Redevelopment and Its Discontents in Numun-dong

By Isaiah Winters

There’s a nasty case of redevelopment remorse playing out on the streets of Numun-dong. Dissatisfied with the compensation offered for their properties, locals are losing faith in the long-term redevelopment project many of them invited into their neighborhood years ago. What’s more, the project could further disrupt Gwangju’s ecology by diverting an important underground stream already marred by pollution problems. The accelerating momentum behind this project, the aging residents against it, and the malodorous tributary stewing beneath it all portend a slew of bad outcomes.

Numun-dong’s Eclectic Urban Networks

Numun-dong, located directly across the Gwangju Stream from Yangdong Market, is one of the city’s more variegated areas and a stellar example of how urban planners used to prioritize density differently through jumbles of mixed-use, low-rise structures. Even as it is now midway through the compensation process, the area is still teaming with grizzled locals and faded mom-and-pop shops that spill out onto the streets between rows of tightly parked cars. It even has a few garish love motels crowned with fake castle turrets and Russian onion domes, though these are mostly abandoned now. It’s from the roof of one of these that I often get my best shots of the area.

If you dip into the narrow alleys punctuating the more modern grid of car- and store-lined streets, you’ll find far older residential networks whose cramped passages flow like waterways. These hidden housing interstices evoke an era of nonlinear residential planning that was less car-centric and more in tune with the local environment – or maybe just more chaotic. I suspect some of these winding back alleys were designed with the underground confluence of the Gwangju and Donggye Streams in mind, though it’s hard to say for sure. The latter stream, which is one of Gwangju’s many paved-over waterways, only came to my attention when doing research for this issue, but it’s in fact integral to the neighborhood’s past, present, and future, so that’s where I’d like to shift this article’s focus next.

The Significance of Donggye Stream

If you’ve ever walked down to the Gwangju Stream under Yangdong Market, you’ll surely have noticed the large tunnel there with its often evil-smelling outflows. This is the pitch-black mouth of the Donggye-cheon (東溪川, “East-Brook” Stream), an underground tributary that merges there with the Gwangju Stream. It got its name simply enough due to its origins in the foothills of Mudeung Mountain east of Gwangju. You can visit one of its origin points where the old Jisan Amusement Park is, just up the valley from Hotel Mudeung Park and the city’s only ski lift. Up that valley, you’ll find many abandoned buildings associated with the former amusement park and a smallish reservoir – a significant collection point for the Donggye Stream.

From this valley in the foothills, the Donggye Stream flows down to Dongmyeong-dong and merges there with another tributary just under Sabotage, a favorite brunch spot for many Gwangju locals. This merger takes place just a few meters beneath the aptly named Donggye-cheon Street, the main thoroughfare connecting the heart of Dongmyeong-dong to Daein Market where, it just so happens, the stream flows right under Dreamers, a favorite live music venue for many of us here. From there, the stream continues straight until it curves left at Gwangju Bank and Lotte Department Store, later spilling its contents into the Gwangju Stream beneath Numun-dong. It’s a fascinating course that links many of the city’s best-known haunts together and gives us a broader perspective of just how close we are to the city’s paved-over past. That’s why disrupting this course could come with so many problems, to which we’ll now turn our attention.

Subterranean Streams of Concrete

City planners began covering Gwangju’s many urban streams as far back as the 1970s, when the Yangdong Market area was expanded, resulting in the partial coverage of the Gwangju Stream seen there today. Things then really kicked off in the late 1980s when the Donggye Stream and others were covered, followed by new coverings of still other streams in the mid-1990s. While convenient for Gwangju’s booming development overhead, turning the city’s natural waterways into subterranean streams of concrete came with drawbacks. Heat is one such detriment. Urban streams help reduce the urban heat island effect by keeping cities greener and cooler with less heat-absorbing concrete blanketing surface streets. Flood control is another issue, as the new concrete waterways funnel floodwater faster and prevent natural groundwater permeation. Then there’s the pollution. Entombing urban streams converts them into a complex no-man’s-land that’s part stream, part street, and part sewer, making these spaces hard to classify and manage. Naturally, the result is poor waste management (and the ensuing wafts of effluvia that rise up from sewer grates to singe our nose hairs periodically).

