Journalists who write about Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, often dwell on the supposedly “Stalinist” characteristics of its high-rise apartment blocks, and their reduction of human beings to ant-like creatures. To the writers, these blocks are clearly a bad thing. Yet some three hundred kilometers further down the Korean peninsula, in the South Korean capital of Seoul, tower blocks seem even more domineering. Clustered together in miniature cities within the greater conurbation, they have become the preferred dwelling place of the affluent and successful. South Koreans boast of their tower blocks and the urban infrastructure of elevated roadways, underpasses and bridges that go with them, comparing Seoul's Yŏŭ ido Island to Manhattan. There is nothing negative about this assessment of such buildings.

In this fascinating book, the French geographer Valérie Gelézeau examines how this came to be. Her work is party based on direct observation through living in Seoul, and interviewing urban residents. As well as examining how people live in the towers, she also includes much information about traditional Korean housing and explains how today's city dwellers manage to preserve some traditional practices in the very different spaces that they occupy today. She traces the origins of the modem dwelling complexes to the industrial complexes established in the Japanese colonial period, but argues that the real take-off for high-rise buildings was only practical with improvements in water pressure and the reliability of electricity supplies, for central heating and elevators, that had to wait until the economic transformation of South Korea under President Park Chung-hee began to take effect. It was thus only in the late 1970s that the widespread use of buildings over four-six stories became possible. Before then, the typical Seoul “high-rise” was about five stories, with no elevator and with a water tank on the roof. In a society where few people owned their own cars, there was little or no need for parking places. Some of these low highrises survive, now updated, with the water tank used only for emergencies, and where possible, with parking spaces for the explosion in car ownership since the mid-1980s. In general, however, the mighty blocks that now dominate so much of the city have replaced these early efforts.

Park and those around him then encouraged such buildings for a number of reasons.