Aerial view of the area of Yeonghwa-dong. The site (before the construction of Project Re\Turning Gunsan) is located in the middle block. Image courtesy of ISON Architects
The Birth of the Hybrid City
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.
Why Gunsan? The answer lies in its hybrid DNA, embedded deep in the history of Gunsan. Before the port’s opening, the old downtown was a small military port of 511 people. In the late nineteenth century, as trade shifted from inland river routes to maritime international commerce, Gunsan rapidly became a hub for West Sea maritime trade. It was the only port capable of exporting rice from the Honam Plain – bordered by Geumgang River, Dongjingang River, and Mangyeonggang River – to overseas markets.
On the 1st of May, 1899, the city officially began its urban life with the opening of the port. An area of 572,000m2 in Yeonghwa-dong and Wolmyeong-dong was designated as an extraterritorial foreign concession for various countries, while Koreans were pushed into Gaebok-dong. The vacated land was filled by Japanese and Chinese residents. When the Japanese colonial period began in 1910, Japan dubbed the city ‘Gunsan of Rice’ and commenced full-scale rice exploitation.
The broad grid street system found in the old downtown was created to move rice efficiently from inland areas to the docks. Among the open ports of Mokpo, Incheon, Busan, Jinnampo, and Gunsan, the amount of rice exported through Gunsan Port was overwhelming—40.2% as of 1914. With the prices of farmland at just one-tenth of those in Japan but profits exceeding fourfold, Japanese merchants in the rice, milling, and brewing industries flocked to the city. Trade, land reclamation, construction, and infrastructure development flourished, attracting merchants and labourers from all over Korea, led by Gaeseong merchants. Chinese merchants engaged in the textile trade and agriculture also continued to settle in Gunsan, where opportunities were often better than on the mainland. After liberation, many shifted their businesses and opened Chinese restaurants such as Binhaewon. If Incheon is remembered as the birthplace of jajangmyeon, then Gunsan is where the Korean-style jjamppong (spicy seafood noodle soup) first emerged.
When the Korean War ended in 1953, the U.S. Air Force established a base in Gunsan. With the departure of Japanese residents after liberation, Yeonghwa-dong had fallen into decline, but it was soon transformed into an ‘American Town’, filled with bars, import shops, and clothing stores catering to U.S. servicemen. Women who entered contractual relationships with American soldiers – so-called yanggongju – also settled in the district. From the start, Gunsan grew as a ‘hybrid city’, where Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and American cultures overlapped and became entangled.
In the 1960s, the development of the outer port set Gunsan on the path towards becoming an industrial city, attracting major enterprises such as Baekhwa Brewery, Korea Plywood, and Kyoung Sung Rubber Company. By the 1980s, the city’s first planned district, Naun-dong, was followed by the development of Susong-dong and Jochon-dong. In the process, Yeonghwa-dong and Wolmyeong-dong were left behind by the development boom and quietly forgotten. In the early 2000s, however, colonial-era buildings were reappraised—no longer dismissed as relics to be erased but recognised as sites of ‘dark tourism’. More than 170 Japanese-style houses once again drew public attention. Beginning in 2009, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism launched Gunsan Modern Cultural City Project, soon followed by initiatives such as Modern Culture Belt Project, and Modern Historical Landscape Project. Through these, Gunsan Modern History Museum, Gowoodang, Former Joseon Bank Gunsan Branch, MITSU Coffee, Former Japan the 18th Bank Gunsan Branch were restored. In 2014, Gunsan was designated by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport as an Urban Regeneration Leading District, marking a turning point in the revival of its old downtown.
What is important in understanding a city’s history and architecture it is continued dialogue with its people—those who have grown up surrounded by that history and shaped by the buildings that embody it. After a decade of exchanges with countless Gunsan residents, what I have come to feel is that Gunsan is both a muddy stream (takryu) and a city of jjamppong.
Gunsan is deliciously jjamppong-ed with the meeting of cultures from many nations. Within a single building, one might find the skeletal frame of a Japanese-style house, witty extensions typical of Korean provincial cities, and interiors filled with American cultural content. This hybrid landscape, difficult to define within any single architectural style, does not confuse but rather sparks curiosity. The capacity to embrace rather than reject foreign cultures is, to me, the essence of Gunsan’s identity. Thus, Gunsan is a city where jjamppong values – mixing, blending, playfulness, and coexistence – take precedence over fundamentalist values such as originality, authenticity, and purity. Because there is no insistence on ‘how things must be’, the city shows little hesitation in welcoming unfamiliar urban experiments.
