When I am with N teacher, we often talk about Dongtan. It always come back to the same story, really, but it's always a conversation that cannot be avoided, because Dongtan is like that. While it is a quiet place, it is asking for it's share of the everyday gossiping.
Our conversation have two parallel trains of thought.
Dongtan is a Ghost-Town
Dongtan is a ghost town. I blogged quite a bit about this in many different ways but the general feeling of the town is messed up. It is a 5 years old or so, city, so it's super clean and new. Thing is, usually, when a new city is born, it's because it gets created starting from a small village, and people like the place and naturally gather there. It becomes big because there's a need.
My dad told me once that the best way to make a brick/rock path in a backyard is to have grass first, and see where a path will appear gradually where people naturally walk to get by. That way, after the path is made, people will just keep using that same way without damaging the grass on each side of the path.
If you build a path first, and choose it for the design and the position it has in your backyard, for instance, there are high chances that the path will not be used as often, and you'll find yourself with two paths: one that was designed to be one, pretty and unused, and a grass path where people walking around will have made the grass wither away.
So far, I think Dongtan is a designed path.
It looks beautiful and clean, it is a genius or architecture with both sport and leisure facilities as well as a lot of good quality shopping areas an amazing amount of coffee shops, but while there are thousands of inhabitants, people don't seem to be converging into the city itself. They mostly take one of the two express buses to Seoul, or go there by car.
However, one cannot deny one thing. Walk in Central Park on weekends or hot weekday evenings and you'll find a crazy amount of families with babies and toddlers and high schoolers ALL OVER THE PLACE. Or you'll see couple strolling in the numerous paths of the place. Both Korean and foreign. All those people work in the Samsung company that has a big settlement right beside Dongtan. Samsung covers a indecent number of different things all around the planet, but I am amazed at the amount of people who work for them anyways. What can they be doing with so many workers?
However, All the people who are here seem to be that, families and couples who came to look for peace in the ghost town that is Dongtan. I dare you to find young single men. I mean. Not even men. Find me one. And I'll treat you to Kobe beef.
Dongtan is the Matrix
N teacher, however has this vision of Dongtan as a sort of messed up Matrix city, where everything is so clean cut perfect and just can NOT be just there for no reason. She tells me that the place is a crazy Matrix where people who move in just become part of this weird system... why else would there be so many stores, coffee shops and shops that are completely empty at every time of the day? Why else would new stores just pop out of nowhere and appear as if they'd been there all along. Chilling in Korea.
Aren't we the weird kind of anomaly that walks around, aware that there is something wrong? Why would fountain shows start as we walk by? Why would a dead part of the park light up as we walk by, when there is no one else around?
Pushing the idea, I like to see us in this weird Truman Show with a city built out of nowhere and everything a person needs (save maybe friends?).
I'd say that Dongtan is the wet dream of some architect. What architect wouldn't love to design a whole city and put people in it? The whole city seems to have been completely framed on one single mindset and peolpe just trying to fit in the mold.
I'll upload more pictures of the city soon... just a bit lazy now...
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