If you have lived in Korea maybe you have noticed the brown tarp installed in front of commercial and residential zones. Another variety is the pastel aqua, pink, and purple cloth seen in the background of this picture:
Have you ever taken a peek behind the curtain? If you are as curious as I am, you might get views like this:
Maybe an impulse hits you. Curiosity takes over and you find a hole or untied section of tarp, coming across something like this:
Welcome to the Redevelopment Zone! Once you notice one area being redeveloped, you can’t help but see every other neighborhood being torn down to make room for more high-rise apartments or more glass box commercial spaces. When the tarp goes up, the window of exploration is finite. Within months, the rubble of buildings has been cleared and the land smoothed or dug up and ready for construction. Not every Redevelopment Zone has the same timeline. Others linger in legal limbo as tenets go through legal proceedings to delay the inevitable or to get better settlement from developers. These proceedings take years, so it’s possible you are wandering into an area eighty percent empty.
At this point, you might be strongly interested in Urban Exploration. Possibly you are curious about the ethics of exploring abandoned buildings. Unfortunately it’s easy to see UE as nothing but vandalism due to the antics of a few. If you dig deeper, you will see UE has more depth and at it’s core is highly ethical. I highly recommend this insightful article about the Dos and Donts of exploring in Korea.
I think UE is as normal as other sort of exploration, ethical or not is the point of view depending from person to person. But for me it is another form of story retelling. Something which was so alive and breathing once now either forgotten or being erased, require to be made known to people of this time, that once it did exist or is still there with all its grandeur. So as UEr one does the bit of informing everyone out there. But on rule UE should be sticked with is that, take only pictures and leave only foot prints. No harm be made.