South Korea’s $21bn alternative to Seoul lacks transport and soul

November 19, 2013 3:56 am

South Korea’s $21bn alternative to Seoul lacks transport and soul

By Simon Mundy in Sejong City, South Korea

Stretching from the top of the transport ministry to that of the prime minister’s office, the undulating rooftop garden lends a futuristic touch to South Korea’s new government complex in Sejong City, 150km south of Seoul. But Lee Dae-young casts a lonely figure as he makes his way through the park. Like many other civil servants, the 53-year-old accident investigator left his family behind in Seoul when he moved to Sejong late last year, and now sees his two children only at weekends.“There’s nowhere to go after work here, so I tend to just work into the night,” Mr Lee says.

Behind him lies a landscape that until a few years ago contained just a scattering of small villages – but is now dominated by dozens of characterless apartment blocks built to house the thousands of public officials being moved to this new city, in one of South Korea’s most controversial policy initiatives of recent years.

The mass transfer of government bodies emulates the example set in recent years by other nations such as Malaysia and Myanmar, although South Korea has stopped short of making Sejong its new state capital.

Twelve government ministries and state agencies, including the finance ministry and the prime minister’s office, moved to Sejong late last year, with their staff accounting for much of the city’s current population of 22,000. Eighteen more bodies including the ministries of education, trade and welfare will move by the end of next month, with another six set to follow next year.

Official predictions put the population at 500,000 by 2030 – a forecast that assumes that the government migration will trigger a cascade of private investment into Sejong.

The project is intended to address concerns about the overly dominant national role of the capital – the Seoul metropolitan area accounts for nearly half of the country’s gross domestic product – in line with growing pressure for a more even distribution of national wealth. But it is proving expensive: the project cost has already reached Won10.7tn ($10bn) and is expected to rise to Won22.5tn.

In spite of this outlay, the government opted to forgo the expense of connecting Sejong to the country’s rail network. This leaves officials facing a road journey of two hours between the two cities, sometimes several times a week as they shuttle between meetings – a problem that Hyun Oh-seok, finance minister, has mitigated by typically spending just one day a week in Sejong.

Compared with Seoul, there are a number of inconvenient things – since it’s a new city, there are not many shops or restaurants

– Seo Yoon-jung, junior government official

“The transport is a serious piece missing,” says Diana Balmori, the Spanish landscape designer who created the blueprint for the government complex.

The time wasted by officials in transit has provoked fierce criticism, and tensions over the project are heightened by its political back story. Sejong was initially pitched as a new national capital by the liberal politician Roh Moo-hyun in his successful 2002 presidential campaign, in what political analysts see as a calculated pitch for votes in the crucial swing province of Chungcheong.

The constitutional court ruled two years later that Seoul must remain the capital, and Mr Roh’s successor Lee Myung-bak tried to abandon the plan to relocate government offices to Sejong, only to be defeated in parliament in 2010.

While Park Geun-hye, president since February, is a longstanding supporter of the scheme, it continues to attract criticism within her ruling centre-right New Frontier party. “There is enormous waste in time and material resources,” says Shim Jae-chul, a prominent lawmaker. “It leads to . . . the waste of people’s taxes.”

“Obviously our move to Sejong has made our operations much less efficient,” says a senior official who moved to the city last year and asked not to be named. Young graduates appeared to be increasingly seeking employment at agencies still based in Seoul, such as the financial regulatory bodies, he noted.

The order to move from Seoul was not enough to tear Seo Yoon-jung from her ambitions of advancement at the finance ministry. But the 33-year-old junior official cannot hide her wistfulness for the capital. “Compared with Seoul, there are a number of inconvenient things – since it’s a new city, there are not many shops or restaurants,” she says.

The streets around her are indeed conspicuously light on commercial activity. While a hoarding in one window indicates the imminent launch of a Starbucks coffee shop, the new city is without a single hotel, and residents will have to wait until the end of next year for its first supermarket and cinema. In the absence of wine bars and nightclubs, the government has resorted to organising dating events for lonely public servants.

Lee Han-na, deputy director of the city’s investment promotion team, expects commercial investment to be driven by companies setting up research operations in Sejong, drawn by tax breaks and by the presence of 16 government-funded research institutes, as well as several university campuses. “The private sector will come to Sejong sooner or later,” she says.