Green roof tops Daum Communications / Ilshin Building, Seoul, Korea

Seoul is not known for it eco-friendly building designs, but a couple of buildings I encountered recently, which have significant green roofs, have made me thinks that there may be hope yet for this city.

A Green roof according the Wikipedia:

A green roof is a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and soil, or a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane. This does not refer to roofs which are merely colored green, as with green roof shingles.

The most significant benefit of green roofs are:

• Reduces cooling cost in the summer
• Reduces the city’s average temperature
• Reduces stormwater run off

The best known green roofs are Chicago City Hall, The GAP Headquarters and Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant.

Click image to view slideshow

Yesterday I visited the new offices of Daum Communications, the distant-second-but-nicer-place-to-work Korean portal site (#1 is Naver.com). It is housed in the newly completed Ilshin building in Hannam-dong which is also the home to the Italian embassy. On the roof of the building I was surprised to discover a green roof. The chairman/CEO of Ilshin Spinning, Kim Young Ho, the building’s owner, is no stranger to design and architecture, having graduated with an architecture degree from Pratt in NY, and served on the board of the Korean Institute of Architects and also know for his formidable modern art collection. The anecdote recounted by one of the Daum staff was that he delayed the opening of the staff cafeteria on the 2nd floor of the this building because he was not happy with the design of trays.

Click image to view slideshow

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at Ewha Womans University (Note: “Womans” is not a misspelling), one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Korea. I was very impressed by their recently completed the Ewha Campus Complex, which was designed by French architect, Dominique Perrault. The building itself unnoticeable at first glance since it is half buried in the ground, but this makes for an impressive green roof.

Dongdaemoon Design Plaza
(photo: archiCentral.com)

Ground was recently broken for Dongdaemun Design Plaza, which replaces the aging Dongdaemoon Sports Complex. The London-based architect Zaha Hadid was awarded the commission following an international competition. The most prominent feature of the design is its fluid surface green roof that weaves and connects the various part of the design.

F(ourth) floor is 4th floor in Korea

No 13th floor (photo credit: eggrollstan)

The 4th floor in Korea has the same status as the 13th floor does in the US.

The pronunciation for “4″ is “sa” which is the same as the Chinese character for “death”, hence the “F” (for Fourth) instead of “4″ in elevators.

Quite silly really.

iTunes U

Republished from UXforGood.org.

Recently I’ve participated in brainstorming session for a premier university in Korea on how to make its lectures available online.

Ever since MIT started offering its lectures through its OpenCourseWare (website) initiative in late 2002, many higher education institutions have been offering lectures online through various channels: YouTube and iTunes just to name the obvious.

The YouTube Effect

The explosive popularity of sharing sites such as YouTube seems to have radically changes the way we consume media.

Part of the popularity of YouTube lies in the ease in which you can “take” video, hosted on YouTube, and embed it on your site. This is no trivial change. Previously content was a guarded commodity. Some readers my remember that in the early days of the internet, “deep linking” (linking to a page other than the homepage) was a controversial issue, which seems almost comical in today’s internet environment. Others devised ways of keeping users on their website as long as possible, and only allowed consumption of their content on the site.

With the rise of user-generated content, and the legal framework that Creative Commons affords in terms of copyright protection, the line between between the ownership/authorship of content hosted on such content sharing sites as Youtube, Flickr, SlideShare and to some degree digg are being blurred.

YouTube really doesn’t distinguish between the content being on their site or your site. This is important in that it recognizes that is is impossible to neatly categorize the content and it is transferring that burden of organization, categorization and contextualization of the content to users themselves. YouTube has so much content that it cannot (and does not) predict how users will use the content on its site. They leave it up to the users to contextualize it by embedding in their sites. A funny video of a cat may be just cute entertainment on someone’s personal site, whereas it could be a serious example of feline behavior on an academic site. YouTube is saying, we provide you easy access to the content, you provide the context.

David Weinberger writes a whole book on this issue. In Everything is Miscellaneous he writes:

We are building an ever-growing pile of smart leaves that we can organize as we need to at any one moment. Some ways of organizing it – of finding meaning in it – will be grassroots; some will be official. Some will apply to small groups; some will engender large groups; some will subvert established groups. Some will be funny; some will be tragic. But it will be the users who decide what the leaves mean.

Allowing users to take the content is supremely smart for YouTube in that it significantly increases distribution and now that they have figured out a way to advertise within the video frame, a greater source of advertising income.