Though a task bordering on the Sisyphean, there are those pursuing efforts to reconnect Gwangju’s underground streams with the surface. One such group is the Korea Federation of Environmental Movements in Gwangju (광주환경운동연합), from whose website I got much of the information for this segment of the article.^[1] While the expensive and far-fetched project to uncover Gwangju’s underground streams may seem locally isolated, the group has its eye on the broader context, with more extreme weather nationally and globally providing added urgency. As seen with the severe flooding across Gwangju during the 2020 rainy season and then in Seoul this year, all it takes is a few days of heavy rain for the overlooked importance of underground waterways to suddenly become national news. Incidentally, the tunnel in Numun-dong where the Donggye and Gwangju Streams converge is where the most intense images of flooding were produced back in 2020, and that’s why the neighborhood’s upcoming redevelopment project involving the redirection of the Donggye Stream’s course is so crucial. (More on that in the penultimate paragraph.)

Redevelopers’ Remorse

The redevelopment of Numun-dong is a project reaching back to 2006, but after a long series of delays, only now are things really taking shape above ground. The proposed New Stay Apartment (뉴스테이 아파트) project will build close to three thousand housing units that will at first be rented out below market value and then, following the end of the mandatory rental period, be sold or rented out again at the real market price. The issue is that Numun-dong is so centrally located that for the redevelopment company to make a profit on the sky-high cost of land redevelopment there, spending cuts likely have to be made somewhere. That’s why the compensation process is becoming an issue, as local residents feel they’re getting the short end of the stick. In response, a group of anti-redevelopment residents know as the Gwangju Numun Hope Production Solidarity (광주누문희망제작연대) has formed to protect locals’ interests. According to Kim Gwang-ho, a higher-up in said group, “residents of Numun-dong received an appraisal [on their properties] of only one-third the market price, and this is an outrageous amount.” It’s no wonder discontent is growing. For residents, it’s more logical to reject the redevelopment project altogether and maintain their property values at the current market price.

There’s an excellent article by journalists Byeon Jun-yeong and Han Cheong-heun in the Chondae Shinmun in which they interview several residents of Numun-dong about what the compensation process has been like. Much of what I write in this section comes from that fine piece, which I can’t recommend highly enough.^[2] In short, if poorly compensated, many residents will have no place to go. The average age of Numun-dong residents is just over 50 – nearly ten years older than the average Gwangju resident. With so many past their working prime, much of their retirement nest eggs are tied up in the real estate they own. Many simply want the redevelopment project to stop, as it’s now fast killing local businesses, too, making the neighborhood more of an eyesore every day. When reached out to for its side of the story, the union in charge of the redevelopment project said, “Please do not respond to the coverage.” The Urban Redevelopment Division of Gwangju Metropolitan City was also contacted for its views, but it commented that the redevelopment project was originally made “at the suggestion of the residents, so it is difficult for the government to intervene.”

What’s more, part of the redevelopment plan involves artificially changing the Donggye Stream by blocking part of its natural path. According to Yang Hae-geun, director of the Korea Environmental Disaster Research Institute, “If the Donggye Stream is blocked with a structure to divert the water, the flow of groundwater will be blocked, which may cause water to flow into old buildings or weaken the ground. If the waterway … is changed, a groundwater safety evaluation must be carried out.” Unfortunately, according to one excellent article on the matter from last year, the Buk-gu Urban Committee, after completing the advisory process for the apartment construction plan, “did not request any supplementary measures to prepare for the restoration of the Donggye Stream.”^[3] I wasn’t able to find much else on the topic save that one disconsolate quote.

Ultimately, the redevelopment project in Numun-dong looks as grim for the poorly compensated residents as it does for the already badly polluted Donggye Stream. It’s a warning to those seeking to have their own neighborhoods redeveloped in the future: caveat emptor.

The Author

Born and raised in Chino, California, Isaiah Winters is a pixel-stained wretch who loves writing about Gwangju and Honam, warts and all. He particularly likes doing unsolicited appraisals of abandoned Korean properties, a remnant of his time working as an appraiser back home. You can find much of his photography on Instagram @d.p.r.kwangju.