You Can Build a City, But You Can’t Force It to Be Loved

"A city is not a map—it is a memory."
Yet in many of South Korea’s most meticulously planned developments, what stands is not a living city but an architectural projection—spaces delivered in full, but inhabited in part.

Across the landscape of new towns, infrastructure is in place, buildings are pristine, and zoning is executed with clinical precision. But something is missing: density, spontaneity, ritual. What was built to house life now struggles to hold it.

Vacancy, of course, has many causes—economic stagnation, shifting consumption patterns, inflation, platform-driven retail disruption. These factors are real, and measurable. But beneath them lies something more difficult to quantify: a design logic that fails to anticipate how people attach to place, how space becomes meaningful, or how daily life resists pre-configuration.

The dissonance is structural and symbolic. Urban planning in these districts conflates form with function, efficiency with vitality. Streets are planned before movement exists. Shops are constructed before desire has settled. What results is not just an empty space—but a space that was never given time, or reason, to be filled.

Urbanity, in its truest form, resists instant delivery. It emerges from accumulated time, layered friction, and lived unpredictability. The smell of a morning bakery, the creak of an old stairwell, the accidental encounter—these are not programmable assets. Yet when cities are designed without space for such residue, they become psychologically impenetrable, however physically accessible.

The result is a proliferation of spaces that are visually complete but emotionally vacant—spaces that lack what might be called civic intimacy. People do not attach, not because the buildings are poorly made, but because the conditions for attachment were never designed into the plan.

When the City Arrives Before Its People

Cities are not merely physical environments; they are psychological landscapes. We relate to them not only with our feet, but with our attention, habits, and memory. A good city does not just accommodate life—it offers the emotional and perceptual cues that allow us to settle, identify, and return.

In many of South Korea’s planned new towns, this process is short-circuited. Cities are delivered in their entirety—retail spaces aligned, residential towers occupied, public squares paved—before the human routines that give them meaning have begun to form. This reversal of sequence is not only an issue of urban logic; it represents a profound psychological disruption.

Environmental psychology has long shown that people form attachments to places through repeated interaction, voluntary use, and emotional continuity. Yet in many new towns, what residents encounter is a finished product devoid of affordance—a space that does not invite use, only presence. The streets are wide, but unwalked. The storefronts are open, but unsought. There is little room for interpretation, appropriation, or ritual.

What results is not emptiness in the literal sense, but perceptual inhibition. People sense that there is nowhere to linger, no subtle permission to dwell. The spaces lack what James J. Gibson called “affordances”—those features of the environment that implicitly suggest use. A bench that invites rest. A ledge that allows a child to climb. A corner where gossip gathers.

In their absence, behavior becomes hesitant, directionless. Place attachment does not form. Residents pass through without investing emotionally. Shopkeepers operate with the sense of performing in a vacuum. Children play less freely. Even movement becomes flattened, stripped of rhythm and intention.

This is not simply poor design—it is psychological misalignment. Cities built ahead of time prevent people from enacting the very behaviors that create time-bound meaning. When memory has no anchor, and space offers no invitation, people begin to drift—not outward, but inward, toward disaffection and fatigue.

In such spaces, urban presence feels more like compliance than belonging. One lives in the city, but not with it. The world is built, but not yet experienced. And in that gap, emotional investment thins.

A City You Can Buy but Not Inhabit

Urban development today often confuses production with presence. Nowhere is this more visible than in South Korea’s newly built districts, where space is not formed for people, but prepared for markets. Here, the city is delivered as product, consumed through parcels and contracts, rather than lived as experience.

What results is a psychological landscape shaped less by place attachment than by transaction. Buildings are erected to satisfy zoning codes and investor timelines. Ground-floor retail is embedded not where people naturally pass, but where it maximizes frontage. Streets are aligned with engineering precision, but lack emotional grain. Life, in these cities, is expected to arrive after construction—but by then, the psychological scaffolding for belonging has not been laid.

This approach fails to recognize how we inhabit cities not just physically, but affectively. People do not bond with a neighborhood because it’s finished. They bond because it feels unfinished in just the right way—open to contribution, rich with hints of shared use, malleable enough to matter.

In the commodified city, such invitations are rare. Retail space is leased, not learned. Plazas are prescribed, not discovered. And when life fails to fill these frames, blame is deflected: onto the shopkeepers who can’t adapt, the consumers who won’t come, the residents who refuse to “activate” their neighborhood.

But the root issue is structural: the urban form was optimized for sale, not for settlement. Without flexibility, without time, without unfinished edges that invite participation, cities become psychologically closed. There is space, but no affordance. Infrastructure, but no intimacy.

In these environments, even the desire to dwell diminishes. People pass through, perform transactions, return home. The city becomes a backdrop, not a habitat. And with each vacancy that lingers, the message is subtly reinforced: this place was made to be sold—not to be lived.

Where Memory Outlives Design

Not all urban form comes from drawing boards. In many older neighborhoods, the city unfolds not through plans, but through repetition. A bakery that’s been there for twenty years. A shortcut no longer marked on maps. A wall where people lean while waiting for someone they know will pass. These are not designed features. They are psychological landmarks, shaped through time, not zoning.

