Rebuilding the Urban Planning Committee
The conference room was quieter than I'd expected. A late-autumn wind rapped against the windowpanes, and inside, nothing but the flat glow of fluorescent lights fell across the floor.
Everyone seated around the table kept their eyes down, saying nothing, as if they'd all agreed in advance to freeze their faces and bury whatever they were feeling.
I took the seat at the far end of the room and quietly studied their faces. The Director of Urban Space, Noh Chae-eun, Head of the Planning and Budget Division, an officer from Administrative Support, one working-level staff member from the Policy Coordination Office. And beside me, Chief of Staff Kang Seol-heon.
Even the seating arrangement alone made it clear that today's agenda was a sensitive one.
This wasn't the main conference table — this room was reserved for small executive meetings held for strategic discussion. Nothing official, just a place where delicate internal matters got aired.
Since becoming mayor, I'd only convened a handful of these meetings myself, but every single time, the air in the room had frozen solid with tension.
"The current committee members' terms end at the close of this month."
The Director of Urban Space spoke up quietly. As he turned the page and slid a document across the table, his face carried a mixture of fatigue and careful deliberation.
"But we haven't found replacements. Honestly... if not from Gwangseong City, who exactly is going to come all the way out to Yeojin?"
I listened to him at length, then let the corner of my mouth lift slightly — a small measure of ease layered over an otherwise expressionless face.
"It's a thirty-minute drive from Gwangseong City to here. Forty, if you take the trunk-line bus."
My calm rebuttal sent a faint tremor through the room's atmosphere. The Director hid his flustered reaction, though he went to the needless trouble of straightening his thin folder one more time.
"In Gwangseong, an hour-long commute is the bare minimum," I went on, holding my gaze fixed on him. "So why should this place be the exception?"
"I fully understand your point, Mayor, but..."
The Director scratched his head lightly, straining to keep his tone diplomatic.
"Realistically, urban planning specialists — especially anyone with a name — have no interest in Yeojin. There isn't much work here, and frankly, it does little for a career."
The other executives seated around the table lowered their heads or looked away.
They all shared the same thought. The label of 'small provincial city' was proving an obstacle to attracting talent everywhere.
That much, I knew better than anyone in the room — and not just as an abstraction. I was a child of exactly that kind of small city myself, and in the past, I too had stayed away, citing Yeojin's remoteness as my reason for never coming back.
"Then let me ask you this."
I leaned slowly forward.
"What we want — is it a certificate that says 'urban planning major'? Or is it someone who wants to change a city?"
For a moment, the room fell silent. My tone was calm, but the content was far more direct than usual. Kang Seol-heon gave a quiet laugh beside me.
"Strictly speaking, the people who judge that need replacing too."
Her words sounded like a joke, but they were the most earnest advice anyone in the room could have offered.
Only then did the Director of Urban Space lift his head. In his eyes I could read a faint flicker of doubt — does he actually intend to change this thing?
That's right. I was serious. No — more than serious. This was resolve, deep and settled.
I already knew. To change the framework of this city, a mere proposal or a well-reasoned procedure would never be enough. You had to shake it from the roots.
"Director."
I raised my drink, wet my lips, and continued.
"We need to reconstitute the Urban Planning Committee from the ground up. More than half of the current members are construction industry insiders, real estate specialists, and people tied to particular political connections."
The Director held his tongue. I didn't press him further, either. We both knew exactly what the problem was.
He already knew the answer without having to say it, and I had no need to wait for one.
"This is not simply an appointments issue."
I leaned slightly forward in my seat and spread open one of the drawings lying on the conference table.
"What decisions this committee has made, and who benefited from those decisions — the city knows, and the citizens can feel it. The time to change it is now."
"The problem is..."
The Director finally spoke.
"That's easy to say. But finding new members is no simple feat in practice. Especially people willing to stake their name on joining — in this structure, in a place like this."
"It's not people who can stake their name that we need," Kang Seol-heon cut in quietly. "It's people who can stake their accountability. The name follows later."
Her words were crisp and concise — a tone that invited agreement rather than resistance.
The air in the room shifted slightly. The Director of Urban Space's face tightened as he sank deep into his chair. He tilted his head back, stared up at the ceiling, and soon closed his eyes.
He was clearly sorting through names in his head. He wasn't fully persuaded yet, but he seemed to have given up any will to resist the momentum bearing down on him.
"Then let's do it this way."
I pulled out the notebook beside my seat and started writing as I spoke.
"Compile everything on the current members — their career histories, their affiliated industries, their attendance records, how they handled major agenda items over the past five years. The justification for each appointment has to be defensible."
The Director's eyebrows twitched.
"You want that level of detail just to select committee members?"
"No."
I shook my head with a smile.
"That much isn't enough. We have to be able to show what in Yeojin they've been judging, and for whom."
"And look closely at the licensed urban planners and the specialists attached to firms. They may sit on the committee, but they'll move in lockstep with their corporate ties."
The Director's expression grew more troubled still.
"That's unrealistic. They're the very people we need to bring their expertise to the table. Are you saying you'd exclude them entirely?"
"Isn't that obvious?" I said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "These are people who make decisions for corporations, not for the citizens of Yeojin. However desperate we are for bodies, if we keep them as they are, do you honestly believe our Urban Planning Committee will function properly?"
Noh Chae-eun, head bowed, flipped open her notebook at speed.