TED is using this exact model for spreading its ideas.

Shifting role of universities

Back to universities. For universities this climate of content sharing sets up a dilemma.

Universities as an institution have long been in the business of guarding its knowledge and the authors of its knowledge. Whenever you partner with a university the intellectual property contracts their legal department send you is a strong indication of how serious they are about their knowledge. It’s apparent that some knowledge needs to be protected, such as patents, processes and original works. But in this current age, being too strict about protecting knowledge has the negative effects. Universities are not measured in terms of how many books their libraries house but how effective they are in encouraging, facilitating and protecting open discourse, thought leadership and, more so than ever, social responsibility.

Liz Coleman, the president of Bennington College in her inspiring presentation at TED (Feb 2009), A call to reinvent liberal arts education, expresses the urgency of our higher education institutions to be more open, interconnected and socially responsible:

The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus. Learning more and more about less and less. This, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. Lest you think I exaggerate, Here are the beginnings of the A-B-Cs of anthropology. As one moves up the ladder, values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion. Questions such as “What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making?” are treated with more and more skepticism and move off the table.

To share or not to share?

When one thinks about how to describe the premier universities in Korea, words such as exclusivity, high-walled, academic, authoritative and conservative come to mind. This is clash with the values of the internet that shout social, communal, accessible and collaborative.

The motivation behind a premier university in Korea sharing its lectures online seems may seem to be a little more self-serving than socially inspiring: To reinforce it branding and positioning; to create a business model for paid exclusive content; and to provide some public service.

Whatever the motivation, I believe that once the door to access is opened up, it may unintentionally trigger a change that may be irreversible.

—

Update: Fast Company: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education is worth reading on this issue.

It even stipulates that the students are only required to pay back the loan after they find employment over a maximum 25 years. It also supports living expenses.

More detailed article on 헤럴드 경제 (sorry, in Korean) says that the conditions of the loan are:

취업을 못해 일정수준 이상의 소득을 올리지 못하면 상환 의무도 없어진다.
수혜 대상은 기초수급자 및 소득 1~7분위(연간 가구소득 인정액 4839만원 이하)에 속하는 가정의 대학생으로 평균 성적이 C학점 이상이어야 한다. 고소득층인 8~10분위 가정은 기존의 대출 방식을 적용받는다. 특히 1인당 대출 한도액(현행 대학 4년간 최대 4000만원까지)을 없애 연간 등록금 소요액 전액과 생활비 연 200만원을 대출받을 수 있게 된다. 생활비는 기초생활수급자에게는 무상으로, 소득 1~7분위는 소득에 따라 무이자 또는 정상 대출방식으로 지원된다.

Very encouraging indeed. This does remove some of the barriers the poor students had to accessing higher education and bettering their lives.

Still remaining is how to make inroads into the issue of supporting poor kids while they are in school and bridging the gap between them and kids who get private extra-curricular education (사교육).

Update 2009-08-24
Some opposing opinions about the new loans. (in Korean)

The article claims:
- If you postpone repayment after graduating, you still get charged interest;
- Given the current employment market, most graduates will not be able to afford the repayment schedule;
- Loans mean that grants given to low-income students will reduced;
- This may be grounds for raising tuition, since you payback after you graduate;
- For the government providing the loans, this is another long-term, low-risk way of financially exploiting parents and students.

A couple of years ago I asked a friend in Korea with a single child if he considered having more kids. He told me that he wanted to give the best for his son, and he couldn’t really afford the education cost of a second child. He told me a his son was taking 3 classes outside school and that it cost him about 1/3 of his then salary.

Like many countries, the Korean education system is biased towards create elite member of its society. This has been historically true. In ancient Korea, there was the state examination called Gwageo (??). Its purpose was to select officials for government office and shortest route to achieving aristocratic status. In modern Korea, many still think that the purpose of the educational systems is to generate an educated elite of administrators for the high public office through Goshi (??) examinations and university professors. This is really not surprising given that it is these administrators and professors who create education policy and systems.

One is lead to ask, what should the purpose of public education be? To send kids to a good college? To land a high paying job? To marry into a good family? Then perpetuate this cycle? It does seem like the purpose of education is a self-serving cycle without real social benefits or meaning but to advance economic gain and social tenure for the few and the elite.

