Seoul mayor slams brakes on construction

Park Won-soon, Seoul’s new reformist mayor, playfully wonders whether his mandate allows him to lop the tops off the tower blocks that obscure the view from his office towards the snow-dusted mountains to the north.

“Do you think I can do it?” he asks the FT during an interview, miming a karate chop.

The offending buildings are probably safe. But Mr Park is determined to stop Seoul’s explosion of high-rise blocks. Since winning October’s election, the leftwing former human rights lawyer has made a priority of slamming the brakes on the rampant construction-led growth advocated by President Lee Myung-bak, himself a former mayor of Seoul, and his ruling Conservative party.

Instead, the new mayor wants to shift the focus to increasing welfare spending, which he says can foster more productive growth than contracts to bulldoze old, maze-like, red-brick neighbourhoods and replace them with skyscrapers.

The evictions of residents from those neighbourhoods to make way for development have long been a controversial subject in the city of 10.5m. Six people died in a pitched battle over relocations in 2009.

Mr Park’s office continues to be swamped with petitions from people hoping to save their homes from the wrecking ball. “I feel hopeless about being turfed out. My eyes well with tears when I see my wife and son,” one petitioner wrote recently. “A man cannot bounce around without a home like a grasshopper.”

The new mayor concedes some derelict areas need rebuilding but argues the conservatives’ demolition plans for Seoul were “too massive”. Out of 866 uncompleted regeneration projects, Mr Park is now putting 610 under review, infuriating investors and landlords who say they have a right to sell.

Mr Park says he will listen to their concerns but argues that “the main job of the mayor is to protect the underprivileged”.

Mr Park’s stand is shaking up national politics in Asia’s fourth-biggest economy, where welfare spending is only about one-third of western European levels. He talks nonchalantly of a “revolution”.

“Our focus and emphasis on welfare is changing the whole nation. The government and ruling party were against social welfare but are now changing their policies,” he says.

Mr Park is lifting the city’s welfare budget by 13 per cent to Won5tn ($4.5bn) and is vowing to shift funds out of major urban engineering projects into child care, education and healthcare.

Since he surprisingly won Seoul’s election as an independent, he has become the most influential opposition politician in Korea, representing about a fifth of the population. His welfare reforms are now reshaping mainstream parties’ manifestos towards greater social security spending ahead of this year’s parliamentary and presidential elections.

The policies represent a major change from those advocated by Mr Lee, the current president, when he served as mayor of Seoul from 2002 to 2006. During his tenure Mr Lee was nicknamed “the bulldozer” and drew on his background as a construction boss to launch so-called “new towns” to replace ageing neighbourhoods. Several of his embellishments, such as an open waterway through Seoul, won him support and gave him a strong springboard to run for president.

Mr Park, who was jailed for speaking out against the military dictatorship that fell in the late 1980s, criticises Mr Lee’s distant approach to people affected by his building schemes.

“Under Mr Lee, the mayoral office was called Lee’s castle,” says Mr Park, arguing he has now lowered the drawbridge.

He enjoys casting himself as a humble man who travels by metro and roves the streets chatting to the people but critics accuse Mr Park, who appears with floppy hair and bare feet in advertisements, of “showmanship” for cultivating this Bohemian persona.

“If that’s so, we need more such showmen who look the people in the eye,” he quips, accusing the political establishment of having no sense of popular opinion.

Last year, Mr Lee’s government criticised moves towards what it slammed as “welfare populism”, arguing leftist reforms could damage Seoul’s finances. Mr Park retorts well-targeted social spending promotes growth.

Taking child support as an example, he says his higher spending would provide work not only for teachers, nurses and cooks but free more women to work.

Despite his desire to use the city budget to fill holes in the national welfare system, Mr Park claims his campaign against new building and his moves to lift metro ticket prices will gradually reduce the city’s deficits. However, many independent economists argue South Korea will struggle to build more credible welfare until it demands higher income tax rates.

Mr Park’s ascension to mayor has led many younger South Koreans to hope his ally, Ahn Chul-soo, an internet entrepreneur, may now complete the “revolution” by running as an independent for president.

Such a national victory may still be too difficult, Mr Park argues, because of the hold mainstream parties have. But his ideas are clearly infiltrating the Korean debate.

A push for the conservatives to consider easing their hardline stance against North Korea appears to be winning some followers. Some conservatives, for example, have echoed his call for more cultural exchanges of orchestras and the revival of a long-abandoned Seoul-Pyongyang football fixture.

“I have only been here 100 days,” he says. “But what we are doing here is changing the debate.”