City profile: Is Pyongyang a post-socialist city? (original) (raw)

Highlights

Abstract

Pyongyang is often used as a metonym for North Korea's leaders and the issues their policies create for the world. However, the profound internal changes rapidly transforming the city since the 1990s make Pyongyang a fascinating urban case study. This profile is an attempt to shed light on one of the most ‘mysterious’ cities in the world; firstly, through analysis of its socio-economic dynamics and, secondly, by examining its possible transformation into a post-socialist city through a comparison of its spatial characteristics with Central and East European capitals. We also consider how the city retains substantial state socialist characteristics.

Introduction

Pyongyang is the capital of North Korea, (officially ‘the Democratic People's Republic of Korea’, DPRK). Its preeminent role in all spheres of North Korean life is epitomized by the phrase “_Korea would not exist without Pyongyang_”, a line that appeared in Rodong Sinmun (Rodong Sinmun, 1999, 29) the official newspaper of record in North Korea. Pyongyang remains arguably one of the most enigmatic cities in the world. There are few works dealing with the Hermit Kingdom's capital, especially given the increasing interest in North Korea. Schinz and Dege (1990), Springer (2003), and Dormels (2014), all offer city-profiles of Pyongyang. They are all rather dated, as since Kim Jong-un came to power in December of 2011. The spatial structure of Pyongyang has started to rapidly transform in a process similar to that throughout the post-socialist world in 1990s, and this process has continued over the last decade.

This article, first of all, satisfies the pressing need for an updated profile for Pyongyang. Second, we focus on the capital, where marketization started in the mid-1990s (Kim, 2018), and continues in spite of a political regime with formal commitments to state socialism.1 We examine if economic changes alone, without ideological relaxation, may transform a socialist city (SC) into a post-socialist city (PSC). Third, this paper attempts to broaden the geographical borders of PSC research, currently focusing almost exclusively on Central and East Europe (CEE).

This paper has several limitations. First, data about North Korea is limited, and often the most recent data were published more than a decade ago. The lack of official data, wherever possible, has been compensated for by estimates made by experts, our personal impressions and photographs. Second, we rely mainly on a large number of secondary sources. Third, in most cases, the spatial composition of Pyongyang is compared with PSCs located in CEE, and have not compared to Chinese cities, where marketization started well before the DPRK (Coase & Wang, 2012). Fourth, we compare Pyongyang only to other capitals regardless of regional variation.

Section snippets

Socialist vs. post-socialist city

The idea of a ‘Socialist City’ was introduced by Fisher (1962) and further developed by Hamilton (1979) and others. It is a specific urban type formed primarily in the countries of CEE during socialist rule, and distinguished by the predominance of public over personal interests, nationalization, centralization and the absence of markets (Musil, 1993). Political, ideological, social and military factors were prioritized over economic concerns (Kostinsky, 2001) and this was expressed in a large

Pyongyang: a history

Pyongyang has a long history, though much of it remains largely unstudied outside North Korea. It has been a city with its own regional identity and distinct, evolving role on the peninsula arguably for many centuries.

Is Pyongyang a post-socialist city?

To answer the question as to whether Pyongyang is PSC, and to contribute to the debate between the two aforementioned schools, we shall analyze the changes in Pyongyang's spatial configuration using five PSC features (Hirt, 2013) from four different perspectives: first, we shall consider what Pyongyang looked like before the mid-1990s and how similar it was to CEE cities; second, how the North Korean capital has changed post-marketization and how this process is comparable to analogous changes

Discussion and conclusion

Dynamic marketization has made Pyongyang more liberal than it has been since the Korean War. The most fundamental effect of marketization is the growing desire among locals to earn and spend money. Indeed, the emergence of a real estate market has reduced the number of green areas and increased density of urban fabric in central Pyongyang. This demonstrates that the state is either gradually losing control over the land and it has started to have market value, or that it persistently supports

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

Authors thank Andrei Lankov, Professor of Kookmin University in Seoul, and Hyun Bang Shin, Professor of London School of Economics and Political Science for their comments for the earlier version of this paper.

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