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- [00:12]
Andrew Tuck
Hello and welcome to the Urbanist, Monocle's program all about the built environment. I'm your host, Andrew Tuck.
- [00:18]
Margie O'Driscoll
Coming up, how might you take this terrible, terrible situation and actually build something that might create better outcomes for people?
- [00:27]
Andrew Tuck
We look at the impacts that war and conflict can have on our cities and how we go about rebuilding them better than before. We start with how to best approach the rebuilding of Ukraine as the war continues to rage on. Then we assess the field of forensic architecture and what it can reveal about war crimes. And finally, we look at the slow redevelopment of a former US military base in the South Korean capital. That's all ahead in the next 30 minutes right here on the Urbanist. With me, Andrew Tuck. Since Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago, Ukrainians around the country have banded together to rebuild parts of the country damaged by the war. It's an effort born out of tragedy, but some architects and designers see an opportunity to to rebuild a better and a more sustainable Ukraine. Levi Bridges sent us this report outlining how an international team of design gurus turned war architects are rebuilding the country.
- [01:37]
Levi Bridges
Recently, Russia has launched some of its largest ever attacks on Ukraine. News footage captures images of Ukrainians spending sleepless nights, nights in bomb shelters as buildings above are destroyed by missiles and drones. Last week I zoomed with Andriy Lakshtanov in Kyiv. He tells me that getting real rest is pretty rare these days.
- [02:10]
Andriy Lakshtanov
It was a terrible night with constant explosion and air defense during all night.
- [02:16]
Levi Bridges
Lakshtanov is with the Ukrainian NGO Dobrobat and a network of volunteers rebuilding neighborhoods damaged by the war. Lekshtanov is a construction professional with years of experience, but he says most of Dobrobat's volunteers had never done construction work before the war.
- [02:35]
Andriy Lakshtanov
It was like pure human nature and willingness to help those who are affected by the war.
- [02:48]
Levi Bridges
This week, Dobrobat's volunteers filmed one damaged neighborhood in Kyiv looking for buildings that can be repaired.
- [02:55]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Usually within this type of explosion, you lose the windows and your roof might be damaged, but overall structure, it still stands.
- [03:05]
Levi Bridges
Volunteers then patch up these buildings, making them habitable so local residents aren't displaced. Lekshtanov says Ukrainians are already collaborating with architects and designers outside inside the country to redesign parts of Ukrainian cities flattened by war.
- [03:24]
Andriy Lakshtanov
We need to take the brightest minds in order to create a strategy for the future reconstruction.
- [03:32]
Levi Bridges
Margie o' Driscoll is an American collaborating on reconstruction plans. O' Driscoll has decades of experience helping launch innovative design competitions in San Francisco and and developing City spaces centered around the needs of communities. That helped her see the tragedy in Ukraine as a potential opportunity to answer a question that Ukrainians are grappling with.
- [03:58]
Margie O'Driscoll
Essentially, how might you take this terrible, terrible situation and actually build something that might create better outcomes for people?
- [04:06]
Levi Bridges
O' Driscol first visited Ukraine just months after Russia's invasion. Taking the train that runs east from Poland. Just looking out the train window, she immediately started getting ideas. In Poland, the farmhouses she saw had solar panels, but we went through the.
- [04:28]
Margie O'Driscoll
Border checkpoint in Ukraine, and all of a sudden I noticed that we saw no more solar panels on buildings. I mean, it was marked that we no longer saw such a sign of sustainability.
- [04:39]
Levi Bridges
Even without solar panels. There was a way to make many of Ukraine's buildings more climate friendly, o' Driscoll says. Lots of apartments that were blown open didn't have insulation, so rebuilding allowed workers to make them more energy efficient. Other buildings are being completely redesigned, though, o' Driscoll says on another visit to the country, she toured a university in Irpin, just outside Kyiv, that was badly hit by shelling.
- [05:09]
Margie O'Driscoll
We met with a group of students in a makeshift public hall that had a skylight that was still badly damaged, covered over in plywood. There' pock marks on all the walls from the shelling, hasn't been repainted. It's really as far from an ideal learning environment that you could imagine.
- [05:26]
Levi Bridges
O' Driscoll brought a group of Ukrainian architects, builders, and government officials to San Francisco, hoping they would get inspired by ways that designers and builders have re envisioned parts of their city. It was a way to test whether ideas and practices in California had merit for Ukraine.