In places like Seoul’s Dongmyo or Busan’s Bosu-dong, what remains is not infrastructure in the modern sense—but infrastructure of memory. These neighborhoods are often described as outdated, economically inefficient, or spatially chaotic. But to those who inhabit them, they offer something more valuable than uniformity: recognition. The ability to see and be seen, to return and be remembered.

Environmental psychology tells us that place attachment is strongest where spatial familiarity and emotional continuity converge. Older neighborhoods provide this effortlessly. Their very wear grants them psychological texture. The chipped step, the faded awning, the awkward turn in the alley—all these small irregularities become mnemonic anchors, making space feel like history, and not merely surface.

And yet, it is precisely these places that are often treated as obsolete by planners and investors. Their complexity—of ownership, of layout, of usage—is seen as a liability. But this complexity is also what allows for adaptation. Unlike the frozen retail zones of new towns, older neighborhoods have been remade from within, again and again. They are not static artifacts, but living structures of memory and improvisation.

What is often called decline is sometimes just resistance to erasure. While newer districts await life to justify their presence, these older districts persist through loss, through wear, through memory. They are already alive. Just not in a language policy knows how to read.

In a time when cities are built fast and erased faster, these neighborhoods offer a quiet rebuke. They remind us that meaning in cities is not given by form, but accrued through time. And time, unlike land, cannot be bought or rezoned.

You Can’t Copy What You Didn’t Understand

Some of South Korea’s most beloved urban districts today—Seongsu-dong in Seoul, Jeonpo Café Street in Busan—were never meant to succeed. They were, in many ways, neglected spaces. Too industrial, too peripheral, too messy. And yet, it was precisely this neglect that made them fertile.

What emerged was not the result of policy, but of permission—the kind of ambient permission that comes from being left alone. Low rent invited experimentation. Weak oversight allowed adaptation. There was room to try, to fail, to repaint and repurpose. Over time, a new kind of urban texture took root: one not defined by any masterplan, but by thousands of minor decisions made by people who had reasons to stay.

These places gave residents and entrepreneurs what so many new towns do not: psychological authorship. The chance to inhabit a space on their own terms, to leave a trace, to feel that their behavior changed the environment, even slightly. In psychology, this is often called “agency”—a sense of personal efficacy that enhances both place attachment and civic engagement.

Ironically, it was only after these districts became vibrant that the institutions began to notice. Suddenly, Seongsu and Jeonpo were rebranded as “creative zones.” They were photographed, surveyed, and earmarked for replication. But replication, in this case, meant replication of appearance—not process. Polished signage replaced hand-painted ones. Landlords raised rents. Zoning laws tightened. In trying to reproduce vibrancy, planners choked the conditions that had allowed it to grow.

The misunderstanding was fundamental: these spaces were not successful because they were planned well. They were successful because they were not planned at all. They functioned as what Winnicott might have called potential space—open fields of possibility between structure and improvisation. Once that ambiguity was sealed off, the life drained away.

There is a lesson here, though it’s an uncomfortable one. Some forms of urban value can’t be engineered. You can’t legislate affection. You can’t manufacture intimacy. You can’t design serendipity. And you certainly can’t copy what you never truly understood.

Planning Less, Feeling More

Cities are not built for perfection. They are built for people—who are, by nature, imperfect, unpredictable, and emotionally complex. And yet, much of contemporary urban planning is obsessed with control: zoning every parcel, scripting every street corner, curating every visual cue. In doing so, it leaves no room for what cities are meant to hold—not just infrastructure, but experience.

When municipalities attempt to replicate what made places like Seongsu or Jeonpo successful, they often recreate the form without understanding the feeling. The factories and brick textures are copied, but the looseness is gone. The timeline is accelerated, the rents rise, and the very people who created the vibrancy are pushed out. What remains is a stylized shell—visually interesting, emotionally hollow.

This is not a design problem. It is a perceptual one. Planning, as currently practiced, too often treats space as a solved equation, rather than an unfolding relationship. It ignores what psychologists and philosophers alike have long understood: that attachment—to people, to places, to meaning—requires ambiguity. It requires the unknown, the unplanned, and the time to let something take hold.

To build better cities, we must plan less, and feel more. We must allow for the unfinished, the informal, the iterative. Urban designers need to listen more than they draft. They must sense patterns of use before imposing patterns of form. They must treat every neighborhood as unique—not just in layout, but in temperament.

This shift is not about giving up control. It’s about trusting people to complete the city. About designing less for spectacle, and more for memory. Less for order, and more for rhythm. Because in the end, what makes a city livable is not how well it’s organized, but how deeply it is felt.

Cities Must Be Felt Before They Are Finished

A good city never arrives all at once. It is shaped in layers—of use, of return, of emotion. It is not what is built that makes a city meaningful, but what is remembered, what is repeated, what is quietly loved. The spaces we cherish are rarely the ones that were designed to impress. They are the ones that gave us room to leave a mark.

In recent decades, we have learned how to build quickly, efficiently, and at scale. But we are only beginning to relearn how to build with care, with time, and with feeling. The cities we have created look complete, but they feel uninhabited—not because they lack people, but because they lack permission to be lived in slowly.

Planning less does not mean planning poorly. It means planning differently—with humility toward time, with respect for local memory, and with faith in the human capacity to transform space into place.

Until then, we will keep mistaking cities for structures. And we will keep wondering why they echo when we walk through them.