![]() ![]() “Throughout the game, zoning is the essential power in the player’s arsenal, granting them the ability to plop residential subdivisions here or industrial parks there, all while keeping incompatible uses separate,” he explains. Nolan Gray, opening the first chapter of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. ![]() For many in my own generation, raised in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, our fascination with cities and our misconceptions about zoning were instilled by the same experience: that of “a little game called SimCity.” For, in more than a few cases, we really are recent converts, having only turned anti-zoning after approaching the technical aspects of cities through some more immediately interesting topic like architecture, infrastructure, or transit. In that particular sphere, we know full well that zoning is bad, and at all times stand ready to declare as much with the zeal of the recent convert. It certainly doesn’t include me, nor does it include most of the urbanists now out there writing about cities in books, in publications, and on social media. Before I go any further, perhaps that we needs clarification. ![]() We all assume that zoning is good, but it’s actually bad. Ten years on, it has nearly 4.5 billion views on YouTube and features in the Victoria and Albert museum’s “ Hallyu! The Korean Wave” exhibition, which opens next week. A satire of the garish lifestyles led by Seoul’s nouveau riche, that song - and even more so its strenuously absurd music video - showed the Korean entertainment industry that, one way or the other, the West could be won over. This pop-cultural “Korean wave” - or hallyu - began sweeping Asia around the turn of the millennium and reached Western shores in earnest a decade ago, with the surprise global phenomenon that was Psy’s Gangnam Style. This distinction results in large part from the West’s years of exposure to Korean popular culture, thanks to the likes of the Billboard-chart dominating BTS, Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winning Parasite, and of course Squid Game. Americans in particular have by now come to regard South Koreans as what I call “the Westerners of Easterners”, a people more culturally relatable than the Japanese and less geopolitically threatening than the Chinese. ![]() It’s no coincidence that Star Wars’ first prominent east Asian performer is Korean. He’ll soon take that fame to new heights as a leading man in The Acolyte, the forthcoming Star Wars series from Disney+. He has won international fame - and an Emmy this week - with his starring role in the hit Netflix series Squid Game, the dystopian South Korean thriller binge-watched around the world last autumn. Lee Jung-jae is in many ways the epitome of South Korean soft power. You can also keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook as well. My public speaking, which I’ve done in places like Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Chapman University, California State University Long Beach, and the Seoul Book and Culture Club, usually covers this same suite of cities-and-culture-related topics. My video essay series The Ci ty in Cinema examines cities (especially Los Angeles) as they appear on film. I’ve previously appeared on a Seoul urbanism radio feature on TBS eFM’s Koreascape as well as hosted and produced the world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture, which evolved from the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas. I write for outlets including the New Yorker, Guardian Cities, Open Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books (including its Korea Blog ), KCET, Boom: A Journal of California (and guest-edited its issue on architecture, infrastructure, and the built environment), Bookforum, Boing Boing, Put This On, The Japan Foundation, The Millions, 3Quarksdaily, The Quarterly Conversation, and Maximum Fun. On my new Substack newsletter Books on Cities, I write long-form essay-reviews on exactly that. … a Seoul-based essayist, broadcaster, and public speaker on cities, language, and culture. ![]()
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