Sir Ken Robinson, in his address at TED 2006, puts it more elegantly:

Education is supposed to take us into the future we can’t grasp… If you were to visit education as an alien and ask, what is public education for, you would have to conclude if you look at the output, the purpose of public education is to produce university professors. The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant and creative individuals think they are not.

This situation in Korea is compounded by the fact that the education-crazed population is not satisfied with public education alone and takes matters into its own hands, investing an absurd amount of time and money is Sa-kyo-yuk (???) or “private education” which consists of carting kids off to Hakwon (??) or educational institutions to get that extra one-up on English, math, Taekwondo, arts or public speaking.

It seems that only the affluent or the crazy could afford to keep up this kind of frenzy. And so many do.

In this kind of climate, schools serve only to invest in those who excel. They have limited resources, demanding parents and an evaluation system that only looks at the grades as it measure of success. Malcolm Gladwell in his latest book Outliers call this phenomenon, the Matthew Effect, coined by sociologist Robert Merton who eluded to the verse in the Bible, Matthew 25:29: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given all kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.

He goes on to point out that in fact kids from poor families work as well as students from affluent families during the academic year, however they start to fall back as a result of laying fallow during the long summer breaks, when rich kids go to camps or received any additional mind-stimulating education.

The Cycle of Poverty²

So what about the rest that do not fall into the academic elite? What about those below average? What about those who do not have the economic means to have that extra education?

The poor remain poor because they are not given the opportunity to generate the escape velocity to break away from the gravity of poverty. It takes extraordinary effort for the poor. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 talks to length about this in his book, Creating a World without Poverty

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, the poor are a victim of circumstance. In Korea this is more true, given the climate of extra education and the breakneck pace of classes and subjects that are covered. Teachers simply do not have the time for those kids who fall behind. They are also not given any incentive to bring those below average kids up, since they are evaluated on how many kids do well in exams.

Silo’ed Efforts

So what to do? Where to break this cycle of poverty in education? How do we give poor kids a fair shot at escaping poverty? This seems to be a two-part problem:

1. From the beginning and all the way through public education, provide poor kids some of the guidance, attention and extra-education that their more affluent classmates get;
2. Once they have made it through the public education system, provide them with an opportunity to attend college.

On the public education side, there commendable efforts such as We Start, a program run by Joongang Ilbo, one of the major daily newspapers in Korea, which provide after-school programs for poor kids. It seeks to provide a community-based educational, health and mentoring support for underprivileged kids. But the program only has a limited reach and it stops when the kids graduate primary school (1-6 grade).

I am sure there are the foundations and non-profits working to help the poor students through public education. But all have the limitations in funding so their enterprise have limited reach and scalability.

Another issue is the availability of teachers for the kids. These non-profits mostly rely on volunteer teachers to help poor kids, and here again is a limited supply.

On the college side, if they are lucky they gain access to various scholarships offered by the government, colleges, foundations and religious organizations. But these are not easy to come by, not centrally or systematically organized, and too few.

For those who do not get a scholarship there are for-profit educational loan institutions. Most of them provide inflexible 6 month to 5 year loans. These obviously serve to profit from their enterprise and do not cater to special the needs of the poor students. I am sure they would prefer to provide loans to middle/upper class students who can pay back their loans on time.

An Integrated Approach

It would seem that the issues mentioned above can be approached an integrated (and possibly financially sustainable) way:

1. Offer “patient” loans to college students from poor families.
2. Allow these students to pay back some of their loan by working as teacher for the kids in public education.
3. Make poor families pay a small amount to commit their kids to this extra education help.

These principles can be the basis of establishing a social business, which could be scalable and replicable.

Loans Instead of Scholarships³

For poor college students, loans and not scholarships are good for many reasons:

It is not a free lunch. It gives kids who have lived most of their lives on a survival instinct to make most of their instinct to find a creative ways to pay back their loans, either during the school year or after they graduate. The whole giving them the fishing rod and not the fish thing.
It creates a sustainable model. Funds are replenished as students graduate and pay back their loans. These funds will be available to the next student.
It encourages independence. They studied hard and overcame odds to get this far. It reinforces their self-confidence. Handouts breed dependence.

The loans are must be targeted and only be offered to those who mean a certain poverty criteria. Yunus is careful to point out that social businesses should not benefit the non-poor. Loan recipients should consistently be engaged and loan conditions and terms adjusted to meet the needs of each student. If they have an opportunity to pay it off quickly, then they should be encouraged to do so. If they fall behind, then the loan should be restructured. Defaulting is not an option. Repayment plans should be strucutred so that they only start paying once they are employed and for a couple of year, no interest is applied.

