Cameron Howland
View from Munhaksan of the Munhak sports complex in Incheon. On summer and winter days alike, hikers walk several trails leading up and down this mountain. This view has remained relatively unchanged since my first time in the city.
The city of Incheon, South Korea, sits on the west coast of the nation, about an hour by train from Seoul, and home to one of the largest airports in the world. Nearly 3 million people live in dense neighborhoods surrounding several forested peaks. As I learned, it is where the South Korean and United Nations forces made one of their most daring assaults of the Korean war, facing the treacherous and unpredictable tides of the Incheon Bay, to re-capture the largely undefended city, and reversing the course of the war. This is memorialized on the side of Cheonglyangsan mountain in a large war memorial which overlooks the bay which is now filled with high-rise developments and “land reclamation” projects.
My connection to this urban landscape started when I was just four; my parents moved my siblings and I halfway across the world to Incheon for a summer. We lived with close family friends in a high-rise complex off the Dongchun subway stop, where my siblings and I marveled at the scale of the connected “emart” superstore. We would ride the train several stops north to school everyday accompanied by my parents, not old enough to ride the train on our own. Though I was only four years old, these details are instilled in my mind; the feel of the subway, scale of the landscape, sound of the language, and the taste of the food. Pictures of our travels, and stories recorded by my father have helped keep these memories fresh enough to recall here, all I remember about Incheon.
What is most easy to remember are the things so different from my hometown in New Hampshire. For example, the memory of endless subway lines, trains and stations has stuck in my mind indefinitely. This is not just because of my own excitement towards trains as a four year old, but rather because it is where I first remember taking the subway. Durham New Hampshire, for reference, has a singular rail line; an Amtrak stop connecting Portland and Boston which runs irregularly and in many cases doesn’t bother to stop. Incheon on the other hand is connected with the greater Seoul metro system which serves over seven million people daily. Everything in South Korea exists at a scale I could not understand, buildings, rails, and roads far bigger than anything I had seen.
Songdo City’s Central Park. This entirely new portion of Incheon was constructed on “reclaimed” land from Incheon’s bay in the past 15 years. A project that had only just started my first time in South Korea.
This past winter, I had the opportunity to recall all I remember about Incheon during a two week trip back to South Korea, with my sister, mom and dad. This time however, I was experiencing the city as a student of planning and an adult. The first thing I noticed was that everything still felt so big. Despite growing an extra two feet since my last time there, I was still astonished by the scale of the city. For miles in each direction dense organized housing developments rose in between a patchwork of forested mountains. The metro was just how I remembered it, busy, busy, on time, and busy. I remembered the mountains, hiking through forested trails surrounded by one of the most densely urbanized landscapes in the world, the sounds of the city still present through the branches above. Being back in Incheon however was not just about remembering how it was, but discovering how it is. As I’ve learned, throughout Incheon’s history it has both expanded into the bay, as well as surrounding mountains, constructing impressive infrastructure to connect neighborhoods. In a planning context I am now fascinated with how the city continues to expand to meet housing needs.
A view of South Korea's mountainous landscape, with interspersed development.