Last year, I stood in Guryong Village, Seoul’s last remaining shantytown, situated just a stone's throw away from the towering, affluent skyline of Gangnam. Through my camera lens, I documented the stark spatial inequality and the looming threat of displacement faced by its residents. This documentary recently won third Place at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Film Contest at the Tribeca Festival. However, as I celebrated this cinematic achievement, a sobering realization dawned on me: Capturing the pain of displacement through empathy is not enough. Concrete, institutional policy changes are required to solve it.
To seek actionable solutions, I transitioned from a filmmaker to a researcher.
On July 2, I had the distinct honor of presenting my comparative urban policy study at the First Young Scholar Seminar hosted by the Korea University Institute for Urban Research. Engaging in profound debates with esteemed professors, Ph.D. scholars, and urban planners, a clear consensus emerged: The 30-year stagnation of Guryong Village’s redevelopment is not merely a dispute over compensation. It is fundamentally rooted in the absence of a legal baseline for its unauthorized occupants.
To understand how to navigate this deadlock, I cross-analyzed Guryong Village with two major public housing redevelopment cases in the United States: Barry Farm in Washington, and Hunter’s View in San Francisco.
The contrast between the two US cases is striking. At Barry Farm, authorities pushed for total demolition before building new homes, scattering the community for over six years and shrinking the return rate to a mere 45 percent. Conversely, Hunter’s View successfully employed a "Phased Redevelopment" model — building new housing on vacant lots within the site before demolishing the old units — achieving a remarkable 70 percent retention rate.
Yet, the true lesson here is not just about the order of relocation. The phased redevelopment at Hunter’s View was only possible because the residents were legally recognized tenants with an institutionalized "Right to Return." In Guryong Village, residents lack this foundational legal status. Therefore, the immediate task for Seoul is not merely importing the American phased-redevelopment model, but legally creating a baseline of rights for disenfranchised occupants.
Drawing from my research and the invaluable insights exchanged at the seminar, I propose five systematic policy mechanisms for Guryong Village.
First, we must shift the baseline of resettlement qualifications from formal property ownership to verified facts of long-term residence. Second, the state must utilize its eminent domain power to immediately establish formal, protective public leasehold relationships with the displaced occupants. Third, we must legally siphon the windfall commercial gains generated by Gangnam's premium land values to subsidize resident re-entry permanently. Fourth, resettlement blocks must be designed around long-standing, organic neighborhood mutual-aid networks rather than individualized lottery systems. Finally, fragmented local factions must be restructured into a single, legally binding representative body to legitimize the entire renewal process.
True urban renewal does not begin with bulldozing old structures to erect gleaming new ones; it begins with protecting the people who have called that space home. In early August, I plan to deliver a comprehensive policy brief based on this research to the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee. It is my deepest hope that Korea’s policymakers will rewrite the narrative of urban redevelopment — shifting the focus from capital to people, and from exclusion to fundamental rights.
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Ethan Lee
Ethan Lee is a senior at the Lawrenceville School and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.
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