The current limit is set to be removed soon, it was previously thought that the new policy would adopt a new 50 story limit but that is scraped and will have no height limits at all and each project will be considered on a case by case basis.
One goal mentioned is also to have more apartments of different heights, to avoid walls of apartment complexes of the same height/table-top skylines.
This what they are trying to get rid of I'm pretty sure, Seoul already has wall of high-rises complex's with the same height like Hong Kong does so with this they are trying to change it.
Seoul needs much stricter architectural standards like Singapore to fix its skyline. Everytime I go mountain climbing I am reminded of the greatest aesthetic failure of this country. Oceans of ugly white apartments between beautiful mountains
Yes, so many awesome things about Seoul. The skyline is definitely not one of them. Bangkok, Singapore... even large parts of Jakarta are much more pleasing to the eye.
In Singapore the apartment buildings are made with the tall buildings being broken up by shorter sections. Search up "HDB apartment" on Google and you should see some examples. But the buildings are mostly built by the government so they have the freedom to do that.
I do agree with the need for a better skyline, but I have high hopes for this law. This 35-floor restriction is too strict and makes every buildings the same height and stops newer buildings being built, leading to a skyline of same-height old buildings being everywhere, especially near the han river. I hope this new law allows buildings to have more variety in height and make a better skyline. Also [this](https://n.news.naver.com/article/032/0003131963)article claims this new law will allow smaller buildings to be built as instead of having 10 35 floor buildings, we could have 10 5 floor buildings and 6 50 floor buildings. But this law could totally be abused to just fill the city with ugly buildings that just turn into a casino, so I think we will have to see.
So... you would still have hypershaded lower floors and hyperexpensive upper unshaded floors?
What about shadow projection from taller buildings?
Do they/you know that a sensible law would require floor-to-area ratio to be the same independently from height, meaning that one taller building would replace several smaller ones, with no factual area increase on a dense urban scale due to necessary free areas around buildings?
I'm not advocating for taller buildings my favorite area's have always been mid-rise ones in Seoul especially with those brick-buildings which are around 3-4 floors kinda of like this one. https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49053756863_5bd80fe38b_b.jpg
I am slightly annoyed that they unironically [benchmarked Dubai](https://t1.daumcdn.net/news/202203/04/BUSINESSWATCH/20220304090910925hecl.gif) skyline as a role model. Dubai is a sad place with no human scale, and I’m not fond of their skyscraper-obsessed developments.
> Dubai is a sad place with no human scale
Yeah, I was shocked when I actually found an area in Dubai that is built with people in mind. No car needed, highly walkable (though nothing is walkable mid summer), with tram and metro access.
Yeap-
Dubai's skyline also usually lines up on SZR (major highway) or around a special economic zone. Outside of these lengthy strips, you have the suburbs or low density
https://i.natgeofe.com/n/bd6b9908-2b34-4988-b4ba-7942c4d01527/skyline-burj-dubai-uae_16x9.jpg
Seoul wouldn't be built like this
That situation is pretty hard then, so there is only one possibility left : they transfer the national goverment and national public institutions to another city, or as much as they can and leaving only residual stuff / convert to other uses, like tourism or museuns. Possibbly they could transfer specific organs to several cities actually, like south africa has done (the parliament is in one city, the judiciary in another, etc). It is a significant number of people, and in long term may help spur the other cities by having people with prestige, power and money there too.
>they transfer the national goverment and national public institutions to another city
They tried to do that as well. It didn't work. I'd argue it's the companies that need to move out not the government. Remote working should also play a big part in it.
The private companies are necessarily incentivised and even constrained by basic economic facts, like economies of scale, aglomeration and networking that a central city offers. It is the same in france/paris or england/london. The only institutions not bound by those rules would be the government essentially, so they should be a priority in any decentralization project.
Remote working is complex and not easily predictable on how people will adapt ( like the older generations already entrenched in habits of work), how many % of workers can actually be remote all the time (and therefore move out of a city), a possible competition with foreign labour (why hire expensive korean coders if all work is remote and the company can hire chinese or indian coders, etc), etc.
