Seoul. It’s an economic powerhouse, and renowned
for its food, culture, and NewJeans. But we’re not here to talk about Seoul,
we’re here to talk about Sejong City: the new guy replacing Seoul as South Korea’s
administrative capital. Like Seoul, Sejong has an economy, and I’m
sure at least some of their jeans are new. But if you’ve never heard of it before,
it’s probably because it was just a bunch of peach farms until the South Korean government
whipped it up into a capital city about a decade ago. But how did they do that? And why? Our journey begins on the presidential campaign
trail in 2002. At this point, things have been going pretty
well in South Korea for a while: they’ve hosted the Olympics, they got into the UN,
and the GDP’s as high as it’s ever been. And as such, people are starting to think
less about making the country richer, and more about making sure everyone gets a slice
of the national money pie. Because, the money pie is very much in Seoul. The Seoul Capital Area—comprising the city
itself, plus Incheon and the Gyeonggi Province—has just under half of the whole country’s population
on under 12% of its land, and the income gap between there and everywhere else is widening. So out on the campaign trail, candidate Roh
Moo-hyun floats a big idea: take a bunch of the people and jobs in Seoul, and push them
somewhere else. Because, come on, Seoul has enough going on
without the government kicking around. Sharing is caring, right? So when Roh gets elected, he sets his big
move-the-government plan in motion. But not everyone’s into it. It’ll disrupt a lot of people’s lives,
plus there are certain operational conveniences that come from having the country’s financial,
cultural, and administrative capitals in the same place. One not-into-it party, namely the oppositional
Grand National Party, filed a complaint with the Korean Constitutional Court, which ruled
in 2004 that Seoul’s capital status was so universally understood that it was part
of the “unwritten and customary constitution.” And sure, an “unwritten and customary constitution”
is, by definition, nothing, but turns out robe guys can say whatever. So now the government has three options: get
a written Constitutional amendment passed to call Sejong the capital, ditch Sejong entirely,
or adjust their plans a bit. They did the last one. Under the new plan, Sejong would be the administrative
capital, home to most of the government’s ministries, while leaving a few back in Seoul,
along with the presidential residence and the legislature. Roh’s term ended in 2008, and South Korea
got a new president, who happened to have been Seoul’s mayor and very anti-Sejong. He briefly tried to rally people around sending
companies like Samsung to Sejong instead of the government, but that was even less popular,
so they kept going with the revised plan from Roh’s administration, and work began in
earnest in 2011. The site chosen for Sejong was here, a rural
spot in the central Chungcheong Province, conveniently located between Seoul, Busan,
and Gwangju. Before it got Extreme Home Makeover’ed,
it was called Yeongi and was home to just eighty thousand people—about as many as
Parma, Ohio. And if you’re not familiar with Parma, Ohio…
exactly. To develop Sejong, they flattened out the
hills, laid down a grid system for the streets, stood up some shiny high-rise apartments,
and built the office building that would draw everyone there: the Government Complex Sejong,
a roughly two-mile or 3.2 kilometer-long building snake covering more acreage than Disneyland. By the time the government started moving
ministries there in 2012, the new city had restaurants, schools, and a grocery store,
as well as high-tech amenities like automatic trash collection, zero-waste food disposal,
EV charging, CCTV security, and more. And if that makes you think “Wow, they thought
of everything!” Well, not quite. Because young Sejong was missing some stuff
people like, such as a movie theater, and a museum, and a hospital. The transit system was also pretty bad—the
nearest high speed rail station is a 25 minute drive away, and Sejong City doesn’t have
its own subway or tram. It does have bus rapid transit, but it’s
not great—the routes have never been good enough, nor the buses frequent enough, to
meaningfully pull people away from cars. Which is just baffling to me, because as far
as I’m concerned, the whole point of building a city from scratch is the electric thrill
of throwing down train lines willy-nilly before anyone stops you. Today, Sejong’s bus system only provides
seven percent of the city’s transportation, less than half the average for a metropolitan
city in South Korea. So that’s not great. As the government moved itself to Sejong,
it didn’t exactly siphon population away from Seoul the way they’d hoped. In fact, many workers just commuted there
from Seoul, even though weekday rush hour commute from, let’s say, the presidential
residence in Seoul to the Government Complex Sejong takes over two hours. But to many government workers, it’s worth
it to stay in Seoul rather than move somewhere that’s kind of, well… Seoul-less. In fact, as Sejong’s grown, it’s pulled
a lot of its population from around its own province, rather than from Seoul itself. Think about it this way: if your banger house
party’s getting a little crowded and running out of snacks, you don’t just start a second,
worse party at another house in hopes people will leave. You order a pizza, open up some bedrooms,
and move the furniture to make space. Because the truth is, nobody wants to leave
a good party—they just hope other people will. And look, it’s not a perfect metaphor for
the Seoul/Sejong situation, but in fairness, I don’t get invited to a lot of parties,
and in both the party situation and the city one, the solution is more housing. But despite all the controversies and bad-vibes
accusations, South Korea is still moving forward on making Sejong their administrative capital,
and it’s not even going that badly. They’ve opened up libraries, a stadium,
a nice park, and more shopping. In 2020, they hit their two hundred thousand-person
population target, and are heading towards a goal of five hundred thousand by 2030. It’s also made itself a great place to raise
kids, with daycare centers in each apartment complex, cash rewards worth over a thousand
dollars for each kid you have, and highly subsidized caregiver support for new parents. And they’re making the bus free, so that’s
nice. In all, Sejong is walking in the footsteps
of other purpose-built capital cities before it: joining Canberra, Australia and Brasilia,
Brazil on the list of “places where the most interesting thing about them is that
they’re the capital instead of somewhere more interesting.” Well that, and the fact that it was built
to move people away from Seoul, and yet both cities have added tons of people since this
whole twenty billion dollar project started. Oh well! The daycare thing is cool! So, if you made it to the end of this video,
I’m gonna make two assumptions about you. One: you have amazing taste. And, two: you like—or can at least tolerate—my
voice explaining random stuff to you. And if either of those things are the case,
then you should come join us on Nebula. For those of you out of the loop, Nebula is
an independent, educational streaming service that I started with some of my creator friends. We wanted a place where we could develop and
share the sort of big, exciting, and risky projects that wouldn’t work on YouTube. It was the incubator for Jet Lag: The Game,
where we developed an exclusive pilot season called Crime Spree to test out the concept
before bringing it to YouTube. It’s also where I publish longer passion
projects of mine, like our documentary about the remote airport of Saint Helena or our
new show about the logistics of things like commercial fishing or search & rescue. And it’s home to a rapidly-growing list
of other creators like Real Engineering, Not Just Bikes, PhilosophyTube, and Johnny Harris,
all of whom are developing their own slate of amazing original content just for Nebula. Signing up for Nebula not only gets you access
to this massive library of content, but it’s also a great way to support independent creators
like myself and all of these other folks scrolling by—all you need to do is go to Nebula.tv/HAI
and you’ll even get 40% off an annual plan which brings the monthly cost down to under
three dollars a month.
