Hyelim Jang is an architectural designer. She studied in Korea before moving to Tokyo to join Kengo Kuma & Associates. Since 2025, she has been working at Haeahn Architecture in Seoul.
I was born and raised in Seoul. But I’ve spent the last six years living in Tokyo, working as an architect. This is my attempt to reflect on how emotion and place become intertwined, and the debate about demolition versus adaptation.
Whose city is it, really?
One morning on my commute in Tokyo, I found myself pondering this question as I witnessed a daycare teacher pushing a cart filled with babies, one or two years old. They were standing wide-eyed, observing the world around them. The teacher strolled slowly with them through the neighbourhood.
At first, I thought the sight was adorable. But once I realized this scene played out every morning, it left a deep impression on me. Later, I learned that in Japan there’s a word for these “walk carts” used in early childhood education: sanpo-kā (散歩カー). That’s how routine and intentional they are.
(A group of toddlers being taken on a daily stroll through a Tokyo neighbourhood in a “sanpo-kā” walk cart, an early childhood practice that introduces children to the city through sensory experience.[1])
Though these children couldn’t yet walk, they were already learning the city with their eyes, ears and skin, feeling the wind as it passed, catching glimpses of sunlight filtering through leaves, and smelling the bread baking at the corner bakery. To them, these sensations were the world – their neighborhood. And I began to wonder, perhaps this kind of sensory experience is the foundation of our emotional bond
with a place, creating memories that linger even into adulthood,
making us care for the place we inhabit.
And then I thought, why do you hardly ever see such a scene in Seoul?
I had lived there for 25 years. Yet I could barely recall seeing
pre-schoolers out walking with their teachers.
It’s not that Seoul is a bad city for walking. In fact, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index (2021) ranked Seoul 8th in the world. It has low crime rates and excellent public transport and pedestrian infrastructure. So why is it that we rarely have the chance to absorb and embody our neighbourhood like this?
When do we begin to remember places?
And when does a city become an object of emotion?
Buildings as consumable products
This train of thought reminded me of a friend from Guatemala. He once told me he had no memories of playing in his neighbourhood as a child. Because of safety concerns, he was always confined within fenced areas, and the city existed only as something he glimpsed through the car window – like a visual object consumed from a distance. That story stayed with me for a long time. There’s a fundamental difference between seeing a city and experiencing it.
To experience a city means more than simply consuming it as a backdrop to your life. It involves encountering it up close, repeatedly, allowing attachments to form over time.
It’s the difference between passing through a place and dwelling in it. When these experiences accumulate, we start to perceive the city as a landscape of emotions.
But in many cities today, it’s become increasingly difficult for such feelings to take root. Buildings are being torn down faster than ever. Seoul has over 1,400 redevelopment and reconstruction projects in progress – an astonishing pace of urban transformation.[2] And this absence of time and familiarity is not just an emotional issue but a structural one, stemming from how we treat buildings not as vessels of memory, but as assets.
Compared to other countries, both Japan and South Korea exhibit relatively short average building lifespans. According to depreciation-based asset lifespan standards provided by Japan’s Ministry of Finance, the average lifespan of residential buildings is around 32.8 years, significantly shorter than 55 years
in the USA and 77 years in the UK.
In South Korea, a similar pattern emerges. Based on the National Tax Service’s asset depreciation table, the weighted average lifespan across all residential building types, including including reinforced concrete, steel frame, and timber, is approximately 28.1 years. [3] This places Korea among the countries with the shortest expected building lifespans in the world.
In Seoul, for instance, redevelopment has become increasingly standardized – old land parcels and street patterns are erased and replaced with uniform brand-name apartment complexes. As a result, the sensory continuity of the city is disrupted, and it becomes hard to even grasp what kind of neighborhood you really live in. It’s not simply that buildings are old but that they’re deemed no longer economically viable. Unless designated as heritage, many buildings – sometimes even entire blocks – are demolished before their spatial or emotional significance has had time to accumulate.
It’s as if buildings are consumed and discarded like disposable products
before they can absorb any sense of feeling.
What do we value?
This same logic of rapid consumption appears in how we treat building signage and facades. The problem isn’t signage itself but the fact that it’s often the only way for commercial buildings to express their identity. Flat façades force shop owners to overcompensate with excessive text. The city becomes visually overwhelming. Not rich in character but saturated with noise.
In Seoul, buildings under 30 years old are often demolished for being “too old.” Every year, thousands of new building permits are issued, and with them the city’s appearance changes constantly. New structures go up, old ones disappear,
and some return in altered form.
Amid this endless cycle, we may be losing the places we once knew. As of 2023, 49.5% of all buildings in the city were over 30 years old – a figure projected to reach 61.8% by 2024.[4] In other words, we are fast approaching a point where we can no longer postpone the question of demolish or repair. This is not a problem of the future, it’s already at our doorstep. And with every demolition, time, memory and emotion are erased along with the walls.
(A typical example of signage-driven architecture in many Korean cities[5] )
This is not merely a matter of planning and development policy, it’s about how we perceive and use the city. What do we actually value? In Seoul, many buildings are demolished before they’ve even had the chance to become meaningful. Of course, there are thoughtful efforts to create distinctive, context-sensitive architecture. But particularly in residential redevelopment, projects often prioritize construction brands and marketing strategies over local context. Of course, every city has its own rhythm of change, influenced by its economy and culture. But the tempo of emotional accumulation matters. Perhaps the real difference lies in how each city is experienced. And instead of erasing and rebuilding, we should look to models
that preserve and reinterpret what already exists.