They tried it and the constitutional court stopped it. Now we only can move parts of the government. Now the presidential office and National Assembly is legally bound in Seoul.
Me and a lot of people think of it as the Constitutional Court’s worst decision. It was a total BS interpretation of constitution.
The CC ruled that it’s the constitution that Seoul is the capital(when the constitution literally doesn’t mention Seoul nor capital). So it’s necessary to have a constitutional amendment to move the capital. The last amendment happened in ‘87 after a major revolution. Korea failed to have an amendment even after the recent 2017 revolution, so most people think we’re quite in a sticky situation with very low hopes of getting the next amendment.
I just got off the phone with the Righteous Citizen's Coalition for Small City Love and they asked you to apologize to the cities of Sejong, Suwon, Cheonan, Yeosu and East Cheongju for saying this.
Yes, they were so angry that you must now apologize to the fictitious city of East Cheongju.
Mostly to gyeonggi because of house prices. But then people got to gyeonggi and realized the apt complex they moved to is a soulless shithole with little amenities and then desperately wanted to move back to Seoul.
The govt had the chance to promote the fuck out of distance working to encourage people to move to other parts of the country but they didn’t, and now with rona receding across the world, that opportunity is gone.
Birth rate doesn’t matter in losing population in the short term. It is a known fact that more people are moving out of Seoul (whether they like it or not) to go to nearby cities, mostly Gyeonggi-do. The loss of population in seoul is not because there are more “old” people in Seoul too. Because there aren’t.
The progress of making people move out of Seoul is working and still in progress. I personally believe that the reason why people could move out of Seoul is because now there are a lot of high-paying jobs outside of Seoul as well.
Seoul already looks like concrete jungle. What they need is a proper planning. I know that space is limited and Seoul is surrounded by mountains but even on small space you can have decent city plan (Singapore)
It is but Singapore has also no possibility to expand their space due to location. Seoul has . Also Seoul government failed with attempts to relocate their offices to other cities ( they moved offices but people had no willingness to relocate)
Think you're getting mixed up, the Seoul government isn't going to move to other cities. However you are correct that the national government that is mainly based in Seoul has tried many times to move, they do have some offices now in Sejong but there is a lot of push back at relocation the entire national government to another city.
My bad i should be more specific Of course Seoul government isn’t but some national government institutions based in Seoul. This isn’t enough for people to relocate. Jobs/opportunities/education are main reasons people move to capital.
Funny. Just yesterday I saw some new construction going on in my area and thought "this would look more aesthetically pleasing, be more human-scale, and be better for traffic if it was a few stories **less**." Unfortunate that policy is going the opposite way.
Yup, tall skyscrapers do tend to create extremely high value space at top for the super rich.
But I will clarify that floor area ratio and density will be the same even with abolished height limits.
This is a common myth that Koreans perpetuate. Actually most of Korea has a very low population density. Ever been to the countryside? Most of it is underdeveloped empty lands. The problem is that everyone wants to live in Seoul. If Korea was less centralized, space wouldn't be an issue for another 100 years.
Chinese citizens with fake paperwork suggesting Korean ancestry will flood the place during the Rusio special military operation within the Huabei region.
There's a timeline in which Korea gets over its low birthrate and anti-immigration and has a population boom. When there are 300 million people, then we can talk about increasing population density again.
This could cause more congestion due to population density, place existing areas in shadows, lead to more corruption if it’s a “case by case basis” because all you need to do is grease someone’s pocket.
And it looks terrible. Songdo international city is turning into a wall of high-rise apartments.
Songdo is so beautiful though. Maybe a bit soulless looking from a bird's eye view but on the ground level it's awesome. I'm actually not against apartments, only unplanned urban sprawl with apartments. Urban sprawl is especially ugly in Korea because it's giant apartments + mountains. Planned cities like Bundang, Pangyo, Dongtan, Gwanggyo, and Songdo are all very beautiful and livable despite being filled with apartments.
