How can small and mid-sized cities struggling with urban hollowing, population decline, and vacant houses find a way forward? Gunsan—a city that began as a port town during the Japanese colonial period and, through cycles of rise and fall, became a place where diverse people and cultures intermingle like a jjamppong (Chinese-style Korean seafood noodle soup). Some have returned to transform the city’s declining old downtown into a ‘a neighbourhood alive with residents’. The team behind Project Re\Turning Gunsan aims to revive a cluster of jeoksan (Japanese-colonial-era) houses, formed over a century ago, through architectural intervention, cultural content, and social networks. Loosely connected relationships rooted in friendship and romance attract a wide range of participants – from local youth and merchants to community activists, cultural planners, architects, designers, editors, novelists, artists, and musicians – gradually filling vacant houses and alleyways one by one. Why Gunsan? It’s time to hear their story.

Over the past decade, Gunsan has served as Korea’s stage for the boldest urban regeneration experiments. Many projects bear ‘first in the nation’ labels: PPP (Publc-Private Partnership) public building regeneration (GCC), DIT (Do It Together) vacant space regeneration (DIT Festa), privately led block-scale regeneration (Project Re\Turning Gunsan), SK E&S’s SME support programme (Local:Rise Gunsan), and Korean-style town management (Yeonghwa Town). All began here.

Once the Preoccupation of the Ideal City, Where is ‘Publicness’ Now? I believe that the recent transformation of the LG Twin Towers (hereinafter Twin Towers)’s communal area on the lower levels was not just a simple remodeling, but rather an ‘architectural’ remodeling in response to the area’s changing context. I also find it interesting that the area is in Yeouido. When the original designer, SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), first designed the building, Yeouido was a wasteland.

The project supports the goals of the NPNRU (initiated by the French government in 2014) by modernising one of Avignon’s key public facilities and creating an inclusive and attractive community hub. The library, which was once known as ‘Beaubourg of Avignon’ when it was built in 1985, is located at Saint-Chamand, one of Avignon’s three ‘priority neighbourhoods’. The NPNRU aims to improve quality of life by creating urban ‘centralities’ with high-quality public spaces, breaking down physical and social barriers, and encouraging a more socially mixed population through more varied housing options. A key improvement is the new tramway which connects residents to the city centre in under 20 minutes, combatting Saint-Chamand’s long-standing isolation.