Where Did Seoul's Shantytowns Go? From Cheonggyecheon to Guryong Village

Walk through Seoul long enough and you’ll feel it — the moment the city begins to climb. Below the old fortress wall of Naksan, on the slopes of Inwangsan, along the southern face of Namsan: alleys suddenly narrow, stairs appear where roads give out. These hillsides are now dressed in murals and dotted with cafés, but make no mistake — this was land nobody wanted.

Seventy years ago, Seoul was a city of one million, flattened by war. Two decades later, it had swollen past five million. The people who arrived in between built homes out of wooden planks along streams and up hillsides. Here is how those neighborhoods came to be, what stands in their place now — told through six places.

Why Did Shantytowns Appear in Seoul?

The reason is dead simple. People arrived far faster than houses could be built.

When Korea was liberated from Japanese rule in 1945, ethnic Koreans returned from Manchuria and Japan in waves. Then the war broke out in 1950, and refugees poured south. After the armistice, rural families left their farms for factory jobs in the capital. They settled on public land nobody claimed — stream banks, railway sidings, hillsides. The building materials were whatever the U.S. military left behind: wooden crates, corrugated iron sheets, scrap planks. Hence the name panjachon (shantytowns). Perched on slopes where the moon hung visibly overhead, they also earned the name daldongnae (literally “moon villages”).

The city government got serious about the problem when Kim Hyun-ok took office as mayor in 1966. The citywide survey had turned up 136,650 unauthorized structures. The plan was blunt: legalize 46,650 of them, demolish the remaining 90,000, and move their residents into Citizen Apartments (simin apateu) — hastily built public housing blocks — or relocate them outside the city entirely. Speed was the whole philosophy.

The results came just as fast. In December 1969, fifteen blocks of the Wau Citizen Apartments were completed in Changjeon-dong, Mapo-gu. On the morning of April 8, 1970, barely four months after they opened, the buildings collapsed. Thirty-three people died. The support columns had never been strong enough to carry the weight. Mayor Kim was dismissed, and the Citizen Apartment program effectively died on the spot.

In the 1980s, the game changed. This time the driving force was redevelopment and the approach of international events. In 1984, Mok-dong; in 1986–87, Sanggye-dong; then Sadang-dong — tenants fought evictions that came with no relocation plan. In Sanggye-dong, after their tents were torn down in April 1987, residents moved their protest to the grounds of Myeongdong Cathedral and held out. A documentary about the struggle was titled Sanggye-dong Olympics.

What Became of Those Neighborhoods

Cheonggyecheon — The Stream Where It All Began

After the war, Cheonggyecheon wasn’t a stream; it was an address. Shacks crowded the banks and even rose on stilts driven into the water itself. The farther downstream you went, the denser they became. In 1958, the government began pouring concrete over the stream, burying it. By 1971, the Cheonggye Overpass was running above that concrete lid. The water was gone, and so were the people who had lived along it.

In 2003, the overpass was dismantled. In 2005, the stream was brought back to daylight — the Cheonggyecheon we walk today. No shacks survive, but along the promenade near Majeon Bridge, a stretch of wall panels carries photographs of the old Cheonggyecheon shantytowns. You’ll come upon them as you follow the water. Nearby, the Hwanghak-dong Flea Market is a descendant of the trading that once thrived here.

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Haebangchon — A Name That Is History

Climb one hill over from Itaewon and you’re there, on the southern slope of Namsan. The name means “Liberation Village” and dates to 1945. Returnees from Manchuria and Japan, displaced families from the North — they claimed this unwanted hillside and layered themselves on top of each other. Sinheung Market was their marketplace.

From the 1960s onward, what sustained this neighborhood was knitwear. At its peak, some 300 home-based workshops hummed here, shipping sweaters across the country. Many of the rusted shutters you pass in the alleyways are the ghosts of those factories.

When the Itaewon commercial district began expanding in the late 2000s, Haebangchon’s lanes filled with cafés, indie bookstores, and craft studios. Rents climbed; longtime residents were pushed out. Walk beneath the Sinheung Market arcade and you’ll see the collision in real time: a 60-year-old mill next to a three-year-old wine bar.