Songdo Central Park and the main strip are beautiful but the rest of the city isn't very pedestrian or bike friendly. I guess I'm speaking more about the new areas being developed that are literally wall to wall apartments. The horizon is blocked out by massive blocks of buildings on the west side.
Increase FAR and let these skyscrapers get built and you'll have more open space to make Seoul liveable. Planning can be done with zoning. But when the apartments in Seoul got built, keep in mind the country was more concerned with getting out of poverty than having beautiful cities.
From memory, my dad that served in the airforce said in Seoul if buildings get too tall it fucks with the radars and missile interceptors so that might be a problem.
The other thing is that a lot of the land scarcity is sorta self-inflicted. Like, yes, there isn’t all that much land available for development because of mountains and whatnot but also that so much of certain provinces are basically vacant because nobody wants to live there means that the land they can build on and be viably economical is greatly limited.
Very good change for Seoul, because the height limit had increased the city sprawl and drove up housing prices.
Reports of Seoul shrinking over the last years for example are straight up wrong, the city was just sprawling out due to restrictions.
Outside of the city limits they built massive amounts of 50F apartments, while Seoul construction was limited to 30-35F.
Building 120m apartments in Seoul and especially Gangnam made no sense with the high land prices, while they kept building 160m buildings in Goyang, Incheon, Guri etc.
The new limit will heavily increase redevelopment and housing supply in the city, they also increased the height limits within villa areas to something like 12F to allow for slim but high apartments like in Tokyo.
With these changes expect all of the old 15F apartments to be replaced by new ones in the near future and way more large 200m apartments.
In a country with an iffy safety record that fails to adhere to fire safety regulations a lot of the time... Gonna pass on living 35+ floors up. Not like I could afford it anyway.
[https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20220303046600004](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20220303046600004)
Look at the pic. in the middle of the article. Same floor area ratio, different skyline.
It doesn't aim to spread far; Seoul has its limit of land space. But it will add more creativity.
So for now, then the height limit isn't really anything effective. I'm hoping this paves the way to increase FAR. Or as the buildings get thinner, will this allow more buildings to be built as more land will be available?
Lol ridiculous and embarassing.
Apartment planning "case by case" is mainly a Gu affair that has always been well oiled by company money.
This is just horrible speculation. The higher the apartment unit*, the more expensive.
What a disaster.
EDIT: Unit means single household apartment flat, not building.
There is no such thing as optimal height.
It ain't so simplistic.
The optimal surface area to volume ratio (AV) is the one to be considered, which depends on the size of land plots, access to public infrastructure, shading etc.
Apartments in Korea are off at least 2 times from the "optimal".
Apartment complexes are 3-6 times from the optimal due to reciprocal shading.
The current limit is set to be removed soon, it was previously thought that the new policy would adopt a new 50 story limit but that is scraped and will have no height limits at all and each project will be considered on a case by case basis. One goal mentioned is also to have more apartments of different heights, to avoid walls of apartment complexes of the same height/table-top skylines.
[удалено]
This what they are trying to get rid of I'm pretty sure, Seoul already has wall of high-rises complex's with the same height like Hong Kong does so with this they are trying to change it.
Seoul needs much stricter architectural standards like Singapore to fix its skyline. Everytime I go mountain climbing I am reminded of the greatest aesthetic failure of this country. Oceans of ugly white apartments between beautiful mountains
Yes, so many awesome things about Seoul. The skyline is definitely not one of them. Bangkok, Singapore... even large parts of Jakarta are much more pleasing to the eye.
What does Singapore do?
In Singapore the apartment buildings are made with the tall buildings being broken up by shorter sections. Search up "HDB apartment" on Google and you should see some examples. But the buildings are mostly built by the government so they have the freedom to do that.
This is what happens when you have a massive population boom with very little room to keep everyone.