- [05:47]
Margie O'Driscoll
We took them through the Presidio, which is an old military base in San Francisco that's now been converted into one of the jewels of the national parks. And we showed them how a military base could actually become a recreation center.
- [06:02]
Levi Bridges
The strategy focuses on identifying opportunities. For example, o' Driscoll says a destroyed single family home in a Ukrainian city can potentially offer a future site to build an eight story apartment.
- [06:17]
Margie O'Driscoll
And you are creating opportunities for, say, eight families to live there, as opposed to the one family who lived there before. By bringing in density into the heart.
- [06:27]
Levi Bridges
Of cities, o' Driscoll notes, you need buy in from local communities to pull this off. Late last year, o' Driscoll helped organize a design competition to rebuild the university in Irpin she visited. At a recent gathering in Ukraine, she sat in the audience as the winners were announced. The winning team of architects from the Global Sustainable Design firm Stantec designed a new main campus building for the university with a big open entrance and large windows. Its design leaves an open space between the university and a nearby park, so the space is accessible to both students and the community. Ukrainian born architect Eugene Chumakov worked on.
- [07:20]
Andriy Lakshtanov
The design community is so important for.
- [07:22]
Thomas Pinero
Ukrainians and so opening up building to.
- [07:24]
Andriy Lakshtanov
The community felt like a right idea.
- [07:27]
Levi Bridges
This university is to be a space where people would flourish in a country recovering from war. Chumakov's partner on the project, Dath Wang, says that equity and inclusivity are at the heart of the design. It was meant to be a place.
- [07:42]
Il Weizmann
Where everyone felt welcome, including veterans with.
- [07:45]
Levi Bridges
Physical limitations removing any of the barriers for them to come back and fully participate in this academic and civic life. Margie o' Driscoll says that today Irpines University is one of the only buildings in the city that hasn't been rebuilt yet. Unlike other parts of the country, she says there's already a large scale rebuilding effort underway.
- [08:08]
Margie O'Driscoll
There's everywhere we went, instead of seeing destruction, we saw completed buildings and a city moving on with its life.
- [08:16]
Levi Bridges
But there is still a war. Andrei Lekshtanov says, especially considering that US support for Ukraine is rapidly decreasing. Ukrainians are having to shift their focus a bit.
- [08:28]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Unfortunately now construction is not the first priority. The biggest priority is stop the aggressor with anything you can.
- [08:39]
Levi Bridges
When the war does end, Ukrainians will then be able to design and fully rebuild more sustainable and inclusive cities.
- [08:51]
Andrew Tuck
My thanks to Levi Bridges for that report. What can the built environment reveal about war crimes? That's a question experts at forensic Architecture ask on a near daily basis. The award winning research lab has made it their mission to, in their words, use architecture to confront power. Monocle's Alan Weedon met founder Il Weizmann to understand what architectural forensics is all about.
- [09:26]
Alan Weedon
Sometimes I even say I'm an architectural historian and you can be sometimes a historian of a split second.
- [09:32]
Il Weizmann
This is El Weitzman. He's a British Israeli architect best known for his research lab, forensic architecture. Based at London's Goldsmiths College.
- [09:45]
Alan Weedon
So this is the main room. When you come here it's I guess it looks something like an architectural studio and something like a newsroom.
- [09:56]
Il Weizmann
Founded in 2010, the lab's a collective of experts working across architecture, the arts and human rights. Together they study the built environment to investigate the things states and corporations would prefer to keep hidden. They don't work on behalf of authorities, but rather at the invitation of those with less power, who often have been on the receiving end of violence. Past investigations have looked at police killings, corporate negligence, to state sanctioned genocide.
- [10:28]
Alan Weedon
You cannot do it without space. We understood very soon that the way to do it was actually you build a 3D model of the environment where it happened. And we would weave the multiplicity of data from video, from testimonies, material traces, splatter, bomb craters, etc. All those evidence was put together in a single architectural model. And you can start building narrative between those points now.
