Seoul's 'coolest neighbourhood' loses its soul to tourism and gentrification

Five years ago, I nominated my neighbourhood for a list. Time Out was asking writers around the world to suggest the coolest places in their cities, and I offered up Jongno 3-ga, the old heart of Seoul where I had chosen to live. The submission felt casual, almost throwaway. I didn't expect much to come of it. Then, this week, the same neighbourhood was named the coolest in the world. I should have felt vindicated. Instead, I felt something closer to grief.

I first arrived in this part of Seoul two decades earlier, fresh from school, when South Korea itself was still unfamiliar to most travellers. People warned me against the trip, sometimes confusing the country with its neighbour to the north. There were no English menus in the restaurants, but the owners welcomed me anyway. The shopfronts were worn, their windows full of handmade goods. The alleys twisted and led nowhere, and there was something deeply comfortable about that purposelessness. Men drank soju late into the evening. The place was humble, raw, utterly without pretence. I stayed.

What drew me most was who lived here. Jongno 3-ga had become a refuge for people the rest of Seoul wanted to forget: the very poor, residents of the city's cramped rooming houses, people with disabilities, musicians and artists working without galleries or venues. In Tapgol Park, elderly women sold sexual services to older men in the open air. Outside the park, pensioners played janggi, Korean chess, on the pavement. The neighbourhood asked nothing of anyone and judged no one. For the LGBTQ+ community in a deeply conservative country where being queer still carried real social cost and real danger, it was something rarer: a place to exist without hiding. On weekend nights, hundreds of men came to the street-food tents and the more than a hundred gay bars and karaoke rooms scattered through the area, finally able to be themselves.

None of this was cool in the way magazines understand cool. That was precisely the point. People could move through the neighbourhood unmolested by the need to perform, to consume, to be seen. In a culture obsessed with status and appearances, it was a pocket of genuine refuge.

Then the pandemic ended, and everything accelerated. The street barbecues and food tents remained, but now they had lines stretching down the block, people waiting an hour for a seat so they could photograph their meal and post it online. The neighbourhood that had hidden people became a place to be displayed in. With the crowds came the landlords. Rents climbed. The older drinkers left first, then the sex workers were pushed out. The chess boards disappeared from outside the park. One by one, the small merchants who had run the same shops for decades gave up their leases. In their place came claw-machine arcades, kitschy tourist shops, unmanned photo booths, and an endless succession of bakeries and coffee shops. The humble rice-and-soup restaurants that had fed the neighbourhood for generations became harder to find. What had been shabby and unremarkable was now heavily curated, designed for consumption, no longer recognisably Korean.

I don't blame the visitors. They came because they were told this place was worth seeing, and they bought exactly what they were sold. K-culture is everywhere now—BTS, Squid Game, the whole world watching South Korea. The crowds were inevitable. But standing in the neighbourhood now, watching it transform into something unrecognisable, I feel complicit. I highlighted a place I loved precisely because it was overlooked, and in doing so, I helped create the conditions for its erasure. The vulnerable people who made this neighbourhood what it was—the elderly, the queer, the poor, the artists—have been priced out or pushed away. Their refuge is gone. And I helped sell it.

Jongno 3-ga being named the world's coolest neighbourhood is not a victory. It's a loss. If I could take back the word, I would.