From 2015 to 2022, while planning and running experimental urban regeneration projects in Gunsan, I often asked myself: if I had proposed in another city a PPP regeneration model that granted full use of 2,400-pyeong (about 7,900m2) of public architecture under a 20-year private contract, would it have been accepted? Could a DIT village regeneration project – where people fix others’ vacant homes at their own expense (covered in SPACE No. 688) – have even begun? Would a privately led local management company, acting as a kind of neighbourhood planning agency, have been embraced?
Gunsan’s jjamppong attitude is also evident in Dongguksa Temple, the only Japanese-style Buddhist temple left in Korea. After liberation, other cities tore down Japanese temples under the banner of purging colonial remnants, but Gunsan’s Dongguksa Temple (then Geumgangsa Temple) was accepted as part of the community. In its front yard now stands the Statue of Peace, presenting a jjamppong landscape where conflicting histories and cultures coexist in a single scene. One emblematic moment of Gunsan’s jjamppong inclusiveness is when the chief monk lowers a screen in the main hall and uses a projector to explain the temple’s history from the colonial period onward—an image where different times and spaces are blended together.
There is a saying that ‘Gunsan has no third generation.’ The city was built by migrants from elsewhere, meaning that there were, in essence, no ‘multi-generational natives of Gunsan’ to begin with. As a result, local exclusivity has been weak, and the city has shown little resistance to accepting newcomers. In most provincial cities, unless one has completed elementary, middle, and high school locally, one is rarely recognised as an ‘insider’, no matter how long one has lived there. Gunsan, however, having long traded with the Japanese, interacted with U.S. military personnel, and lived alongside Chinese residents, has been accustomed to integrating outsiders with relative ease.
In an era of population decline and slow growth, the value of diversity is increasingly emphasised. The greater the uncertainty and unpredictability of society, the stronger the instinct to broaden diversity—much like expanding biodiversity to increase the chances of survival. For this reason, many planners are turning their attention to provincial cities – now widely referred to as the ‘local’, despite the awkwardness of the term – in search of distinctive tastes and deeper diversity. Against this backdrop, Gunsan’s muddy stream character shines even more brightly.
In his novel Takryu, the writer Chae Mansik described Gunsan as the very point where the clear stream of the Geumgang River merges into the muddy stream as it meets the West Sea. During the turbulent colonial period, Gunsan’s takryu signified confusion, corruption, and hardship. Today, however, its takryu represents diversity and creative possibilities through cultural fusion. In contrast to a stubbornly clear stream that resists change, the muddy stream – open, fluid, and willing to mix with anyone and anything – can generate far richer flows in diversity.
No account of Gunsan as a muddy stream would be complete without the influence of American military culture. To outsiders, Gunsan is known as a modern Japanese cultural city, but for its younger residents, the Japanese colonial period is in the distant past. More familiar is the breakdancing, DJing, skateboarding, cocktails, and Levi’s jeans they acquired from interacting with American soldiers who visited their neighbourhoods. It is well known that many backup dancers for Korea’s first-generation K-pop idol singers came from Gunsan. Even today, many of the city’s most distinctive cafés, bars, and restaurants – those that make visitors wonder, ‘Who came up with this?’ – are run by former B-boys, DJs, bartenders, and skateboarders.
The muddy stream spirit is also evident in Yeonghwa Town, a small traditional market with the slogan ‘An Eternally Harmonious Village’, where a Spanish tapas bar, a casual izakaya, an American-style Philly cheesesteak shop, and a genredefying bar coexist. To me, Go Eun, the owner of the tapas bar Don Quixote, is the embodiment of Yeonghwa Town’s muddy stream symbolism: he dropped out of a national university’s college of law, worked as a DJ in a cocktail bar, became a Vietnamese chef at a hotel in Vietnam, and then returned to his hometown to open a Spanish restaurant despite never having been to Spain. In Gunsan’s cheerful muddy stream, the clear stream question of ‘Why a Spanish restaurant in Gunsan?’ simply dissolves into ‘Why not?’