Korean college education is still relatively cheap compared to US schools. A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that the recent graduate with an average paying job out of college dedicates 10% of his/her salary to repayment, they should be able to complete payment in about 8 years.⁴

Community Component

The loan recipients should be offered the employment during the school year or during summer and winter breaks to repay part of their loans through mentoring of disadvantaged kids in poor neighborhoods. Ideally they would return to their own neighborhoods and communities. Here a matching grant from foundations or corporate sponsorship maybe be helpful.

Students in upper years can also be offered jobs administering the loan program, mentoring students new to the system so that the program has a strong community aspect.

Many religious groups and local communities offer and maintain scholarships for disadvantaged kids within their communities. These group could “bank” their funds in the loan and offer it to their students. A loan rather than a scholarship gives both the group/community and students a reason for them to stay engaged. You can walk away with a scholarship, but you are tied to a loan. The group/community should provide as many additional opportunities for the students to repay their loans through community service and mentoring to kids who are in similar situations as they were just a couple of years ago.

The “Patient” Loan Institution

A “patient” loan institution of this sort does not currently exist, but it would have many benefits:

• Transparency
• Better reach
• Efficient management / economies of scale
• Effectiveness of loan process
• Stability and patient capital
• Success metrics tracking and improvement in products and services over time
• Institutional knowledge
• Credibility through branding
• Accommodation of individual donors and institutional donors

Challenges Ahead

Obviously these are just untested thoughts at this point. There are many foreseeable challenges:

• Will this model be a sustainable social business?
• Should this business be a non-profit or a for-profit enterprise?
• Can a loan institution of this kind be created? What is the legal framework that it needs to operate under?
• What would be the governance structure for an business of this kind?
• How to initially fund this social business?
• How to form meaningful partnerships with schools, universities, foundations, non-profits and religious groups to support this effort?

I also believe strongly that if this model is indeed sustainable, scaleable and (socially and economically) profitable that special provision for special education students who can volunteer/help kids with disabilities. These kids are one of the most stigmatized, abused and neglected in Korean society. If the measure of a mature society is how well it takes care of those who cannot take care of themselves, Korea ranks pretty low, looking at the way it look upon and treats it disabled.

—

Updates

2009-06-05
Similar to my proposal, there was an article in the New York Times I�m Going to Harvard. Will You Sponsor Me?, about UniThrive.org which provides a service where alumni can give a loan to students in financial need. As of writing the service is only limited to Harvard students and alumni with plans for other schools. It also not limited to students from poor families. It’s the idea of providing interest free loans to students is worth comparing. The loans are limited to $2,000 and are interest free, and repaid within 5 year after graduation. The article also mentions that kiva.org a crowd-sourced microfinance site will soon be offering loans in the U.S., planning eventually to expand to student loans.

—

Footnotes

1. This post came from the result of many conversations with my father who is a volunteer English teacher for the We Start program. Two books I read recently further shaped my thinking:

• Muhammad Yunus, Creating a world without poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
• Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

I am pretty sure that many people (smarter than I) have already though of this idea and have developed much further than what I write here. If so I’d love to hear about their work.

2. There are many ways to break the cycle of poverty. Microfinance has been proven to be a very powerful one. I believe upward mobility through education is another.

3. I have to say that by knowledge of banking, student loans, scholarships etc. are very limited. None of these ideas have been tested in any way. God is in the details. The challenge is working out the details, refining the ideas and testing them.

4. The assumptions for this calculation are: 5 million won / year for tuition, 20 million won salary with 10% increase per year based on the following information sources:

• Comparison of tuition fees in Korea: A quick glance a the list show a range of 4.5 – 5.5 Million won per year. I just took 5 million.
• Salaries out of 4 year college: Average salary for a 4 year college graduate is about 27 Million won in 2007. I just took 20 million for simplicity.

Koreans paying their last respects before motorcade leaves Seoul. (Photo credit: ohmynews.com)

Former president of Korea Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2007) died of severe head injuries suffered in a suicide attempt on May 23. Today (May 29) saw his national funeral and cremation. Thousands gathered in the city center to pay their last respects.

I was no supporter of the late President. I didn’t even vote for him since I was in the States at that time. But his death shocked me and truly saddened me.

