Post-Human Urbanity: a bio-synthetic future on Namsan

Nature recedes into the background of a human-oriented environment. The attempts towards a human and nature coexistence fails to truly integrate both the adaptive potential of the organic with manufactured solutions of the synthetic. Despite the pressing environmental and societal issues humans face, the tendency to wreak havoc undermines any attempt for resolution. In the current climate, the unification of both man and nature seems to be a paradox.

In effect, the vision for Haebangchon is the result of people’s
capacity to collectively affect their surrounding to unimaginable extents. Haebangchon, becomes the stage where nature overtakes the fragments of human carelessness and becomes a protagonist in the healing process of the urban detritus.

Haebangchon, as a center for Seoul’s revitalization, becomes ground zero to the symbiotic relationship between man and nature. In Seoul’s post-fragmentation, nature enters into spaces once exclusive to man while man supplements nature through decentralized interventions situated on the remnants of the existing structures. The new growths that sprout from the existing become sources for revitalization of Seoul and the local life. Recalibrated Haebangchon serves as a model for Seoul’s regeneration. Both nature and man come together in site and emerge as one unified system for an organic propagation.