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Ihwa-dong — What the Murals Gave, and What They Took

Tucked just below the Naksan section of the old Seoul City Wall, a short climb from Dongdaemun. People began gathering here toward the end of the Japanese colonial period; after the war, the density exploded. Height restrictions meant to protect the fortress wall made redevelopment nearly impossible, and so the alleyways of the 1960s and ’70s were left untouched — a fossil of a neighborhood.

In 2006, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism poured ₩250 million (roughly US$180,000 at the time) in lottery funds into a public art campaign here. Around 70 murals were painted onto walls and stairways. Television dramas and variety shows came, and the tourists followed. Then came problems the village had never known — noise stretching past midnight, trash, cameras aimed at bedroom windows.

Ihwa-dong is quieter now than it was at peak fame. The remaining murals, the alleyways, and the view of Seoul at night from Naksan Park are still worth the climb. Just remember: this is a neighborhood where people live before it’s anything else.

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Nangok — The Poster Child, Erased Without a Trace

On the slopes of Gwanaksan in Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu. The old name was Nakgol, and through the 1980s and ’90s, if a Korean heard the word “daldongnae,” this is the place they pictured. It began in the early 1960s with thirty-odd households staking out a foothold. By the end of the 1970s, the entire hillside was covered in homes.

The redevelopment process was unusually tortured. Designated a redevelopment zone in 1973, the designation was revoked in 1982. Re-designated in 1995, the project stalled again when private developers walked away. It wasn’t until June 2000, when the Korea National Housing Corporation took over, that anything actually moved.

Today, backed against Gwanaksan, a complex of 43 buildings, 13 to 20 stories high, 3,322 units (2,810 for sale, 512 public rental) occupies the ground. There is almost no marker to tell you a moon village once clung to this slope. It’s not a place a traveler needs to seek out, but it is perhaps the most honest ending to the story: most of Seoul’s shantytowns ended exactly like this.

Baeksa Village — The Final Years of the Last Moon Village

Lot 104, Junggye-bon-dong, Nowon-gu. Read the lot number aloud in Sino-Korean — baek (100) and sa (4) — and you get the name: Baeksa Village. It was born in 1967, when families displaced from the Cheonggyecheon and Yeongdeungpo clearance zones were resettled here.

The reason this village survived nearly sixty years is an irony. In 1971, it was locked inside a Green Belt (development restriction zone). While other settlements were bulldozed into apartment blocks during the 1980s and ’90s, time stood still here. Coal-briquette houses remained. The alley widths, the retaining walls, the locations of shared water taps — the physical structure of a 1960s resettlement colony was preserved intact. That’s why photographers called it “Seoul’s last daldongnae.”

In January 2025, the demolition review passed. The fences went up. What will rise here is a complex of 26 buildings, 4 underground floors to 35 stories, 3,178 units, with completion slated for the first half of 2029. For now, you can’t go inside.

Guryong Village — A Shantytown in the Heart of Gangnam

Gaepo-dong, Gangnam-gu, tucked between Guryong-san and Daemo-san. Across the street: Tower Palace. The contrast is so stark that international news cameras have made this one of the most photographed corners of Seoul.

This village formed later than the others. As the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Olympics approached, the city razed more than 200 unauthorized settlements in the name of urban beautification. The displaced drifted to what was then quiet farmland on the slopes of Gaepo-dong. A village created by the city’s own celebration.

For the next thirty-odd years, fires broke out again and again — shacks packed wall to wall, jerry-rigged electrical wiring, precarious winter heating. The news cycled back every season. After protracted negotiations, Seoul confirmed redevelopment: roughly 3,800 units. More than 600 will be long-term jeonse (key-money deposit) rentals for newlyweds and young families, with completion targeted for 2029.

Six Neighborhoods at a Glance

🗺️ Seoul's Shantytowns — Origins and Present Day

These six places resolve into three endings. Some were erased entirely, replaced by apartment towers. Some kept their names but became entirely different neighborhoods. And a few still hold people, living out their last years before the bulldozers arrive. That’s roughly the story of what Seoul has pushed aside to become the city it is — in six coordinates, across seventy years.