I have a soft spot for the horizon.
In Korea, it's rare to see land stretching flat all the way to the edge of the sky. Look up and there's a mountain. In the city, there's an apartment block in front of the mountain. So when I see an endless plain abroad, I find myself staring at it a little too long.
And this is the country where people started pouring into the cities.
The Most Practical Way to Fit Everyone In
Most of Korea is mountains, so there was never much flat land to build outward on. Starting with the first apartment complexes of the 1960s, Korean cities grew up instead of out. A French geographer once called Korea an "apartment republic," and this is the landscape behind that phrase.
Apartments weren't loved from the start. Cities were growing at breakneck speed, and apartments were the answer to fitting that many people in.
Then people lived in them and found them surprisingly convenient.
Not One Home, but a Small Village
Walk into a large apartment complex (a danji, in Korean) and you notice the complex before you notice any single home. There's a security desk, a playground, an underground parking garage. The bigger ones even have a small library. A few steps outside the gate, you hit convenience stores, cram schools, clinics, and cafés.
A house with a yard sounds lovely. Then you think about who shovels the snow, and the building management office suddenly looks pretty reassuring.
The Name Is the Address
Ask a Korean where they live, and they'll often answer with the name of their apartment complex rather than the neighborhood.
"Where do you live?"
"Hannam-dong."
"Oh, which apartment?"
The moment that second question lands, a home stops being an address and becomes a name. Brand names like Raemian, Xi, and Hillstate, which belong to Korea's big construction companies, are part of that name.
And here's the funny part: you can often guess roughly how well-off someone is just from the name. Complexes like Nine One Hannam in Hannam-dong, Galleria Foret in Seongsu-dong, and Signiel in Jamsil show up so often in celebrity gossip that even people who've never set foot inside know the names. I've never been inside any of them, and I know them too.
Recently, a friend moved into Raemian One Bailey in Banpo, Seoul. I went for a housewarming and took a walk around the complex. I saw quite a few middle and high schoolers, which meant their parents were probably in their forties. There were young mothers pushing strollers, too, of course.
Honestly, I was a little stunned. So many people, this young, living in a place like this?
How is that possible? I don't know. But I do know that in Korea, an apartment name alone can stir up a feeling like that. In Korea, an apartment is a home and a kind of business card. A funny, slightly sad one.
A Home, and Another Story
Apartments are standardized, so they're easy to compare, and it's easy to look up what a similar-sized unit in the same complex just sold for. That's how apartments became the most familiar kind of asset. I'd like to dig into that side next time, when we look at real estate and construction. Why Korea's housing ended up this way is Why Korea's job, after all.
So, Why Apartments?
Koreans didn't start out wanting to live in tall buildings. Cities grew fast on mountainous land, and apartments solved the problem. Then schools, transit, and conveniences gathered around them, until apartments became the most familiar container for a way of life, an identity, and an asset.
So when you look at Korea's skyline, the sheer number of apartments looks a little different. It's also a trace of a time when people, in a hurry, decided to live close together.
And I still want to see the horizon sometimes. A view with no mountains and no buildings, open all the way to the end, is a rare luxury in Korea.
Curious about Korea?
So am I.
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