I’ll say upfront that I do not condone suicide for any reason. But his death does reveal some ugly truths and disturbing trend about Korean society: it has consistently went after its leaders�with a vengeance�after they leave office.

• Park Jung-hee (1963-79): We all know his term ended in his assassination. I actually remember crying. I was 10 at the time.
• Chun Doo-hwan (1980-88): Indicted for embezzlement, corruption and abuse of power. In 1996, he was convicted and sentenced to death for treason and mutiny in his rise to power. Later pardoned
• Roh Tae-woo (1988-93): In 1996, along with president Chun Doo-hwan, for corruption, indicted treason and mutiny. His sentence of 22 1/2 years in prison was later pardoned.
• Kim Young-sam (1993-98): Ironically Kim who lead the anti-corruption investigations into this two successors, and in an attempt to reform powerful politically-tied Chaebols, found himself in a corruption scandal that implicated his son.
• Kim Dae-jung (1993-2003): Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2000. He was later determined to have arranged his much publicized meeting with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, only after an alleged payment (read: bribe) of $500 million. His second son also served 3 1/2 years in prison on charges of bribery.
• Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008): He was subject to public humiliation as his immediate family and his closest aides were investigated for corruption and bribery.

Let’s put aside for a moment whether justice should be served at any cost. At the heart of the matter is the close link between business interest and political interest. This is what Korea is, right now. The two seems to have a hard time being separated. It’s also obvious media cannot be trusted given its overt political inclinations and biassed reporting. Anyone who goes after the establishment suffers either at the hands of the establishment itself or at the hand of their successors.

Given enough scrutiny and tenacious will to defame and reduce one’s political foe’s influence, there will always emerge something where you can hook the moral and political liability on. Nobody is perfect. Least of all Korean leaders.

Does Korean politics have a heart or the stomach for a forward-thinking visionary leader? No wonder some pine for president Park’s dictatorship years, which revisionist history claims was what laid the foundations for Korea’s incredible economic growth. Ask my father-in-law who worked for the Economic Planning Board, the highest government authority on economic matters, he will tell you it was some smart economic policy coupled with a lot of luck.

Sign reads: “We are deeply sorry for not protecting you”. (Photo credit: ohmynews.com)

In her emotional speech at the funeral, Han Myung-suk, Roh’s Prime Minister apologized for not being able to protect the President from such an ending. This is a sentiment that was felt by the millions who came to pay their last respects across the nation at official and makeshift memorials. Those who were not supporters during his presidency, and those even despite being his supporters who were disappointed at Roh by this recent scandal turned out, tearful, resentful, and remorseful at the state of the nation and at not being able to have done more to protect the one they once believed in.

Maybe the self-proclaimed “Foolish President” Roh needed a “Chaney”. Someone who will ruthlessly defend and dog political foes so that the president can be protected, regardless of the fact that the administration’s policies may be misguided. In some way this is why Obama needs Biden. Someone who can navigate the rough and tumble waters of politics while he leads.

The question at the end of the day is can this unfortunate and deeply disturbing event be a catalyst for change? Can Korea’s politics be more focussed on being forward-looking than political in-fighting? Can it be more independent of business-interests? Can Korean politics have a strong social reform agenda equal to its economic growth agenda? Can Korea create socially-driven businesses as much as greed-driven businesses? Can Korea create vehicles for the civil sector to express and operate to initiate change? I truly hope so.

In his book “The Culture Code”, cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille claims that a culture “grows up” only after killing its king. I’m not sure if I agree with this, but let’s hope that this week’s painful lessons and needless death shall help the Korean political system wake-up, and mature a bit more.

Autumn in Namhan-San-Seong

Autumn is by far the most spectacular season in Korea, in my opinion. Since the 70% of Korea is mountainous, the transformation of color is quite dramatic. These photos were taken in Namhan-San-Seong Park, located about half-an-hour from Bundang where I live.

Growing up in Korea, going to visit Namhan-San-Seong always seemed to entail a long road trip to me, but I was shocked to see how close it had become. Seoul has expanded quite rapidly to the South since I last visited, and I now I find Namhan-San-Seong is actually between where I live, Bundang and Seoul itself.

My little ones are oblivious to these memories of Seoul’s past and present of course. As much as they seem permanent, cities do change. Both in our memory and physically.

More photos of Namhan-San-Seong in my Flickr set.

JINA Architects

I formally started working at JINA Architects on September 1, as an Associate Partner.

