Walling political conflicts : an urban archetype for the Demilitarized Zone

Abstract

Polarity in political ideologies within the Korea Peninsula has left a heavily militarized infrastructure, called the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The no man's land is a thickly belted corridor on the Korean peninsula that demarcates North Korea from South Korea, incorporating territory on both sides of the cease-fire line and being created by retreating 2km along each side of the line. For these political reasons, it has remained almost untouched for some six decades since the cessation of warfare in 1953, which has made it one of the most pristine undeveloped areas in Asia. While recent efforts to develop the DMZ into an ecology park are on the rise, this thesis is intended to seek a strategy for initiating a buffer city between the two Koreas. As is well known in the case of the Kaesong Industrial Park near the DMZ, operated as a collaborative economic development between South and North Korea, this territory has oscillated between shutdowns and reopenings because of political fluctuations. This thesis asks, what if a city in the DMZ confronts a political situation where it is impossible to secure permanent settlements? The thesis aims to propose a new urban archetype in which political ideologies are able to coexist along with their inevitable conflicts. The strategy of the proposition is two-fold. First, the DMZ city needs to accommodate two different political systems, communism and capitalism.This implies that the city should not be made of one consistent system. The second is that because of its extremely unstable military situation, the DMZ city needs to have a different city structure according to the change of political risks, repeatedly alternating between abandonment and reoccupation. Through the exploration of the DMZ, entangled with political issues under the pressure of uncertainty, this study has tried to explore a new archetype for the political city, the wall and enclave, where different ideologies are co-existing through revealing their conflicts.