A high-angle view of the Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul, showing the restored waterway and pedestrian paths flanked by urban skyscrapers.
SEOUL · May 4, 2026 : When Anne Hidalgo and Norman Foster shared the stage at Bloomberg CityLab Madrid last week, their consensus was blunt: the modern city begins when you remove the car. For Paris, this has been a twelve-year crusade. For Seoul, it is a lesson learned two decades ago through the Cheonggyecheon restoration: a precedent that remains strikingly relevant, yet stubbornly incomplete.
The Cheonggyecheon Precedent
In 2003, Seoul took a radical gamble by demolishing a 10-lane elevated highway to uncover a buried historic stream. The result was an immediate validation of the philosophy that urban space is a vacuum; when asphalt is retracted, nature and humanity fill the void. Today, the Cheonggyecheon attracts an average of 60,000 visitors daily. It didn’t just lower local temperatures by 5.6 degrees; it proved that removing car-centric infrastructure creates a superior social and economic engine.
The Foster-Hidalgo Thesis
The Madrid forum highlighted that the "15-minute city" is a global design imperative. Norman Foster’s institute reinforces that the car was the dominant negative force in 20th-century urbanism. Seoul’s stream is the "proof of concept" Paris uses to justify its own aggressive pedestrianization. If a massive freeway can be successfully replaced by a blue-green corridor, any boulevard can be reclaimed for the public.
The Politics of Permanence
However, Seoul also serves as a warning. While the Cheonggyecheon works, the broader battle against car dependency continues. Despite the success of highway removal, car ownership in Seoul is still growing, and "road-diet" politics remain contentious. Transformation requires more than one grand project; it demands a political infrastructure capable of holding the vision across multiple election cycles: a reality Hidalgo knows well.
Source: Bloomberg CityLab Madrid April 27, CNN Paris Hidalgo, Norman Foster Institute
Tags: Paris / Anne Hidalgo / Norman Foster / Public Space / Car-Free / Urban Transformation / bcdW Current Today : May 4, 2026