After a 9 year hiatus, I am back in architecture. Well not quite. It’s urbanism. JINA Architects is a more than a design studio. It’s currently has about 140 staff, a huge growth from having just over 30 a decade ago. Under the management of Eliot Bu (blog / mostly in Korean), it has transformed from just another architecture studio, doing mostly commercial and academic buildings, to now consulting for local and international government clients on urban design issues.

The key to its success? Design Knowledge. With any consulting practice, the key is consolidating and managing knowledge. In the case of JINA, knowledge enables the analysis of legal codes and policy that govern urban design practice. Corporations and architectural practices see the building code as a constraint they have to “deal with”. The government see the building code as a tool for regulating the quantity and quality development. And hence the lack of communication between the two. When you have a deep knowledge of codes then you can act as a medium between the two seemingly opposing entities, and the role that JINA has carved out for itself.

In the US and Europe, non-profits function to collect, analyze data and consolidate knowledge. These non-profits provide politically neutral facts that both businesses and policy makers have equal access to. Korea hasn’t reached that stage yet, with knowledge being held in closed government institution or corporate think tanks. Yet, this is one of the ultimate goals of JINA – to create a non-profit: to collect, analyze and provide access to urban design knowledge and through it to influence the quality of life and in turn, and as corny as it sounds, to change the world.

What is my role in all this? Eliot invited me to join JINA to head the project to develop the Master Urban Plan for the Expanded Hanoi Capital which they were finally officially awarded Sept 23.

Am I qualified? My lack of urban design experience surely would pose a handicap. In the words of Eliot, this is the exact reason I was offered the job, apparently. Urbanism is more than engineering and construction. It’s about the lives of people and hence more infinitely complex, and in dire need of a new approach. He wanted an outsider, untainted by ingrained urban design practices to seek a new approach that incorporates the wide range of expertise that have typically been left out.

For the Hanoi project we have experts in energy policy, international affairs, marketing, sustainability, urban sociology, cultural studies, clean energy development, Vietnam legal system in addition to local experts providing their perspective on how a city should be developed.

This a new approach to urbanism that hasn’t been attempted before and I am caught between fear and dread and shear excitement and optimism that I have been lucky enough to have been offered the opportunity to participate in such a history event of developing a master plan for a city.

We will be changing the lives of the millions in Hanoi. And I know already that Hanoi is a city that will change my life. I have to believe it is a calling, and I am humbled.

—

I won’t be moving to Vietnam as the title might suggest. But I will be making frequent visits to Hanoi. The title’s just a play on the last time I posted about a new job, New City, New Job. That time, I found a city and then found a new job. This time I found a new job which found a city.

Community Garden in Bundang, Korea
The sign reads: No gardening. The land is owned by Korea Land Corporation and will soon be sold and developed, therefore any cultivation is forbidden. No compensation shall be made for any damages to illegally cultivated goods. May 2005. – Korea Land Corporation

It is said that what is everybody’s is nobody’s. When something lacks ownership it tends to be abused or neglected.

This long Chuseok weekend, I finally had a little extra time to explore my neighborhood. I live in Bundang, which is one of 5 planned satellite cities (link in Korean) created to house the ever-growing population who work in Seoul. It is one of the better ones with a lot of (interesting) open space running through the rows and rows of mind-numbingly boring monolithic slab apartment blocks. I live in its far corner which ain’t all that bad, at the foot of some nearby hills with hiking paths.

On my walk, I noticed a empty plot of land, where people were growing vegetables, in the adjacent lot next to where my 3 block apartment complex stands. There are signs scattered across the plot which forbid any cultivation. I passed by without thinking too much, but this plot of land lingered in my mind long enough to form a series of questions what bubbled up to consciousness:

1. Why was it empty?

In a place like Bundang, where land is so precious, and high-valued, there must be a good reason why it is empty. According to records, it been zoned for residential development and is owned by the Korea Land Corporation, which is the government organization that developed Bundang. Signs on the land state that it will be developed soon, but it’s dated 2005. I’m not sure why it’s being left intentionally empty.

2. What was happening in this empty plot?

It was being cultivated as a community garden. Elderly residents of the nearby apartment blocks have taken over the land, and have planted all sorts of vegetables used in common Korean cuisine.

3. Why was this happening?

What is interesting here is that a vacuum is being filled not with abuse (e.g. communal trash heap) but with productivity (communal vegetable garden). Koreans, especially elderly ones, have a very strong attachment to the earth. My dad has it. He’s always been fostering a romantic dream of retiring to a house on a small plot of land where he can grow his own vegetables. I have never seen him grow anything in my years as his son.