- [10:59]
Il Weizmann
You might have seen this kind of time based analysis before. They're those long form articles that combine text with verified photos and videos, allowing you to virtually dissect an incident frame by frame. Media and human rights organizations have created visual investigative units since the advent of architectural forensics, such as Amnesty International and the New York Times, both of which are close collaborators with forensic architecture. However, there are times where there's scant visual evidence to analyze, leaving people's memory to do the heavy lifting. And in these situations, forensic architecture is a method called situated testimony, an interview process where 3D architectural models are used to help witness recall. With this model we can go through all of the floors of the tower using this little widget here, which is called the floor selector. It's a process that helped digitally reconstruct a notorious black site in Syria. The Sidnaya prison used to torture and disappear dissidents of the Assad regime.
- [12:08]
Alan Weedon
One of my close colleagues that we worked with for a long time, his name is Lawrence Abu Hamdan, he's established a kind of an acoust architectural way of investigating that space. And we were interviewing the witnesses and they were reconstructing the sound. They haven't seen the space, they've heard that space. So we were playing different echoes until we got it right. And then we understood how high the ceiling was, what materials there are. And then there was one of the prisoners, who's a builder, only knows that the flow tile is 33 cm long and counted at the number of flow tiles. From the dimension of a flow tile, you get the dimension of a cell. From the dimension of a cell, you get the length of the corridor. Together with the acoustics, you get the architecture of the place.
- [12:59]
Andrew Tuck
One of the first places liberated by.
- [13:01]
Il Weizmann
The rebels in Damascus is Sadnaya prison, north of the capital. It's thought tens of thousands of people have been killed there since the outbreak of civil war.
- [13:11]
Alan Weedon
When the place was liberated, we were elated. It was one of the most hopeful moments in my life, I think. Obviously we put immediately our model on GitHub, which is kind of an open source library, allowing everybody to kind of use that model in the search. What we were surprised is how precise our model was. A model created through very little visual evidence and mainly from memory actually, you know, created a very precise model of the prison.
- [13:47]
Il Weizmann
Often investigations take a long time, but once they're complete, the team do everything in their power to share their findings as far and wide as possible. While the court's an obvious home for forensic architecture's analysis of evidence, that same investigation may also be recut for lectures, for appearances at art festivals or galleries. The team even won a Turner Prize in 2018 for their efforts.
- [14:12]
Alan Weedon
Very often people in court asking me, are you actually an artist? And I go, look, no, I am a forensic architect. But forensic architecture involves showing the same kind of evidence both in the media, in court and in art. Because to make evidence political, it has to be made public.
- [14:31]
Il Weizmann
One recently completed investigation is a prime example of this. The team has published a large data mapping project documenting Israel's attacks on Gaza since October 2023. An interactive website allows you to click around a map of Gaza to see the granular layers of destruction of schools, hospitals, to even greenhouses. An accompanying 800 plus page report has also been sent to lawyers representing South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, an accusation Tel Aviv has always denied. And that forensic architecture report has been cited by the South African team in past public submissions to the icj.
- [15:13]
Alan Weedon
A genocide case really is about intent, which means you need to understand the system behind the totality of violence that is applied. This is why we built a special tool which allows you to see day by day all the incidents that we could collect. And we really, we were harvesting tens of thousands of videos, verifying them, understanding what kind of violation we're seeing, putting a data point on the map, and then start seeing the systematic nature of these violations. As an Israeli born person, there's nothing more painful than recognizing that the place where you've grown in is accused and you are actually part of building a case that it is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Architects see how space is organized and politics is matter slowing into form. I am offering perhaps a kind of a sub discipline, a small, modest sub discipline of architecture that actually shows architecture has something else to offer. Is there something in architecture that can actually be a force that confronts power rather than surrenders to it?
- [16:48]
Andrew Tuck
My thanks there to Alan Weedon. Yongsan Garrison is a former US military headquarters that existed in the part of the South Korean capital of Seoul. Today it's a vast urban void right next to Itaewon that's been in a slow transition since most operations moved to Camp Humphreys, the largest U.S. base overseas. In the 90s, the garrison's golf course was returned to South Korea and turned into a family park and the National Museum of Korea. But you can still see the barbed wire fence and the on base houses beyond. New sections are opening up slowly, but a peek through the fences reveals huge abandoned and unkempt stretches still marked by US property Keep out signs. Thomas Pinero visited the site recently and he sent us this report on the impression that the Yongsan Garrison left on him.
