About the coolest Seoul neighbourhood and erosion of public spaces
Writing for The Guardian, Raphael Rashid comments on the degradation of local culture in a neighbourhood of Seoul, South Korea:
A wave of tourists and visitors has changed the character of the Seoul neighbourhood I live in and helped create a place that no longer feels like home
Raphael’s story is one that many around the world can relate to. It is especially true across much of Southern Europe, including Cyprus where I live.
The environment of individualism and distrust
Gentrification happening to a megacity like Seoul is part of the process. Cities of this scale are fundamentally not geared towards community. The more they grow, the more alienating they become. This is not because of some malevolent scheme at keeping people disunited: it is a side-effect of scale combined with pace.
If we think of a city in abstract terms, we are dealing with a highly dynamic system. People come and go from anywhere. Their connections are not strong enough to prevent them from moving. They do not stay in one place for a long time. They are rootless. This is due to economic activity, which typically is some kind of service or office job.
Offices can be relocated and employees may work from a distance, for example. Even when the workplace remains fixed, the employee may still relocate to another part of the city where rent is more affordable or some other benefits have become present. In this context, it is common to not know one’s neighbours within the same building, let alone the entire block.
Each person is thus reduced to an individual or to a small group like the atomic family. They may still have friends, but getting to meet them typically requires arrangements that are indistinguishable from formal appointment on the agenda. By this I mean that they are the product of concerted action: they do not happen organically without coordination within a given locality. More so when individuals relocate within the city’s boundaries while keeping contact with their old friends from another part of the city.
Combined with the high population count, the individual becomes nameless and invisible. Socialisation is yet another job. If they have a small group of trusted contacts, they can still schedule events with them if salaried work permits, but are otherwise operating as a stranger among strangers.
This is an environment that breeds distrust. If an individual starts greeting passers by on the street, for example, they will be treated with suspicion. And rightly so, given the circumstances, because nobody knows who that person is, what is their background, and what may their motives be. Same idea for neighbours that come and go: they cannot be relied upon.
The process of alienation
The urban environment forges the individualist. Each person realises that they have to fight for themselves or their tiny group against practically everybody else. They must rely on their own means because there is no wider community, no milieu built on trust and solidarity, to fall back to.
Profit thus becomes the singular pursuit of each person and the currency that regulates social relations. Gentrification follows naturally. There will be no restraint in radically altering the character of a neighbourhood because there are no emotional ties involved: it is just another transaction.
Though even without the gentrification of neighbourhoods, there is rampant alienation. With distrust as the backdrop of human relations, the public space becomes increasingly narrower until it is rendered obsolete. It cannot be trusted. Parents, for example, will typically not leave their children unsupervised. They will prefer to keep them confined to four walls, where they can “safely” melt their brain on the computer all day, than go run around carefree.
Adults face a similar challenge. The elderly are easy prey for criminals while women are correctly cautious to move around, especially at night. As gangs become more prevalent, even the toughest men become easy targets, because no amount of physical strength can counter machetes and firearms.
When the public space is not undermined by distrust it is eroded by profiteering. To socialise, each person must effectively pay for everything. These days a mere coffee is a non-trivial expense. Those who are on a tight budget are thus faced with the very real prospect of not socialising as much as they would like to: they are steadily priced out of their humanity.
Couched in those terms, the individual eventually realises that they do not matter. Nobody cares for them. They are estranged from what they thought was their milieu because their milieu was always essentially individualistic and thus not “theirs” in any meaningful way. It was all a lie.
The illusion of choice
The megacity is an environment of caution and fear counterbalanced or otherwise obfuscated by a false sense of ample opportunity.
Adults may choose the city life on the premise that they can seize one of the many opportunities it provides. They believe that there are so many activities they can pursue and places they can socialise in. There are shopping malls, cafeterias, restaurants, theatres, stadia, and more.
Each of those, however, is a for-profit business which means that one’s options are a function of their disposable income. The incentive, then, is to maximise profits, which brings us back to the aforementioned individualism. And when everybody thinks the same way, eventually no amount of profit is enough for the average person.