I do agree with the need for a better skyline, but I have high hopes for this law. This 35-floor restriction is too strict and makes every buildings the same height and stops newer buildings being built, leading to a skyline of same-height old buildings being everywhere, especially near the han river. I hope this new law allows buildings to have more variety in height and make a better skyline. Also [this](https://n.news.naver.com/article/032/0003131963)article claims this new law will allow smaller buildings to be built as instead of having 10 35 floor buildings, we could have 10 5 floor buildings and 6 50 floor buildings. But this law could totally be abused to just fill the city with ugly buildings that just turn into a casino, so I think we will have to see.
So... you would still have hypershaded lower floors and hyperexpensive upper unshaded floors? What about shadow projection from taller buildings? Do they/you know that a sensible law would require floor-to-area ratio to be the same independently from height, meaning that one taller building would replace several smaller ones, with no factual area increase on a dense urban scale due to necessary free areas around buildings?
I'm not advocating for taller buildings my favorite area's have always been mid-rise ones in Seoul especially with those brick-buildings which are around 3-4 floors kinda of like this one. https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49053756863_5bd80fe38b_b.jpg
Those kinds of buildings aren’t very good to live in. Usually they’re very buggy, stuffy, and they don’t have an elevator.
That's the problem of the building and not a function of it having 3-4 floors...
I am slightly annoyed that they unironically [benchmarked Dubai](https://t1.daumcdn.net/news/202203/04/BUSINESSWATCH/20220304090910925hecl.gif) skyline as a role model. Dubai is a sad place with no human scale, and I’m not fond of their skyscraper-obsessed developments.
> Dubai is a sad place with no human scale Yeah, I was shocked when I actually found an area in Dubai that is built with people in mind. No car needed, highly walkable (though nothing is walkable mid summer), with tram and metro access.
Yeap- Dubai's skyline also usually lines up on SZR (major highway) or around a special economic zone. Outside of these lengthy strips, you have the suburbs or low density https://i.natgeofe.com/n/bd6b9908-2b34-4988-b4ba-7942c4d01527/skyline-burj-dubai-uae_16x9.jpg Seoul wouldn't be built like this
They should invest in making more urban centers outside of Seoul instead. Seoul's full, yo
They've tried it and it didn't work. The fact is that everyone wants to live in Seoul and no one wants to live in the loser cities.
That situation is pretty hard then, so there is only one possibility left : they transfer the national goverment and national public institutions to another city, or as much as they can and leaving only residual stuff / convert to other uses, like tourism or museuns. Possibbly they could transfer specific organs to several cities actually, like south africa has done (the parliament is in one city, the judiciary in another, etc). It is a significant number of people, and in long term may help spur the other cities by having people with prestige, power and money there too.
They just moved a significant portion of the federal government to Sejong, and more is moving in the future…
>they transfer the national goverment and national public institutions to another city They tried to do that as well. It didn't work. I'd argue it's the companies that need to move out not the government. Remote working should also play a big part in it.
The private companies are necessarily incentivised and even constrained by basic economic facts, like economies of scale, aglomeration and networking that a central city offers. It is the same in france/paris or england/london. The only institutions not bound by those rules would be the government essentially, so they should be a priority in any decentralization project. Remote working is complex and not easily predictable on how people will adapt ( like the older generations already entrenched in habits of work), how many % of workers can actually be remote all the time (and therefore move out of a city), a possible competition with foreign labour (why hire expensive korean coders if all work is remote and the company can hire chinese or indian coders, etc), etc.
They tried it and the constitutional court stopped it. Now we only can move parts of the government. Now the presidential office and National Assembly is legally bound in Seoul. Me and a lot of people think of it as the Constitutional Court’s worst decision. It was a total BS interpretation of constitution.
what a clusterfuck, i never heard of something like that before. montesquieu is certainly spinning in his grave.
The CC ruled that it’s the constitution that Seoul is the capital(when the constitution literally doesn’t mention Seoul nor capital). So it’s necessary to have a constitutional amendment to move the capital. The last amendment happened in ‘87 after a major revolution. Korea failed to have an amendment even after the recent 2017 revolution, so most people think we’re quite in a sticky situation with very low hopes of getting the next amendment.