Kang Seol-heon leaned back against her chair with her arms crossed, observing the way I spoke.
"What about the civic groups?" she asked. "They've never had real expertise — we only ever seated two of them on the grounds of oversight and checks. Let's use this as the chance to expand their seats. Their voice matters too."
Then I added, firmly: "But please screen out the ones who sit through meetings reading their handouts and nodding without ever saying a word. A committee is not a room full of raised hands."
The Director of Urban Space pushed back hard.
"Civic society lacks the expertise to be of any use. All they offer is pie-in-the-sky talk that never helps resolve actual issues."
I turned the question back on him.
"Why wouldn't they help? Since I took office, has a single civic group ever been the problem in anything I've done? Every one of them works hard for this city. And because we were willing to sit down and discuss things together, we solved problems with good ideas — didn't we?"
At that, the Director went quiet as a man with a mouthful of honey.
The moment he confirmed my resolve, he'd evidently concluded that adding anything further would put his own position at risk.
Typical of a man staring down mandatory retirement in a few years — his instincts for self-preservation were superb. I had wondered why he'd come to report in person, of all things, but then, people rarely change at the core.
The room settled back into silence.
The Director of Urban Space offered no further rebuttal. Instead, he rose from his chair and picked up his coffee cup.
His movements were slow, but he looked like a man who had, by and large, made up his mind.
"This is going to get loud," Kang Seol-heon said. "The committee is an old, old frame — and inside that frame live the middle-aged men of Yeojin, this city's inertia and all its habits."
"Noise is just a reaction," I said evenly. "Proof that we're actually changing something."
Just then, Noh Chae-eun, who had been sitting quietly until now, spoke up.
"Mayor. If you replace the entire committee... the press could come after us with 'lack of expertise' and 'one-man rule.' Especially in a climate as politically charged as this one—"
"They will," I said, nodding. "But leaving city planning in the hands of people with no connection to citizens' daily lives — isn't that the real one-man rule?"
Cho Yeon-woo attended the meeting that day, but he never said a word. He only listened.
The morning air was colder than the conference room had been. Since the discussion over the Urban Planning Committee's appointments ended the day before, City Hall had been unusually hushed.
Unspoken whispers about who would be brought in and who would be pushed out drifted all the way down the corridors. No one named names, but everyone knew.
When the mayor sets out to change something, it means the world outside that room is about to stop being quiet.
I left the mayor's office on the first floor and went up to the third. In this building, a mayor personally visiting a working department's office was all but unheard of.
The structure was simple: you summoned, they came up; reports flowed upward. For the mayor to come down and pay a visit, the way I was doing today, bordered on an event in its own right.
When the elevator doors opened, the familiar corridor unfolded before me.
Citizen Space Design Division.
Barely a few months ago, this department had been called the Urban Planning Division. Renaming it had been the very first thing I did upon becoming mayor.
In an administrative organization, a department's name is never just a nameplate. Shifting from an attitude of planning a city to one of designing space was a far bigger change than it sounded.
Plans are handed down from above; design is made together. And the starting line of that process, I believed, had to be the citizens themselves.
The moment I opened the door and stepped inside, the office froze as if someone had pressed pause. Two or three people stopped mid-shuffle through their documents; someone at a computer turned their head, hand frozen on the mouse.
A brief stillness hung in the air. One employee shot up out of their chair, then sat back down in embarrassment; another nudged the person beside them, their expression saying, it's the mayor.
No one needed to be told. A mayor walking into a department office himself was no ordinary occurrence.
I gave them a short bow.
"Hello. Just stopping by for a moment — no need to be alarmed. Where's Cho Yeon-woo's desk?"
One employee absently pointed across the room, and I made my way over at an unhurried pace.
Cho Yeon-woo, seated at his desk, started up out of his chair in surprise — then stopped when I raised a hand to wave him back down.
Several design drawings were spread across his desk, and the familiar CAD program glowed on his monitor.
"Mayor."
"Stay seated. I came because I wanted to talk."
He settled carefully back into his chair, and I took the empty seat in front of his desk. The fact that I had come down here myself was already a message in its own right.
And I was certain that this conversation was one that would never, ever have come through a report or a briefing line.
"What project is this drawing for?"
"One of last year's village regeneration grant competitions. The plan calls for a mixed-use community center... and this location has been giving me quite a bit of trouble."
"The location?"
"It's somewhat removed from the residential areas, and there's no commercial district or public facilities nearby. Public transit access is poor too. To be honest with you, the plan itself is finished — but it feels like there's no scent of people in it."
The word he'd chosen — scent — lodged itself in my ear. It was not a word about function, or floor area, or regulatory thresholds.
A city drawn by following the numbers on a blueprint, versus a city drawn by following the lives of the people who move through it. I knew the difference well, and the man sitting in front of me seemed to be trying to put that difference into words.
He handed me one of the drawings and continued carefully.
"This community center sits slightly outside the core. For residents living nearby to reach it, it's a walk of fifteen minutes or more, and the road access is inconvenient too. By traffic-planning standards there's no problem — but for the residents who would actually use this space... the accessibility falls short. And usage drops with it."
I traced the center of the drawing with my eyes, following along the path of his fingertip.
The plan was sound. The location, the layout — nothing about it violated administrative procedure. But a design can be flawless and still miss life entirely.
At that moment, Cho Yeon-woo spoke.
"Mayor. About the Urban Planning Committee appointments. Do the members really have to be urban planning majors?"