The Muddy Stream Approach of Project Re\Turning Gunsan
Gunsan’s muddy stream character does not mean that it has no place to call home simply because the clear stream orthodoxy is weak. Instead of orthodoxy, Gunsan possesses a kind of friendship capital stronger than that of any other city. Perhaps, because it is a city of great change through which people come and go, friendships with neighbours who can be called upon at any time have developed. Especially in the old downtown, Gunsan’s residents have built a credible ecosystem based upon friendship. When I looked beyond the level of tourists and observed the downtown as a place sustained by living population and related population,▼1 it was tied together with strong bonds of friendship. Many of the bars, restaurants, and cafés were run by people who visited each other’s shops, spent time together, and often joined forces to create events. They shared food ingredients and exchanged manpower, forming one ‘ecosystem’. Thanks to this widely spread ecosystem of friendship capital, whenever I began a new project in Gunsan, I was able to quickly secure the talents needed.
If friendship capital has formed an ecosystem, then the music and fine arts faculties build Gunsan’s worldview. In this small city of 260,000, it is unusual that both music and art institutional activities remain so vibrant. The department of practical music at Howon University and department of fine art at Kunsan National University – renowned nationwide – have produced graduates who stay in the area, opening distinctive businesses or continuing cultural and artistic pursuits. More recently, even the faculty of department of practical music at Howon University have moved into the old downtown, enriching everyday life there with music.
The architectural design of Project Re\Turning Gunsan (hereinafter Re\Turning Gunsan) fully embodies the city’s
characteristic blend of jjamppong; hybridity, muddy stream, friendship capital, and worldview of music and fine arts. The building began its life during the Japanese colonial period as a commercial property in the Japanese quarter, later becoming a yanggongju bar and a fortune-teller’s shop, and has now been reborn as a multicultural regeneration hub.
Looking closely at the details of Re\Turning Gunsan, one cannot easily tell which parts are newly built and which belong to the original structure, as the boundaries have been deliberately blurred. Rather than a strict division by era or a decisive act of demolition, the building embodies muddy stream architecture: an architectural practice of appropriate absorption and natural blending, modeled after the very way Gunsan took in and interwove Japanese, Chinese, and American cultures. The same interpretation is revealed in the nonchalant reuse of a girder salvaged from the Former Joseon Bank building – constructed in the same era as Re\Turning Gunsan – which has been effortlessly transformed into a bar table.
Re\Turning Gunsan is also a project built upon friendship capital. Leading the project, Song Sungjin (principal, ShareWe LC.) is a figure possessing the deepest and most robust friendship capital in Gunsan. His flagship Italian restaurant in Gunsan, Paradiso Perduto (hereinafter Paradiso), is well known for having a high number of long-term staff who have remained with him over ten years. Businesses founded by the alumni of this restaurant continue to maintain close ties with the Paradiso team, forming what can be called the ‘Paradiso ecosystem’.
Re\Turning Gunsan, a fully private-led urban regeneration project driven by local members, faced a severe financial crisis in early 2024 due to rising material and labour costs. At that moment, forty local shop owners – senior and junior colleagues from the Paradiso ecosystem – and their acquaintances readily pooled 800 million KRW without mentioning interest. They called themselves the ‘Romantic Bonds’. From a researcher’s perspective, I might try to explain this phenomenon in terms of academic, regional, or familial ties, yet among them, there was no common denominator other than mutual support and long-standing friendship. Their actions, difficult to categorise neatly, are an unmistakably Gunsan-style expression of muddy stream friendship capital.
GCC (Gunsan Creative Center) is a PPP regeneration of the Gunsan Community Hall (1989), the final work of architect Kim Chung-up. The term ‘regional extinction’ has been circulated ominously, reflecting the threats posed by population decline, aging, and decreasing tax revenues in provincial cities. A representative government response to regional extinction has been the construction of public buildings, typically in the form of multi-purpose cultural spaces. While 50% of construction costs are subsidised by the central government, operational costs during the building’s lifespan – often four to five times the initial construction cost – must be fully borne by local governments. As a result, public building operating deficits have escalated sharply, currently approaching 1 trillion KRW annually. In other words, simply ‘existing’ costs the government around 1 trillion KRW each year. Worse still, many facilities are built without thorough planning or demand assessment, only to become vacant again when visitors fail to materialise. GCC’s story begins at precisely this point of failure.