- [17:51]
Thomas Pinero
Yongsan Garrison was built in the early 1900s under Japanese occupation, A strategic military outpost set just beyond Seoul's old city walls on what was then its rural fringe. After World War II, the US army moved in and stayed for seven decades, turning the compound into one of its most important overseas bases. At full capacity, the Garrison housed over 20,000 troops and their families, along with a civilian workforce, all spread across more than 2 million square meters. Meanwhile, so transformed from a war torn capital into a bustling modern metropolis, the city eventually wrapped itself around the base and placed it quite literally at the center of things. In the 90s, a slow process begun to return the land to South Korea, with sections of the former garrison gradually absorbed into the city and the entire military personnel relocated to Camp Amfreys in pyeong Thaek, about 60km south of Seoul. The long term vision to transform the entire site into Yongsan Park, a vast urban green space many are already calling Seoul's own Central Park. Yet the project remains far from complete. Concrete walls topped with barbed wires still trace the perimeter with warning signs, delivering a clear message. U.S. government property keep out.
- [19:17]
Andriy Lakshtanov
I often describe Yungsan Garrison as a kind of black hole, a massive void right in the middle of Seoul. For decades, it was physically present but physiologically invisible. Unless you had access inside, it was just a long grace in the black wall. Even if you drove past it every day, the true scale of the garrison couldn't be grafted from the ground.
- [19:49]
Thomas Pinero
This is Professor Daniel oh. After working as an urban designer in Hong Kong, Bahrain and New York, and while lecturing at Korea University, he joined the Yongsan park master plan in 2013, back when it was still an active.
- [20:05]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Military base, I remember we had to get security clearances just to see the CAT files, which were scrambled for confidentiality. And I remember sitting in a sealed room staring at some 2,700 unnamed unmarked building footprints, literally blank boxes, asking myself how do we plan a park on top of the place so layered with secrecy and trauma and history? As landscape architects and architects, we believe that we have a duty to preserve and build on the narrative of the place. And that seemed impossible.
- [20:50]
Thomas Pinero
What unsettled oh further was the plan to demolish over 70% of existing structures, remnants tightly bound to Korea's modern history, all to meet zoning requirements. As the project unfolded, he started to see it differently and realized where he could find the narrative he had been looking for.
- [21:10]
Andriy Lakshtanov
I began to hear stories from my parents generation, from veterans and civilians who had worked inside the garrison. And I realized that while the official archives were in a way meaningless to the design process, personal stories, personal memories were much more relevant.
- [21:37]
Thomas Pinero
In parallel, he launched Yongsan Legacy, a civilian led, volunteer driven archive gathering oral histories, photos and memories from those who knew Yongsan as more than just a military post.
- [21:50]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Over time, our team grew. An oral historian, ecologist, a service designer, a computer programmer, a photographer and more joined the effort. In 2017, we launched our website. And after 10 years on, I've come to believe that Yongsan's real legacy isn't geopolitical, it's emotional and cultural. Half of the people working inside the garrison were Korean civilians, like cooks, gardeners, carpenters who built and maintained the garrison from the 1940s onward. These are the unsung voices we desperately want to document.
- [22:36]
Thomas Pinero
Cho O. The former garrison holds deep memories of hardship, recovery and resilience for the Korean people. He sees it as a modern archaeological site and one of the most important in Seoul.
- [22:48]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Because it was militarized and off limits, it was protected from the frenzy of urban development. Even Seoul's royal palaces were rebuilt after wartime destructions. But Yongsan remains in many ways a living archaeological site. It is the only place where you can still trace the physical layers of Seoul's 20th century transformation from colonization to war to economic miracle beyond warfare.
- [23:27]
Thomas Pinero
Yongsan Garrison was once a place teeming with cross cultural encounters, radiating new ideas and shifts in behavior.
- [23:35]
Andriy Lakshtanov
At its peak, the garrison wasn't just the headquarters quarters. It was a self contained American suburb in the middle of Seoul with schools, playgrounds, shops, gardens. It was sort of surreal.
- [23:52]
Thomas Pinero
To post war Seoulites, this felt like a glimpse of the future. A future they were eager to understand, engage with and help shape.
- [24:01]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Music, fashion, cosmic surgery, heart surgery, baseball, golf, cars, fine art, cuisine, computer architecture, you name it. Somewhere someone will have a story that begins with a connection to Yongsan Garrison.
- [24:20]
Thomas Pinero
As all notes, Koreans were far from passive. They absorbed, reimagined and reworked These influences ultimately shaping a distinct soft power of their own. K Pop, for example, owes part of its lineage to American rock, while the country's cosmetic surgery boom traces back to reconstructive procedures pioneered in military hospitals.
