Has the Sun Set on Gwangju’s Urban Parks?

By Isaiah Winters.

One of my favorite places to go people watching these days is among the low, leafy hills around the World Cup Stadium, an area known as Gwangju Central Neighborhood Park (광주중앙근린공원). Etched with myriad footpaths, the hills are crawling from dawn till dusk with hikers, farmers, and the odd, camera-wielding stray like me. This verdant patchwork spans the Juwol, Pungam, Hwajeong, Geumho, and Sangmu neighborhoods around said stadium in what makes up the city center’s largest respite from ever-encroaching development. It’s a novelty to have so much undeveloped green space within a major city, and I’ve grown to love the area as a result. Nevertheless, it’s not a proper Lost in Gwangju article without a little doom and gloom, so this month’s edition will focus on how the area is likely to change for better and for worse in the near future.

There’s a massive (but vague) plan in the works called the Gwangju Private Park Special Project that’s attempting to walk a fine line between preserving and developing these green spaces. At present, wrangling between City Hall and the Bitgoeul Central Park Development Company over the project’s cost and extent makes the whole thing rather opaque and highly tenuous, but from the few architectural renderings I managed to dig up online, it looks like one plan is to do a little of everything: a little housing construction, a little greenscaping, and a little (unmentioned) expropriation of farmland.[1] The latter process is already underway despite everything else still being rather speculative. Accordingly, a great banner war has broken out between local farmers on one side and City Hall together with the JoongAng Park Company on the other over issues of expropriation and compensation. The latter two have couched their messages in soft bureau-speak, promising interested landowners to “sincerely respond” to any “inquiry about land compensation.” As you can imagine, the farmers’ banners are infinitely more colorful in their phrasing.

Meanwhile, the park’s countless burial mounds are being diligently marked for later disinterment and removal in what’s sure to be a grim process. There are well over 1,200 bodies interred throughout the park beneath burial mounds in motley states ranging from precision landscaping to unrecognizable heaps of undergrowth. Most have nevertheless been meticulously marked with a numbered signboard bearing a message again from City Hall and the JoongAng Park Company. The signs are an attempt to find the current caretakers of each grave and relocate the bodies at no cost to the living relations. However, almost none of the mounds bear the names of the deceased entombed within them, so the relocation process will likely be long and tedious. As if right on cue to help speed things along, many of the contact signs have been slapped with sticker ads for funeral and cremation services that smack of shameless opportunism. Ultimately, with so many burial mounds unlikely to be claimed – not to mention all the ones invisible to the naked eye – the upcoming project is literally likely to be built on bones.

Plastic is another thing likely to be dug up en masse once development begins. Local farmers have used an ungodly amount of the stuff over the decades to either retain soil moisture, protect plants, or seal off their land and, if we’re going to be honest, much of the farmland appears to be a polluted, chaotic mess as a result. A trek through the debris-hemmed microfarms of Juwol-dong, for example, takes you past a bevy of tumbledown, asbestos-panel sheds and across precarious bridges spanning smatterings of junk. To me, this is all fascinating in its own right, but for most normal people, it’s likely seen as a societal blemish that’s run its course. Coincidentally, a large part of the proposed development project in Juwol-dong is set to be built right on top of much of this farmland, which would certainly tidy the place up, though at the cost of cauterizing acres of Gwangju’s verdant, urban lungs. Naturally, the resilient community of local farmers would be decimated in the process. On my many walks through the fields, it was clear that the area derived its soul and charm (but also its trash) from them.

To be fair, City Hall has done pretty well in negotiations to restrict the project’s development area to under ten percent of the total parkland, so that’s a pretty good deal in exchange for a much-needed cleanup. In fact, this amount allotted to the development company is 11 percent less than the national average for similar projects, which cuts into the developer’s profits. But that’s the rub – the development company now considers the project too unprofitable to be attractive, especially since land prices are shooting up across this area of Gwangju, in part due to delays and to the project itself. The way the deal works is the city first allows the private development company to buy its parkland, and then the company cleans the parks up and improves public facilities. In exchange for this, the company then gets to develop luxury high-rise apartments on a fraction of the land and sell those at a profit. In the end, the company gives the spruced-up parkland back to the city and keeps the private apartments for itself. But with land prices on the rise, development allotments staying low, and COVID-19 dragging on, negotiations have reached a standstill.[1][2]

To end at the beginning, this whole convoluted exchange between City Hall and the Bitgoeul Central Park Development Company was made possible thanks to the expiration of the Sunset Law which, after shielding local parks from development over the last 20 years, expired last July, thus lifting restrictions on new building projects. As negotiations over tiny percentages of land grind on, I’m surprised by how it’s practically taken for granted that enough land can be expropriated from local farmers, some of whom claim to have been farming the same plots for up to 50 years. Many legitimately own the land they farm while many others don’t, adding yet another wrinkle to this ongoing story. In total, nine local parks have been freed up for construction in the wake of the Sunset Law, putting the property of local smallholders across the city at risk and ensuring that these types of land disputes continue for the foreseeable future. Whichever way future negotiations go, the city center will certainly keep its lungs – now it’s just a matter of what type of phlegm they retain.

The Author
Originally from Southern California, Isaiah Winters is a Gwangju-based urban explorer who enjoys writing about the City of Light’s lesser-known quarters. When he’s not roaming the streets and writing about his experiences, he’s usually working or fulfilling his duties as the Gwangju News’ heavily caffeinated chief copy editor. You can find more of his photography on Instagram @d.p.r.kwangju

Sources

[1] Park, J. (2020, April 20). 전국최고 공원보존율…도심 숲 둘러싸인 명품 주거단지. Gwangju Ilbo. http://m.kwangju.co.kr/article.php?aid=1587308400693904004
[2] Kim, K. (2021, February 16). 광주시, 고분양가 논란 ‘중앙공원 APT 개발’ 원점 재검토. Today Gwangju-Jeonnam. https://www.todaygwangju.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=82349