Designed to Be Seen: How Busan’s Urban Identity Became a Campaign

Busan, South Korea — From the observation deck of the Busan X the Sky tower, the city below unfolds like a modernist blueprint: clean lines, glass towers, freshly paved arterial roads, and masterplanned communities in the making. To the untrained eye, it looks like a city on the rise. And according to its official slogan, it is: “Busan is Good.”

Unveiled under the current municipal administration, the slogan has come to define the public face of the city. It appears on banners, brochures, subway walls, and government social media accounts—three simple words projected onto an entire urban landscape. Paired with stylized visuals, branded architecture, and a rising reliance on AI-generated images and content, the branding effort is unmistakable: Busan wants to be seen as global, accessible, and future-ready.

But behind the visuals lies a growing disconnect.

While the city is being carefully designed to be seen, many of its residents are left wondering whether it is still being built to be lived in.

The Politics of Slogan — What Does “Good” Actually Mean?

When the Busan city government unveiled its new slogan—“Busan is Good”—it did so with fanfare. Press releases framed it as a message of confidence and optimism, a statement meant to resonate locally while appealing to a global audience. A stylized acronym, “BIG”, was developed to represent the slogan graphically. It soon appeared across public buildings, social media feeds, and promotional materials—from city-run YouTube videos to international tourism campaigns.

But for many residents, the question came quickly: good for whom?

At first glance, the slogan’s simplicity seems like its strength. It is short, positive, and linguistically universal. But its vagueness is also its weakness. Unlike earlier city mottos such as “Dynamic Busan”—which emphasized motion, energy, and ambition—“Busan is Good” offers no clear value proposition. It is a claim without content, a compliment without context.

In attempting to say everything, it risks saying nothing at all.

Critics argue that the slogan reflects a deeper shift in the city’s governance priorities: from public service to public image. Rather than articulating a clear direction for policy, development, or community well-being, the slogan focuses on perception—on how the city appears, rather than how it functions.

There are no indicators in the slogan about equity, livability, inclusion, or sustainability—key terms that shape global urban discourse today. Nor is there any reference to Busan’s specific challenges: demographic decline, spatial inequality between east and west, aging infrastructure, or youth outmigration. Instead, the word “good” floats above them all, detached from the city’s actual condition.

A slogan, at its best, is a promise.
In this case, it feels more like a placeholder.

The slogan’s emptiness is not an accident; it is strategic. It avoids political specificity. It cannot be easily challenged, because it makes no measurable claim. Yet this is precisely what makes it so fragile. In a city where public trust depends increasingly on whether citizens see tangible improvements in their everyday lives, an empty slogan does little to inspire belief.

Without clarity, slogans become mirrors—they reflect the ambitions of those in power, not the realities of those on the ground.

Urban Design and Branding — A Politics of Aesthetics

Walk through Busan’s recently refurbished plazas—Busan Station Square, Centum’s waterfront promenade, or the developing edges of Eco Delta City—and a clear visual language emerges. Clean sightlines, smooth paving, promotional signage, and the ever-present branding of “BIG: Busan is Good”, rendered in high-contrast gradients of magenta and purple. The city feels made for the lens.

This is not incidental. It is intentional.

Busan’s public spaces are now as much media assets as they are community infrastructure. Their design is increasingly optimized not for use, but for photographic coherence—backdrops for promotional videos, social media posts, and international investor brochures. Architecture becomes narrative. A bench is a frame. A corridor is a cinematic axis. And over it all, the slogan.

In this new aesthetic regime, public design does not merely serve; it signifies.

Under the current administration, the city has embraced a strategy of image-forward governance. Its investments in public design prioritize uniformity, order, and modernity—but not necessarily adaptability, accessibility, or community ownership. Projects are often delivered as finished products, not evolving processes. Public consultation is minimal. Critique is often interpreted as interference.

It is a logic that mirrors branding more than it mirrors planning.

Rather than ask how a space functions for its users, the question becomes: “How does it look on a drone shot?”
Rather than address complexity, the approach prefers legibility—neat renderings, finished timelines, photo-ready moments. But urban life is not always legible. Cities are lived in the gaps, the improvisations, the uses that cannot be designed for.

This visual coherence comes at a cost. It displaces spontaneity, erases memory, and substitutes cohesion for complexity. Older, layered, and contested public spaces—like those in Sasang or Saha—rarely receive the same attention. Their messiness is incompatible with a clean campaign.

And so a new version of the city emerges—not from within, but from above.

The color language of the campaign speaks volumes: vibrant magenta and purple hues signal energy, modernity, and aesthetic boldness—but also evoke the visual grammar of corporate brands more than civic institutions. What’s being sold is not a place, but a perception.

Design, in this vision, is not a tool for civic participation.
It is a tool for narrative control.

By fixing what is seen, the city freezes what can be said.

AI Images and Machine-Translated Meaning — Governance Behind the Curtain

In early 2025, the city of Busan launched a new initiative: press releases translated into English using generative AI, specifically ChatGPT. The rollout was accompanied by confident messaging—“faster, smarter, more global”—and a new section on the city’s official English-language website titled AI-translated Press Releases.

