In Seoul, a Freeway became a Riverside Park

One of the delightful features of downtown Seoul, South Korea, is a stream called Cheonggyecheon. It winds 11 km (7 miles) through the central city, lined with various parks and promenades.

As Seoul grew in the 1600s, Cheonggyecheon served as its sewer. Korean kings invested in improving it, building embankments and levees to control flooding. In 1904 part of it it looked like this, muddy, polluted, some said dangerous. Notice that diversion of the stream's water for human use had reduced it to a trickle during dry seasons. The Japanese imperialists who ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945 also invested in the stream and in Seoul's water and sewer systems generally, and the stream was cleaned up a lot.

When refugees flocked to Seoul after the Korean War, shanty-towns lined the stream and it was once a again an open sewer. In the 1960s growing South Korea decided that the stream was an eyesore. So they put what was left of the stream's flow into a concrete-lined tunnel and built this elevated expressway above it.

But then in the 2000s, as Seoul's people started to want nicer lives, not wider expressways, a plan was floated to get rid of the highway and bring back the stream. The plan was approved in 2003 and construction was completed 2005. The result was this delightful urban amenity.

The transformation was not cheap; the bill eventually came to $281 million. 

Some environmentalists protested spending all that money to create something they called fake. Because, remember, so much of the stream's water had been diverted, the new Cheonggyecheon had to be rewatered using sources like water piped from metro stations and even some municipal water in dry seasons. I don't care if it's fake; it looks wonderful.

Three pillars left as a reminder of the freeway that once ran here.

Projects like this remind us that the world does not have to keep getting uglier. It was expensive, but South Korea is rich, and can afford it. New businesses have sprouted up all along the stream, helped to pay the city back for the expense, and it has also helped the city to attract new residents.