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Cheonggyecheon: The Stream Seoul Buried, Then Dug Back Up

Walk down into 청계천 (Cheonggyecheon) on a summer evening and the city noise drops away. Office workers sit on the stone steps with their shoes off, feet in the water. Couples walk the path along the bank. Small waterfalls break up the current every few hundred meters. It feels like the stream has always been here, a quiet vein of nature cut through one of the densest business districts in the world.

It has not always been here, not like this. For most of the 20th century, this exact stretch of downtown Seoul was covered in concrete, and above the concrete ran a four-lane elevated highway, packed bumper to bumper during rush hour.

The stream is not old. It is new. Seoul removed a highway that carried an enormous volume of daily traffic and replaced it with a walking path, on purpose, at enormous cost, in the middle of the 2000s.

That is what is visible. The reason a city would tear down the infrastructure it had built its own modern image on runs deeper.

The Layer
Historical · Cultural · Social Context

The Elevated Highway

The stream itself is old. It ran naturally through the old city center for centuries, used for laundry, drainage, and daily life. But by the 1950s, after the Korean War, it had become an open sewer, and post-war Seoul needed room to grow fast. Starting in 1958, the city began covering the stream over with concrete, section by section, over roughly two decades. In 1976, on top of that concrete, Seoul completed the Cheonggye Expressway: an elevated highway 5.6 kilometers long and 16 meters wide, running straight through downtown.

For a generation, that highway was a symbol, not a problem. It represented exactly what postwar Korea wanted to project: fast, dense, modern infrastructure, built on top of what used to be an unsanitary waterway. It was a monument to how far the city had come in one generation.

By the early 2000s, the monument was failing. The highway was over 30 years old, structurally aging, and engineers had raised safety concerns about its condition. Because the highway had been built directly over the buried stream, pollutants trapped underneath produced methane gas, and the city had to cut ventilation holes into the highway structure just to release the buildup. The infrastructure Korea had been proud of was now a hazard sitting on top of another hazard.

Restoration and Controversy

In 2002, mayoral candidate 이명박 (Lee Myung-bak) ran on a promise to tear the highway down and restore the stream underneath it. He won, and construction began in July 2003. Demolition of the elevated structure started almost immediately and moved fast, but the project was not smooth. Merchants who worked in the market areas around the highway depended on the traffic and access it provided, and from February to September 2003 tension between the city and local merchants escalated, at times into physical conflict, over the disruption.

The stream reopened in September 2005, after 27 months of construction, at a final cost of roughly 386 billion won, about four times what planners had originally projected. Critics raised a second objection after completion: most of the water flowing through the restored Cheonggyecheon is pumped in from the Han River, not fed by a natural watershed, which made some environmental groups call the project more symbolic than ecological. Annual maintenance, including the cost of pumping that water, runs into the billions of won every year.

None of that stopped the project from becoming what it is now: one of the most visited public spaces in central Seoul, and a case study cities around the world study when they consider tearing down urban highways of their own. Lee Myung-bak used the project’s popularity as a political springboard, and was elected President of South Korea in 2007.

The choice to spend enormous money undoing what an earlier generation had built, and to accept years of merchant anger and cost overruns to do it, is not really about a stream. It is about a city deciding that being modern does not mean keeping everything it once built to prove it was modern. Seoul had already moved on. Cheonggyecheon is what it looks like when a city admits that out loud.

End of Layer

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