What practically happens to the city-dweller is that they live with the illusion of choice while settling on a relatively simple routine. Work takes over their lifeworld, as they need that extra profit to keep up with the demands of city life. Their day is spent in commuting and on the job, after which they are too tired to do much else.
The money-centric organisation of society is a pay-to-win scheme writ large that alienates most people while rewarding a tiny minority of ruthless profiteers.
The lack of connection each person has is encapsulated in the fake plants they keep in their room. That plastic cactus on the shelf symbolises the city life they have accepted as normal and desirable.
Mass tourism and ethnicide
[ I have also written about this topic in When your country is a theme park (2025-09-02). ]
Make no mistake: this is not specific to Seoul. I am merely using that article from The Guardian as a pretext for a broader commentary. What I am describing herein is the ordinary experience of the city as such.
The few times I visited that god-forsaken place called “Athens, Greece” I wanted to leave as quickly as possible. Yes, the Parthenon is still there but Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is long gone because the underlying ethos that instituted her as sacrosanct left the moment money was deified. Today’s Athenians love you if you pay well in one of the many pretentious areas or otherwise treat you like a mangy vagabond.
Mass tourism is the bane of our nations. It warps the minds of the locals towards profit-seeking at the expense of local communities. Every random fellow now peddles short-term rental services. They charge a small fortune for a weekend’s stay. The locals are priced out of the market, pushed to the margins of civilisation, and placed on a fast track towards oblivion. Once urban regions are gone, rural areas also fall prey to this omnivorous appetite for money.
This is how I ended up building my simple house in the mountains, for example: accommodation fees not only became exorbitant over the span of a few years but house owners would not even let me in since they prefer short-term rentals to faceless foreigners.
Alienation effectively means that you are not welcome in your own country. You are treated with contempt and derision. Your only way back to a pretence of normality is through money: you buy amiability and are liked for as long as you play that game.
Mass tourism and its flip-side of gentrification are killing our ethnic identity, i.e. ethnicide. Displacement means that we no longer have the chance to form strong connections which, in turn, leads to a diminution in cultural output of a specific ethnic kind. Whatever comes off as local culture is a streamlined simulacrum of so-called “tradition” that exaggerates superficialities in order to entertain stereotypes and cater to the ignorance of tourists.
The nations of the money-god are not content with ruining their densely populated areas. They are doing the same to the entirety of their territory either by selling it off outright to so-called “foreign direct investment” or turning it into a tourist attraction which hates true locals.
In my land, Cyprus, the whole island is being converted into a theme park for the parvenu to live their escapism carefree. All streets are made to look the same. Ancient villages are supposed to follow official directives for what supposedly “traditional” houses look like. It is a shadow play for the nouveau riche to pretend they are gritty village folk when they visit their third house on that one summer weekend.
Previous generations worked with what they could gather from the land. They built tiny houses with shared walls in order to cope with poverty. A large part of the village population would gather to help with construction work. This was a dwelling that was set up adjacent to the person’s relatives. Everybody was involved as a community. They were not following some smug bureaucrat’s inane guidelines; guidelines which, by the by, cost a fortune to comply with and thus have the effect of shifting property to the hands of ever fewer people.
The big bureaucrat and the big moneyman love each other. This is what capitalism is in practice: state intervention in favour of the capital holders; state intervention against community. It consists in the symbiosis of concentrated money and concentrated power, which culminates in gigantism: the propensity to accumulate ever-more resources at the centre against all expression of locality.
Within the context of the aforementioned, gigantism grows in strength because it faces no pushback from local communities. Once everybody is reduced to an individual, they can be dispersed like leaves in the wind. It is just a matter of time before that happens. Whereas those who are tied to their land, their extended family, and their neighbours of several generations, are not going anywhere without a fight. They have roots. They are like the reeds, which might bend but remain in place no matter how heavy the storm is.
What the journalist Raphael Rashid describes in The Guardian is true though is still too polite, as a boutique view of events, to give the proper weight to these phenomena. I hope my language acts as an early alarm mechanism.
There is no reversing this trend by doing more of the same. Unless people change mindset to live a frugal life and to prioritise community within the confines of locality, the money-god will turn us all into sacrificial lambs.