BAMSEOM DANGINRI LIVE

The current urban quality of the area around the Danginri Power Plant site on the Han River, facing Bamseom Island, is that of a symphony played by an orchestra without a conductor. It’s where the vision of the city as a machine resulted in an entropic agglomeration of independent performances focused on energy production, flood control, and vehicular movement. It’s a vast urban territory without place, with a historyfree chronology. This all started 90 years ago when Seoul re-engineered itself as a modern metropolis. However, unlike most locations along the Han River walled off by tall buildings, there is potential for this to become the last public area of this scale that can accommodate public activities along the waterfront and with a larger cohesive cultural and ecological ambition. Now it seems beyond impossible to imagine a ‘collective city’ in a hyper compartmentalized world, where the sum is almost always less than the collected parts. How can this urban territory, with these complex incompatibles, become a new ground? What kind of collective effort does it take for the accidentally found site to create a substitute utopia?