- [24:43]
Andriy Lakshtanov
The US military presence brought with it resources, opportunities and connections that helped spark what many call the miracle on the Han River. But it was Koreans, through grit, resilience and sheer will, who transformed that potential into real progress.
- [25:07]
Thomas Pinero
The base also set off direct economic ripples, spurring the growth of camp towns along its edge where local serving U.S. troops made their living. Itaewon, still arguably Seoul's most multicultural neighborhood, begun as one of them.
- [25:21]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Of course, not all influences were positive or glamorous. Camp towns had their own moral complexities, poverties, inequalities, gender power dynamics. Many women worked in service jobs around the garrison under difficult and sometimes exploitative conditions. There are stories of tension, protests, cultural clashes. It is important to acknowledge that too.
- [25:54]
Thomas Pinero
As South Korea modernized, questions of sovereignty and self determination sharpened and the base became increasingly contentious. Tensions fled over incidents of violence, accidental deaths, and what many saw as disregard for local lives. Environmental concerns also came to the forest. Pollution from the base became a flashpoint, one that echoed in the country's cultural output. Bong Joon Ho's 2006 film The Host, for instance, was inspired by a real life incident in which toxic chemicals were dumped into the Han river, triggering nationwide outrage.
- [26:33]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Yes, public sentiment has shifted, but not in a linear way. It has changed as the country changed. As Korea moved from dependencies to global leadership, the meaning of the US presence also changed from lifesaver to partner to question mark, and now perhaps to something else entirely.
- [27:03]
Thomas Pinero
I visited Yongsan park on a sunny spring day in April, walking through Black Hawk Village, a former residential area for military officers that opened to the public in 2020. Low rise American style apartment buildings still lined the grounds, interspersed with barbecue pavilions, lawns, plazas and colorful playgrounds. Children played, families picnicked in every corner, and young Soulites posed for photos, turning original military plaques into their backdrops. One sign, caution Troops Information, proved specially popular. Most windows offered a glimpse into empty modern apartments, but a few have been repurposed into cafes, meeting rooms, indoor play spaces, small libraries, and two communal kitchens, one for seniors, the other for youth. One apartment now serves as a memorial space. At its center, a preserved American style kitchen offers a vivid glimpse into into everyday life once lived by military families. Black Hawk Village is huge and yet only a small fragment of the whole. Nearby, a larger tract once occupied by the garrison's golf course was returned to Korea in the 90s. Today it's home to the excellent National Museum of Korea and a public park with more playgrounds, a long barefoot trail and communal vegetable gardens. Other parts of the former garrison have also been folded back into the city, including Yongsan Family park, though curiously, this one still requires advance bookings to visit. From the start, the park's master plan passed through multiple design committees and rounds of public consultations. Dozens of groups, from war veterans to environmentalists and artists, brought their perspectives to the table.
- [28:54]
Andriy Lakshtanov
Ironically, many of these stakeholders have never been inside the formal garrison, and yet they all feel strongly about what the park should represent. And because this is the first time a site like this is being converted into a national symbol, there are no clear precedents, only ambitions and hopes and anxieties.
- [29:24]
Thomas Pinero
How to fold the skeleton of a former military base back into the fabric of one of the world's busiest capitals remains an unprecedented challenge. Even with the master plan now complete, a Saturn opacity lingers partially to avoid steering public dissent. Sections are unveiled gradually, like a meal served one course at a time. As for oh, he continues to try to shape the outcomes through the Yongsan Legacy Project, gathering first hand accounts to curate exhibitions, host events and produce content all aimed at reinforcing the site's lasting significance to him is a welcome shift. The area won't be swallowed by real estate pressures as many once feared, but is instead being reborn as a public park. Still in a city already rich in green spaces, he hopes this one will stand apart, not a blank slate, but as a living archive where history is preserved and remembered in all its complexity.
- [30:24]
Andrew Tuck
My thanks to Thomas Pinero there reporting from Seoul. And that's all for this week's episode of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new editions of the show every week. And you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, architecture and urbanism too. Just visit monocle.com the Urbanist is produced by Carlotta Rebello and by David Stevens, who also edits the show. I'm Andrew Tutt. Goodbye and thank you for listening, city lover.