4. What does it have to do with sustainability?

There are 3 components to sustainable communities in the broadest sense: Economic, Environmental and Social. The environmental is the middle sibling that gets all the media attention, but it cannot exist without its two companions.

In my mind, the example of elderly Koreans appropriating empty land for vegetable growing is on a small scale and example of sustainability in practice. It’s obviously environmentally sustainable. It’s also economically sustainable. Elderly people live on meager stipends, with a fixed income, so these people growing their own vegetables close to home make economic sense. But what is equally important is the social sustainability. No sustainable practice can be truly be sustainable without a strong social component: Growing their own vegetables give elderly people a sense of purpose and self-esteem. They are less apt to nag their kids because they have something to do, and it gives them a good reason to invite friend and family over to enjoy the food, or to invite themselves over, to bring over homegrown vegetable to their no-time-for-real-food kids who are too busy scraping a living together. It also provides a generational bridge for grandchildren to work alongside grandparent, not to mention all the knowledge sharing that occurs between gardeners.

In short, the 3 components together create a loop that enriches lives of all residents. A sustainable community.

I’m wondering why more housing developments don’t just create communal vegetable plots with their communal land, which most often suffers from bad landscaping or in worst cases, just cemented over to lower maintenance. Each resident could be assigned a plot of land in the communal garden. If they don’t care for gardening they can lease their land for a fee or freely to those who do care. It’s like guaranteed parking space.

I never cared much for growing things myself, but I can see why people do. I must be getting old.

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Community gardening has been formalized in the US and UK, but from my shallow internet search (Naver, Google), there doesn’t seem to be any formalized grassroots (nice pun!) organizations in Korea as yet.

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[update 2008-09-18] Found an entry on Urban Agriculture on Wikipedia (my italics):

Urban farming is generally practiced for income-earning or food-producing activities though in some communities the main impetus is recreation and relaxation. Urban agriculture contributes to food security and food safety in two ways: first, it increases the amount of food available to people living in cities, and, second, it allows fresh vegetables and fruits and meat products to be made available to urban consumers. A common and efficient form of urban agriculture is the biointensive method. Because urban agriculture promotes energy-saving local food production, urban and peri-urban agriculture are generally seen as sustainable practices.

Given that soon 50% of the world’s population will be living in cities, and many of the new residents would have migrated from agriculture, it would seem to make sense for rapidly growing cities to reserve land around the city for agriculture. This would also form a natural buffer to resist urban sprawl and promote density in urban areas.

To feed a city with a population of 10 Million (Seoul, New York etc), you need to import 6000 tonnes of food each day.

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Updates

2009-06-25
In the past couple of days, they (Korea Land Corporation) walled off the community garden in the photo, with a big sign saying it is being leveled to make way for new housing. Inevitable but still sad.

2009-08-03
Worldchanging.org has an article about the growth of neighborhood farming practices in the US: Urban farming takes root in surprising new ways.

Cyworld's social action website

Recently I decided to take a systematically look at online social action sites in Korea, and whenever possible trying to arrange an informal interview with the sites’ manager(s) to gain a little more insight into their operations and also get a better general sense of the landscape for online social action in Korea. How is the internet bettering the lives of the less privileged in Korea, and how is it achieving social impact?

A couple of weeks ago, I netted my first site, when I had a chance to sit down and talk with Ms. Park Jie-hyun who is one of the manager’s of Cyworld’s Cytogether service.

Cyworld, for those who don’t know, pretty much dominates the online social networking space in Korea. Having launched in 1999 it boasts 22 million or over to a third of the Korean population as its members.

All things that go up must come down and Cyworld is no exception. Lately it has seen a noticeable decline in traffic, as it struggles to find the next generation of services that will appeal to the hyper internet-savvy Korean users. To add insult to injury, it has seen a string of failed launches abroad, due in no small part to its over-confidence in its platform and hence a failure to recognize and pay due-diligence to cultural difference in the way that users in different cultures use the internet socially. It has all but abandoned many of the markets it has entered abroad, and the US may soon be its latest casualty.

Despite its many ailments, one of the bright spots in Cyworld’s traffic is its online social action site, Cytogether or in Korean, ??????, which literally translates to: "a world of good relationships" or more meaningfully, "a world where we get along".