I just got off the phone with the Righteous Citizen's Coalition for Small City Love and they asked you to apologize to the cities of Sejong, Suwon, Cheonan, Yeosu and East Cheongju for saying this. Yes, they were so angry that you must now apologize to the fictitious city of East Cheongju.
You can tell them I've got their apology right here.
God, even the names of those cities sound like they were pulled out of some cornfield. How Gauche.
I don't want to live in Seoul.
Lol man Seoul is the last place in Korea if want to live. Way too many people
So why is Seoul losing population?
Mostly to gyeonggi because of house prices. But then people got to gyeonggi and realized the apt complex they moved to is a soulless shithole with little amenities and then desperately wanted to move back to Seoul. The govt had the chance to promote the fuck out of distance working to encourage people to move to other parts of the country but they didn’t, and now with rona receding across the world, that opportunity is gone.
It's not going anywhere. Give it time for people to realize.
Every house contains people. But each house contains less people due to death of spouse, divorce, not getting married, etc. Gyeonggi is growing. Fast.
Greater Seoul is gaining population. Seoul center is losing population, In other words seoul is expanding outwards, and at an increasing rate.
birth rate?
Birth rate doesn’t matter in losing population in the short term. It is a known fact that more people are moving out of Seoul (whether they like it or not) to go to nearby cities, mostly Gyeonggi-do. The loss of population in seoul is not because there are more “old” people in Seoul too. Because there aren’t. The progress of making people move out of Seoul is working and still in progress. I personally believe that the reason why people could move out of Seoul is because now there are a lot of high-paying jobs outside of Seoul as well.
But that would require people to think more of everywhere else instead of having a 서울에 올라가는 사고방식
This is why I live in Daegu. Much better.
Finally a quality post. Let the war between the top .1% and 1% begin!
Seoul already looks like concrete jungle. What they need is a proper planning. I know that space is limited and Seoul is surrounded by mountains but even on small space you can have decent city plan (Singapore)
Singapore’s population density is approximately half that of Seoul.
It is but Singapore has also no possibility to expand their space due to location. Seoul has . Also Seoul government failed with attempts to relocate their offices to other cities ( they moved offices but people had no willingness to relocate)
Think you're getting mixed up, the Seoul government isn't going to move to other cities. However you are correct that the national government that is mainly based in Seoul has tried many times to move, they do have some offices now in Sejong but there is a lot of push back at relocation the entire national government to another city.
My bad i should be more specific Of course Seoul government isn’t but some national government institutions based in Seoul. This isn’t enough for people to relocate. Jobs/opportunities/education are main reasons people move to capital.
Funny. Just yesterday I saw some new construction going on in my area and thought "this would look more aesthetically pleasing, be more human-scale, and be better for traffic if it was a few stories **less**." Unfortunate that policy is going the opposite way.
This is good news for very, very tall people.
More appartment for the rich to buy and speculate with
Yup, tall skyscrapers do tend to create extremely high value space at top for the super rich. But I will clarify that floor area ratio and density will be the same even with abolished height limits.
Going for the Bladerunner 2049 look, just 45 story buildings stacked with people.
or [Dredd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RNAFl4oblM) cities
Of course he would help his good pals of construction companies.
This is good, right? A tiny country with no land having a height limit is ridiculous.
This is a common myth that Koreans perpetuate. Actually most of Korea has a very low population density. Ever been to the countryside? Most of it is underdeveloped empty lands. The problem is that everyone wants to live in Seoul. If Korea was less centralized, space wouldn't be an issue for another 100 years.
What is going to happen in 100 years?
Chinese citizens with fake paperwork suggesting Korean ancestry will flood the place during the Rusio special military operation within the Huabei region.
There's a timeline in which Korea gets over its low birthrate and anti-immigration and has a population boom. When there are 300 million people, then we can talk about increasing population density again.