The PPP regeneration model of GCC eliminates the roughly 1.5 billion KRW per year in public subsidies, while adding a private profit component within the site. Revenues from the private portion cover the operating and labour costs of the public portion. From the local government’s perspective, this allows the operation of a ‘surplus-type’ of public building—no longer spending 1.5 billion KRW annually, and even collecting usage fees. The private operator enjoys sufficient autonomy and a stable 20-year operation period within carefully defined contractual boundaries, including pre-planning rights. Citizens are offered a vibrant space and content that goes beyond mundane public architecture, embodying private creativity and operational capabilities.
Just as the unfamiliarity of living alongside early foreign settlers after the opening of the port, today’s public and private sectors remain strangers to one another. The PPP regeneration is a jjamppong-style project, mixing these proximate but unfamiliar groups. While a muddy stream absorbs heterogeneous resources without separation, jjamppong mixes ingredients while maintaining the distinct presence of each. At GCC, public and private roles are preserved, yet the partitions between them are opened, allowing the building to operate as a unified team. Breaking the taboo of withholding operational control from the private sector, GCC became the first site to allow private agents to manage a public building for 20 years.
Although Gunsan Community Hall (now GCC) is the final work of Kim Chung-up, questions remain regarding the extent of his involvement, as the design was completed during his period of illness. Budget constraints also produced a significant gap between the winning proposal and the completed building. Here, the jjamppong character of Gunsan, which is less obsessed with originality or authenticity, combines with the project’s conditions to preserve the exterior while allowing bold architectural experiments. Lim Kwonwoong (Architects KLIMA), selected for the renovation design, inserted a daring pedestrian block called the Hoegwan-gil (hallway path) in front of the building, connecting multiple segmented levels including the approach, stairs, sunken plaza, exhibition hall, performance hall, and seating. Instead of suggesting the unconditional preservation of the original form, the project adopted jjamppong-style interventions aligned with the times and new demands.
GCC, which officially opened on the 14th of August 2025, is a place where new cultures meet and intermix jjamppong-style and where new people have long been embraced turbid-stream-style. Whether mingling boldly like jjamppong or flowing subtly like a muddy stream, it is an urban context that welcomes all. Visitors to Gunsan can trust the city’s own GCC, which has embraced all outsiders over time, and enjoy the pleasures of a muddy, inclusive experience.
Regeneration project for the neglected shopping district in Gunsan, 2022 Angdong Cart DIT (co-directors, Yoon Zoosun, Chae Ahram, Kim Bomi). Image courtesy of Yoon Zoosun
A panoramic view of Yeonghwa-dong and Wolmyeong-dong, revealing gridstyle reclaimed districts developed during the Japanese colonial period to control and export rice from the Honam Plain. The large building in the lower right is the Gunsan Modern History Museum, established through the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s Gunsan Modern Cultural City Project. Image courtesy of Yoon Zoosun
1 Living population, defined in Article 2(2) of the Special Act on Support for Depopulation Regions, is a concept adapted from Japan’s ‘related population’. It encompasses not only registered residents but also individuals who stay in a given region for purposes such as commuting, studying, tourism, leisure, business, or regular exchange.
You can see more information on the SPACE No. September (2025).
Yoon Zoosun
Yoon Zoosun is a neighbourhood architect who seeks to expand the scope of architecture. He is interested in the regeneration of architecture and urban spaces, as well as in redefining the concept of architects. Since 2015, he has conducted experimental research in Gunsan, extending his work from observational studies to hands-on, practical exploration. Since 2018, he has organised the ‘Extra-Architectural Exploration seminar series’, seminars that focus on the ‘architect as community designer’ and since 2019, he has planned DIT (Do I t Together) workshops, exploring the ‘architect as builder’. He is currently leading the UDTT Lab at the department of architecture at Chungnam National University, an action-oriented urban architecture collective based in Chungcheongnam-do for better life of community. Yoon respects creative local space operators and works closely with them to improve urban environments of various scales. He has created notable precedents in fields such as community management companies linking public, private, and academic sectors, tactical urbanism, DIT village regeneration, PPP publ ic bui lding regenerat ion, and walkable city initiatives. His representative field studies include the regeneration of Yeonghwa Town in Gunsan, the Gunsan Community Hall (now GCC), and the DIT space regeneration series.