Cytogether uses the Cyworld platform of socially networking its members to achieve 3 main functions: online donations, online petitions and matching volunteers with non-profit organizations. It was launched in 2005, and has currently over 800 registered non-profits and NGO’s in its network. Users can choose to donate to these vetted organization by giving "dotori", Cyworld’s online currency, or by changing to their mobile phone service, which allows for monthly planned donations. Current stats show about USD 20,000-30,000 in online donations (monthly average of about USD 0.90 per donor), about 5,000-10,000 petition signups daily and about 20-30 volunteer matches per day. The most active issues on the site are children (abuse, education, poverty etc.) and, surprisingly, animal rights.

Ms. Park mentioned some of the challenges facing Cytogether:

• All the duties of promoting, managing, vetting, organizing and improving the site fall on the shoulders of 3 full-time and 1 part-time staff hance the site is extremely resource-strapped;
• Balancing the promotion of its 800+ member organization on its homepage is no small feat. Organization are always approaching them with "emergency" situations and demand that they be highlighted. Cytogether, to its credit does provide training sessions for its member organizations, organized on a quarterly basis;
• Better storytelling of member organization causes, activities, and success stories. It hasn’t been doing an effective job communicating the human stories in a more personable voice.

Despite its challenges, Cytogether plans to perform a major update of the site, and focus its offering towards the end of 2008, and partner with a recruiting service to offer job matching services to the unemployed and senior citizens.

The current value of Cytogether lies in its ability to provide exposure to charity organization that would otherwise won’t have the budget or the wherewithal to promote themselves. Traffic is showing steady growth over the past 3 years, where at launch, the site was encouraging its members to give a couple of "dotori" (each is worth about USD 0.10), to now there are regular donations of USD 10.00. The ratio of one-time donors to monthly donors is also on the rise, now standing at around 7 to 3 members.

To me the issue with Cytogether seems to be one of focus. It’s currently everything to everyone. The argument is that it’s a "platform". But I don’t think that relieves them of the tough responsibility of championing key causes. Cyworld is currently too influential not to be using its influence it bring to light tough social issues. Does it want to be IKEA or Herman Miller?

It is also apparent that there is a possibility that Cytogether may outlive its relationship with its parent Cyworld. Just as Cyworld, Cytogether is a platform for activity, there really is no reason why Cytogether cannot be an independent service. If the current downward trend of traffic and popularity in Cyworld continues, it may be in everyone’s best interest for the two to part ways.

Walking away from the interview, my head was full of ideas for improving Cytoether’s service:

• Donor’s wall: If you go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to the right of the entrance there is a wall of all the top donors to the museum. Recognize that some people (organizations) like to be recognized. A page could list large donations;
• API: Go viral. Allow bloggers to promote Cytogether on their site through a widget or a badge. A widget can show causes/organizatios that they support;
• Better member profiling: After a member donates, send a follow-up email with a link to a survey that identify what issues and causes the member is interested in. It can also ask members to opt-in for alerts. Building a database benefits both the users and Cytogether to provide more relevant content;
• Targeted alerts: Based on database mentioned above, Cytoether can send targeted action alerts to those members who have opted in;
• Matching donations: Corporations and workplaces can sign up to provide matching donations for employee donations;
• Corporate badges: Cytogether can provide corporations supporting Cytogether "official" badges to indicate that they support Cytogether;
• Stronger member networking: Members of Cyworld should have tools to alert each other to causes they support;
• Better "minihomepy" integration: Member "minihomey" (which is Cyworld’s member profile page) should indicate that the member supports an organization or cause on Cytogether and encourage visitors to do the same.

I have no means looked at online social action in Korea in any depth, but from initial research, it seems, like many other things in Korea, to be dominated by large corporations and their services or foundations. Naver, the online behemoth, has a service called Happy Bean, where users register to accrue a "bean" every time they use Naver’s service, such as their email. Each bean is a matching donation from Naver of about USD 0.10 and users can donate these beans to a cause of their choice. This seems awfully self-serving and borders on being unethical to me. CJ Foundation (CJ is a member of Samsung extended "family") has Donors Camp modeled on Donors Choose (Charles Best of Donors Choose actually consulted on the project).

Despite this sad state of affairs, Korea does still have one of the most participatory online cultures in the world. And by all indications it seems like the online donations and participation is on the rise. My hope is that all that participation blossoms into social awareness and responsibility, and flows into growth of grassroots online social action and services.