For a city eager to brand itself as a global hub, the move made sense. AI promised speed, accessibility, and reduced labor costs. But as the headlines were being machine-generated, so too were the visuals. AI-generated images—some in the dreamy style of Studio Ghibli, others rendered with uncanny precision by Midjourney—began appearing on the city’s social media accounts and promotional materials.

The message was clear: the future of public communication would be automated.

But for many observers, the shift raised more questions than it answered.

Who is really speaking when a city’s voice is generated by a machine?
And who is responsible for what is said—or not said?

In a civic context, language is not just information. It is representation. It reflects who is at the table, whose priorities are recognized, and how policies are narrated. When city governments begin outsourcing their public voice to machines, they risk severing that representational link. The result is not neutrality—it is absence.

Residents, especially those already distanced from administrative processes, are quick to sense the change. When the tone of a statement feels “off,” when a phrase lacks empathy or understanding, it’s not just a technical glitch. It’s a loss of relational trust.

Machine-generated language may sound correct,
but it cannot feel accountable.

The same holds true for AI-generated imagery. Posters showcasing fantastical versions of Busan—ethereal skies over Gamcheon, perfectly symmetrical skylines, tree-lined boulevards untouched by human imperfection—are impressive. But they are also disorienting. These are cities imagined without residents.

They reveal not a vision of what is, or even what could be, but what is easiest to render.

In this framework, public communication is no longer about engagement. It becomes content delivery. The citizen is not a participant, but a viewer. And the city? A brand, curated and streamlined, optimized for scrollability.

When AI becomes the interface of government,
governance becomes less a relationship and more a performance.

Between Rhetoric and Reality — A City of Passive Citizens

In Busan’s evolving civic landscape, public messaging has become increasingly sophisticated. The slogans are clean, the visuals immersive, the campaigns expertly coordinated across digital platforms. But as the communication sharpens, something subtler has begun to fade: the participatory voice of the citizen.

Terms like “Balanced Development,” “Smart City,” “Global Hub,” and “Innovation Cluster” now dominate Busan’s policy language. These phrases appear frequently in planning documents, speeches, and promotional material. They sound progressive. They sound universal. But they also sound strangely disconnected from the material lives of those living in the city’s aging neighborhoods, riding overcrowded buses, or watching their local clinics and schools quietly disappear.

Rhetoric, in this context, is not a description. It is a replacement.

The more the city speaks in slogans, the less it seems to explain what those slogans mean. “Balanced development” becomes a justification for building high-rises in Gangseo, while older districts like Sasang and Saha remain structurally sidelined. “Global hub” becomes a banner on a press release, not a plan to address the realities of youth outmigration, declining fertility, or employment precarity.

Meanwhile, public forums grow fewer. Citizen consultations are often symbolic or staged late in the process. Urban planning becomes an exercise in announcement rather than engagement, where decisions are presented fully formed, and input is reduced to aesthetic feedback.

The role of the citizen, once central to democratic urbanism, is now largely passive. Residents are expected to receive, not revise. To consume, not co-create. And because the city speaks so fluently—through AI, through design, through perfect renders—there is less and less space for silence, contradiction, or dissent.

This is not apathy.
It is architecture—a carefully constructed relationship between city and citizen,
where performance replaces participation.

In this model, trust is assumed rather than earned. Public communication shifts from dialogue to monologue, from explanation to display. The goal is no longer to involve the public in shaping the future, but to keep them aligned with a version of the future already chosen.

Visibility Without Voice

Every city tells a story—not just through its infrastructure and institutions, but through its symbols, its language, and its memory. In recent years, Busan has worked hard to reframe its story: from post-industrial port to global innovation hub, from aging metropolis to lifestyle brand. But stories are not just made by what is told. They are shaped by what is left unsaid.

In the name of progress, Busan has invested heavily in its surface: slogans, masterplans, drone shots, digital platforms, and algorithmic translations. It has branded itself with magenta logos and rendered itself into AI-generated utopias. It has declared itself “Good.”

And yet for many residents—particularly those in older districts, those without investment capital, those outside the curated frame—the city’s voice has grown distant, even unrecognizable.

Visibility has increased. But representation has diminished.
The city appears more often, but listens less.

This is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of vision.

When governance is designed for performance—when policies become marketing, when spaces become content, when communication becomes automation—what is lost is not just nuance. It is accountability, intimacy, and belonging.

Cities are not brands. They are ecosystems. And ecosystems require care, friction, contradiction, and participation. They require mess. The drive to smooth over those contradictions with visual polish or machine fluency is not modernization. It is erasure.

What would it mean for Busan to reverse course? To speak less fluently and more honestly? To design not only for visibility, but for voice?

A city that truly believes in being good must first ask—for whom?

Until Busan can look into its less photogenic neighborhoods and hear not only what is missing but who is speaking, its story will remain incomplete.

The question is no longer how the city looks.
It is whether the people inside it still recognize themselves.