Cheonggyecheon

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Cheonggyecheon

Cheonggye Stream in downtown Seoul.

Korean name

Hangul	청계천
Hanja	淸溪川
Revised Romanization	Cheonggyecheon
McCune-Reischauer	Ch'ŏnggyech'ŏn

Cheonggyecheon (Hangul: 청계천) is a nearly 6km long, modern public recreation space in downtown Seoul, South Korea. The massive urban renewal project is on the site of a stream that flowed before the rapid post-war economic development required it to be covered by transportation infrastructure. The $900 million project attracted much criticism initially but opened in 2005 and is now popular among Seoul residents and tourists.

1 Geography and history
2 Restoration
3 Photos
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

[edit] Geography and history

Cheonggyecheon is a 5.8 km creek flowing East to West through downtown Seoul, and then meeting Jungnangcheon, which in turn connects to the Han River and empties into the Yellow Sea. During the 1948-1960 presidency of Syngman Rhee, Cheonggyecheon was covered with concrete for roads. In 1968, during the presidency of Park Chung-hee, an elevated highway was built over it.

[edit] Restoration

In July 2003, then-Seoul mayor, current President Lee Myung-bak initiated a project to remove the elevated highway and restore the stream. It was a major undertaking as not only did the highway have to be removed, but years of neglect and development had left the stream nearly totally dry, so 120,000 tons of water had to be pumped in daily.^{[citation needed]} The stream was opened to the public in September of 2005 and lauded as a major success in urban renewal and beautification. However, there was considerable opposition from the previous mayoral administration of Goh Kun, which feared gentrification of the adjacent areas that housed many shops and small businesses in the machine trades.

The restoration helped Lee become a nationally renowned figure, making him a serious contender for the presidency, but did not come without controversy. In May 2005, just a few months before the project was to finish, Seoul vice-mayor Yang Yun-jae and local politician Kim Il-ju were arrested on bribery charges related to the project.^{[citation needed]}

The project is estimated to have cost over 900 billion won (approximately US$ 900 million). In addition, about 12 trillion won (US$12 billion) is expected to be invested to re-develop the 792,000 square meter region near the stream into a major commercial and residential area over the next five years.^{[citation needed]} Some Korean environmental organizations have criticized the project for its high costs, calling it purely symbolic and not really beneficial to the city's eco-environment.

[edit] Photos

A long park runs on both sides of the stream. Every fifty feet or so, stone walkways are placed not just so people stay dry by hopping across the stream on them, but also to regulate the speed of the water flow.	The beginning of the Cheonggye Stream		Cheonggye Stream flowing through Seoul
	The beginning of the Cheonggye Stream at night	The Cheonggye Stream at night	The Cheonggye Stream east of Dongdaemun Market

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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