Editing, not rewriting
One of the most compelling alternatives to large-scale demolition can be seen in Japan through the collaboration between the UR (the Urban Renaissance Agency) and MUJI. UR is a public housing agency, similar to Korea’s LH, responsible for managing aging residential complexes, while MUJI is best known as a minimalist lifestyle brand that designs everything from furniture to clothing.
In recent years, they have partnered to renovate older apartment
blocks instead of tearing them down.[6]
The renovations are light-handed: textures of old wall finishes are preserved, window proportions respected, and finishing materials reused. Units are updated but the broader community spaces – like plazas, shared kitchens, and even former residential units converted into shops – are carefully reprogrammed. In doing so, the complexes are turned into social hubs that reconnect with the surrounding neighbourhood.
What makes this approach special is not just its design restraint but the sensitivity to memory: they preserve the texture of walls, reuse materials, and invite residents to participate in defining what to keep and what to change. It’s a kind of editing, not rewriting. A renovation that acts like acupuncture, targeting only what’s necessary. This model not only extends the life of the buildings
but also revives a sense of community rooted in place.
It challenges us all to realise that demolition may sometimes be necessary. But before tearing something down, we should always ask: Can this be reused or reimagined?
And beyond adapting what already exists, we should rethink how we build from the ground up. As commercial buildings grow more flat, generic and dependent on signage for some kind of identity, we may need to explore design strategies that resist this trend altogether – strategies that embed identity into the architecture itself and ensure that buildings stay meaningful over time.
Seoul’s commercial architecture is often dominated by signs – bright, layered, constantly changing. To some, this might feel dynamic. But for many residents, it creates visual fatigue.[7] The problem isn’t signage itself, but how it’s treated: disposable, replaceable, detached from the building. Architecture becomes a blank shell. Flat, neutral, designed to accommodate turnover rather than character.
This tendency reflects South Korea’s fast-paced consumer culture. Stores change hands quickly, along with their signs, interiors, and façades. To support this cycle, buildings are designed without distinctive personality so that any brand can move in effortlessly. It’s efficient for developers but it leaves behind a forgettable urban fabric where emotion and memory have no room to settle.
Importantly, this is not just a design issue, it’s also a regulatory one. The ability to create varied and expressive façades often depends on building codes, zoning ordinances, and urban design guidelines. Without supportive policies that allow architectural individuality – like flexible setback rules, signage integration standards, or incentives for design diversity – buildings remain constrained to generic formats. The truth is that well-crafted regulation can play
a role in nurturing architectural character across a city.
And yet, not every project follows this logic. Sounds Hannam, for example, offers a rare alternative. By incorporating generous setbacks and spatial thresholds – steps, terraces, and in-between zones – it creates space for individuality. Retailers can place benches, plants, or displays that reflect their character, spilling gently into the street. Here, identity emerges not from signs but from how people inhabit the space.
(A view of Sounds Hannam, where articulated façades and spatial setbacks create opportunities for individuality, expression, and interaction- offering an alternative to Seoul’s typical flat commercial frontages.[8])
This kind of architecture is a quiet resistance to sameness. It shows us that
buildings can be designed not just for flexibility but for memory.
Emotional layers
Ultimately, when we ask whether to demolish or preserve,
we are also asking how do we build emotional layers into the city?
A city is not defined by buildings but by the lives that fill them. By the stories, routines, and time that slowly accumulate within. Architecture must be capable of capturing these traces and the debate between demolition and adaptation finally comes down to an even deeper question: Was this place ever allowed to hold memory?
So we need to ask ourselves, what kind of city do we want to build? If buildings can hold emotion, if streets can collect time, and if experiences can resist erasure, then we should reconsider how we build from the start.
Are we designing buildings that will last—not just physically but emotionally?
Are we creating places where memory can take root rather than
constantly resetting the urban landscape?
There are no definitive answers. Demolition isn’t wrong and adaptation right. It isn’t that simple. The real answer starts not with technical insight but with a question. How much emotional value are we building into this city?
Because in the end, emotion creates belonging. And memories are the most
enduring form of preservation a city can have.
[1] https://hoiku-catalog.com/blog/equipment/保育園のお散歩カート
[2] Seoul Metropolitan Government, Redevelopment and Reconstruction Project Statistics, Seoul Open Data Plaza, 2025. Available at: https://data.seoul.go.kr/dataList/OA-2253/S/1/datasetView.do
[3] The average useful life of residential buildings in Korea is approximately 28 years, based on the asset depreciation schedule provided by the National Tax Service of Korea. Source: National Tax Service of Korea, Table of Asset Useful Life (감가상각자산의 내용연수표), accessed via Korea Law Information Center.
[4] Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 2040 Seoul Plan (2040 서울도시기본계획), 2023, p.31.
[5] Image Source: Photo by the author.
[6] https://www.muji.net/ie/mujiur/
[7] The Seoul Metropolitan Government has made several attempts to address this issue, including the Outdoor Advertisement Guidelines introduced in 2008 and the more recent Signage Design Palette project, which aims to bring visual coherence to urban signage.