How to Use an Urban River — Lessons from a Korean City

In Daejeon, the saying ‘you get what you build for’ rings especially true.

This is the first in a five part series exploring the curious and wonderful ways that people in Daejeon, Korea use their local waterway. These illustrations of Daejeoncheon — ‘cheon’ meaning ‘stream’ — were originally commissioned by the Daejeon Sejong Research Institute, for a publication pairing artists and scientists to explore the city’s rivers.

For the most part, the editors at the Institute liked the concept I presented — a layered view of how people connect with the stream in ways that support health, and nurture relationships between people and the environment.

But there was one illustration that they were not too sure about.

So, I’ll begin this series by sharing that illustration, along with one that eventually served as the opening illustration for the series.

While these two scenes are from two different locations along the same stream, they’re only about 500 meters apart. I share these together here, not because the thought of it raised eyebrows on the editorial board, but simply because I think it offers an important juxtaposition.

Suhee and I often used this stream as a bicycle route to get around town, or even to cut clear across the city, out to the hot springs and the new town. The river bike path was indispensable to us as people without a car, who relied heavily on their bicycles for transportation.

Riding between the two parts of the river illustrated above was always a big shock, not only for us, but for anyone not inside a car.

In one of these places, we can hear the chatter of birds and kids in the river. We can see the fishing tactics of heron and humans next to each other. We can smell sweet riverside grasses mixing with the scent of deep fried chicken from the Central Market.

But just a few hundred meters down the river, all of those sensations disappear. The sound of birds and kids playing is replaced by the roar of cars, racing down a literal highway alongside the bike path. Neither heron nor fishermen are anywhere to be seen. The sweet smell becomes a cocktail of murky algae pools, dust, and exhaust fumes.

Only a few dedicated bicyclists and runners continue into this latter section of the river path. Most turn around just before the first pedestrian crossing — and it’s no mystery why. I see the ones who brave it: dashing across a faded crosswalk, just past an equally faded 50km/h speed limit painted on the roadway. When traffic lightens, cars move at twice that speed.

If we identify as drivers, we might choose the riverside highway where no one is in our way.

But if we identify as human beings on this Earth, we might choose the place with heron, kids, river grass, and fried chicken.

As I sit on the river, sketching out these scenes, I wonder to myself: at the root of our being, which one of these are we?

Car drivers? Or human beings on this Earth?

Do we get to choose?

Questions: Do you feel like you get to choose how to get around your city?

Next Week: We join early-morning rush hour on the river… at 5:30am. What are hundreds of people doing down here this early? If you live in Korea you probably already know. If not, see you next week for the answer.

Another Story: The seed for this series was actually planted a few years back, as we were first exploring the river trails in Daejeon, and learning about how all of them used to be parking lots and highways. In fact, a lot of progress has been made in Daejeon.

SHORT #33: Reasons to Bicycle Instead of...

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