city was willing to take the waste.
Sunyeong City had already declared its refusal, and Sangye City had returned the official letter unopened, without even acknowledging receipt. Only a handful of options remained. Yeojin City was one of them.
"Somehow... we have to persuade at least one of them."
The Deputy Mayor spoke, hand pressed to his forehead.
"Not persuade. A political exchange, more likely."
The policy advisor seated beside him added in a low voice.
"Steer things so they can set conditions. They'll know as well as we do... that nothing comes entirely free."
Gwangseong was being cornered. They grew more desperate by the hour, and the proposals were shifting steadily toward the shape of 'conditional negotiation.'
The letter already sent to Yeojin City was no longer a simple request for cooperation — attached language now emphasized a 'mutual win-win model.'
The language of administration is always soft, but its essence is coercion. And that coercion always lands on someone.
Gwangseong needed to burn seven hundred tons of waste per day. Even if only half of that were outsourced to other municipalities, the administrative and political burden would be considerable.
That weight had just been dropped, quietly, onto a single sheet of paper lying at the center of a conference room in Yeojin City.
The air in the conference room had shifted into something strange. The initial adamant opposition and the confusion in between had both passed.
Now the word possibility had been laid, ever so carefully, upon the meeting table.
The number of people speaking had shrunk, but the number of people thinking had grown. In each mind, someone had already unfolded a map, and someone else was running simulations of the angry complaints to come.
I folded a sheet of the documents slowly and spoke.
"If we refuse, where does it go next?"
Section Chief Cho Yeon-woo lowered his eyes slightly.
"Hmm... realistically, county-level cities — smaller in population than Yeojin, with weaker infrastructure."
The team leader from the Resource Circulation Division nodded along as he added, "I hear a few places are being mentioned. They're farther away, disposal costs will run higher, and yet the plan is just to push it through with administrative muscle..."
"That's right. It's always been that way."
I answered quietly. The words were short, but they left a faint resonance across the whole room.
It was a landscape everyone recognized, even if no one would own the responsibility.
Unpopular facilities always drift toward the weakest places. Regions with small voices, regions slow to access information, county towns without a city council of their own. This problem was no different.
I laced my fingers together for a moment before continuing.
"That's exactly why we set conditions."
Everyone turned toward me, wearing expressions that asked why I was raising that word now.
"Are you saying we should take it?"
The head of the Resource Circulation Division asked carefully.
I didn't answer right away. Instead, I posed a question of my own.
"If we take it without conditions... we're fools."
Then I added, "But if we can set conditions, that changes everything. It means we hold the initiative."
Section Chief Cho Yeon-woo nodded. "By conditions, do you mean technical standards and facility specifications?"
"That's number one."
I folded down a single finger.
"The incinerator isn't the problem. The smell is. And there are real examples of incinerators that don't smell. Copenhagen, for one..."
I stopped. The name of that city had slipped out before I could catch it, and I pivoted quickly.
"...And there are surely a few success stories in the capital region too. Let's pull everything we can find on places like those."
The head of the Resource Circulation Division nodded and began taking notes.
"And condition number two?"
"Location."
I said it quietly.
"Not just anywhere — a site that interlocks with the overhaul of the city's whole spatial structure. Somewhere we're planning development down the line, or somewhere we can tie into our designated redevelopment zones. If we're just talking about empty land on the outskirts, we won't persuade a soul."
The room fell silent for a moment. This time, no one raised an objection.
It seemed everyone had already been turning over roughly the same thoughts in their heads.
I went on.
"Condition three is the citizens. They have to be able to accept it. Forget the usual one-way briefing sessions — what if instead, we asked the citizens for their conditions first? Ask them upfront what terms would make this acceptable to them."
Cho Yeon-woo nodded slowly. "If we go that route, it stops being forced acceptance and becomes a framework for negotiation."
"Exactly. Once you enter a negotiating framework, the decision-making process itself becomes your persuasion."
Only then did the officials' posture begin to change. Where the question had first been the binary of take it or refuse it, the discussion now shifted to a different premise: if we take it, how.
I watched that premise settle into place almost unconsciously, and said nothing. The silence, in fact, was saying more.
"Mayor, we'll secure the technical materials first, then. Odor-reduction cases — overseas or domestic."
"Good."
I gave a short nod.
"We'll also run an internal location simulation on our end... focusing on sites that overlap with the redevelopment zones."
"That works too."
I offered neither praise nor instruction. Every proposal sounded as if it had come from the officials themselves, but the direction had already been set inside my head.
I had simply kept that road 'open.'
What remained in the conference room was the practical matter of how to organize the now-settled conclusion. And very quietly, almost to myself, I murmured:
"If we don't take it, it ends up in some other town too weak to fight back. So... we might as well be the ones setting the conditions."
The words would remain in that room even without anyone writing them down. Someone would remember them as my moment of resolve — but in truth, even that remark had come late in the order of things.
Everything had already been decided, long before it was spoken.
The air in the conference room was settling. Into the space where the heavy silence had weighed, only the sound of pens scratching and keyboards clicking carried on, softly.
The things no one had dared voice minutes ago were now being laid out, line by clear line, in notebooks and on the work messenger. The defensive atmosphere had turned, as if it had never existed, into a posture of practical execution.
I slowly closed the meeting materials again.
I let my gaze rest on them lightly, deliberately — no underlines, no markings. Acting not as the one drawing up the plan, but as the one receiving ideas.
That was the most effective posture I could have chosen in that moment.
"Cast a wide net on the technical materials."
I spoke calmly, leaving nothing vague at the edges.
"Domestic cases go without saying. There's even an incinerator built in the heart of a city, like Copenhagen's. The one with the ski slope on its roof."
For an instant, several heads came up around the table. The unexpected name had caught them off guard.
I pressed on without pause.
"...Not that I'm calling it an ideal. The point is to compare realistic cases where odor and emissions are actually controlled. Surely there are examples like that in the capital region too?"
The head of the Resource Circulation Division nodded quickly. "Yes. The modernized facilities around Nanjido in Seoul and in Incheon's western district. A few have undergone recent retrofitting as well."
"Look into site visits for those, too. You can't get a feel for it from the desk."
I dipped my head slightly, as if to close the matter.
"Let's turn this into a technical conversation wherever we can. Standards, not sentiment. That makes the next conversation much easier."
Section Chief Cho Yeon-woo asked carefully, "Then for the next meeting... shall we organize it around two tracks — the technical materials and the location review?"
I nodded slowly. "On the location, review only for now. Pin down a specific site too early and it could backfire."
"Understood. We'll attach the citizen briefing and Q&A scenarios a little later."
Someone said, still writing, "In the meantime, Gwangseong might come back with additional proposals or conditions."
"That's even better. More conditions mean more points to negotiate."
The words were brief, but there was a faint ease in my tone.
I was already watching the whole board from a distance, and this meeting was merely the first piece set into motion. Some would think I was simply riding the current. Others might think I had already made my decision. In truth, both would only be half right.
I rose from my seat and spoke one last time.
"Let's end the meeting here. The Resource Circulation Division will draft the agenda for the next session, and the rest of the departments will review it together."
Then I added with a slight smile.
"And if anyone still thinks an odor-free incinerator isn't realistic... go see one for yourselves. It might turn out to be less of a big deal than you think."
And with that, the meeting ended.
I didn't leave first. I stayed at my seat, pretending to organize the documents slowly.
As the others filed out of the conference room, I looked through the wall, in my mind's eye, to the far edge of the old downtown — the place whose existence no one yet knew about.
What would rise there, no one knew. And that, precisely, was the greatest power I held.