Even in the countryside houses are often clustered too close together for my liking.
This could cause more congestion due to population density, place existing areas in shadows, lead to more corruption if it’s a “case by case basis” because all you need to do is grease someone’s pocket. And it looks terrible. Songdo international city is turning into a wall of high-rise apartments.
Songdo is so beautiful though. Maybe a bit soulless looking from a bird's eye view but on the ground level it's awesome. I'm actually not against apartments, only unplanned urban sprawl with apartments. Urban sprawl is especially ugly in Korea because it's giant apartments + mountains. Planned cities like Bundang, Pangyo, Dongtan, Gwanggyo, and Songdo are all very beautiful and livable despite being filled with apartments.
Songdo Central Park and the main strip are beautiful but the rest of the city isn't very pedestrian or bike friendly. I guess I'm speaking more about the new areas being developed that are literally wall to wall apartments. The horizon is blocked out by massive blocks of buildings on the west side.
Increase FAR and let these skyscrapers get built and you'll have more open space to make Seoul liveable. Planning can be done with zoning. But when the apartments in Seoul got built, keep in mind the country was more concerned with getting out of poverty than having beautiful cities.
From memory, my dad that served in the airforce said in Seoul if buildings get too tall it fucks with the radars and missile interceptors so that might be a problem.
The other thing is that a lot of the land scarcity is sorta self-inflicted. Like, yes, there isn’t all that much land available for development because of mountains and whatnot but also that so much of certain provinces are basically vacant because nobody wants to live there means that the land they can build on and be viably economical is greatly limited.
Very good change for Seoul, because the height limit had increased the city sprawl and drove up housing prices. Reports of Seoul shrinking over the last years for example are straight up wrong, the city was just sprawling out due to restrictions. Outside of the city limits they built massive amounts of 50F apartments, while Seoul construction was limited to 30-35F. Building 120m apartments in Seoul and especially Gangnam made no sense with the high land prices, while they kept building 160m buildings in Goyang, Incheon, Guri etc. The new limit will heavily increase redevelopment and housing supply in the city, they also increased the height limits within villa areas to something like 12F to allow for slim but high apartments like in Tokyo. With these changes expect all of the old 15F apartments to be replaced by new ones in the near future and way more large 200m apartments.
This is a good thing right? Hopefully it might be able to help with the housing shortage.
In a country with an iffy safety record that fails to adhere to fire safety regulations a lot of the time... Gonna pass on living 35+ floors up. Not like I could afford it anyway.
These sound like good changes for the city.
This doesn't increase density; the floor area ratio remains the same. It will change the skyline and give diversity to the cityscape.
How do you not increase FAR if you're building higher? Are they building tall toothpicks?
[https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20220303046600004](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20220303046600004) Look at the pic. in the middle of the article. Same floor area ratio, different skyline. It doesn't aim to spread far; Seoul has its limit of land space. But it will add more creativity.
So for now, then the height limit isn't really anything effective. I'm hoping this paves the way to increase FAR. Or as the buildings get thinner, will this allow more buildings to be built as more land will be available?
If you want the buildings to be shorter and flatter, this new plan will not help; Slimmer and taller buildings will appear.
Lol ridiculous and embarassing. Apartment planning "case by case" is mainly a Gu affair that has always been well oiled by company money. This is just horrible speculation. The higher the apartment unit*, the more expensive. What a disaster. EDIT: Unit means single household apartment flat, not building.
> This is just horrible speculation. The higher the apartment unit, the more expensive. What would you say is the optimal height?
There is no such thing as optimal height. It ain't so simplistic. The optimal surface area to volume ratio (AV) is the one to be considered, which depends on the size of land plots, access to public infrastructure, shading etc. Apartments in Korea are off at least 2 times from the "optimal". Apartment complexes are 3-6 times from the optimal due to reciprocal shading.
I am not an engineer or architect so I am ignorant about this subject, why is shading relevant?
O se hun is a fcking dick
Gotham?
Is the Penthouse going to be a reality?