Leaving aside the DMZ/NK Risk... Cities work. Bigger cities work better than smaller cities. They're cheaper, cleaner, greener, more productive, with better health and social outcomes and more access to education etc etc etc.
That's why basically any large project basically NEED to be within X minutes of a major city. The saving in land cost setting it up in a rural area is nothing compared to having no staff, no services, no infrastructure, local political problems etc.
Over half of South Koreans live in the Seoul Capital Area. That’s a much higher proportion than countries other people often accuse of being overcentralized and neglecting the regions, like the UK with London or France with Paris.
And to some degree what you describe is a self fulfilling prophecy; big cities hollowing out the smaller ones, shrinking their economies and leaving their governments in deficit and the services worse, rinse and repeat.
You are completely right that this doesn't have a good outlook, but a self-fulfilling prophecy works in practice because of the societal friction.
SK government had probably one last chance to reverse its course, when it tried to move the administrative capital to Sejong in 2003, but it was met with hard backlashes including a very creative constitutional decision. Keep in mind that Sejong is not very far from Seoul anyway, and yet it failed; Sejong does host many administrative facilities, but is short from being the capital in any sense.
It's a nice self fulfilling prophecy. Smaller cities shouldn't exist. Imagine the internship opportunities available to high school students that kids can get in a big city vs small ones. My peers had tech companies in their hometowns whereas I didn't. Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should not exist. Big cities also have the scale to have specialized schools that match students with their interests while small cities just have a classroom for the whole grade.
When we are saying smaller cities in South Korea we are still talking about million plus cities. There are five of them not in Seoul’s orbit.
Germany famously lacks a dominant city and has a pretty good economy. So does the US. Decentralization is also diversification; if one region is falling behind it does not take the whole country with them.
decentralization provides certain benefits at the cost of pure efficiency. People with your mindset are why our supply chains are still fucked up years after the Covid lockdowns. Maximizing efficiency kills durability and reliability
Big cities are way more expensive. People who live there have almost no kids. Rural and small cities have kept the US population from crashing completely. Big cities are currently dismantling their specialty high schools. I don't think the facts on the ground support that big cities are better for kids.
“People who live there have almost no kids” - that’s just not true and super North America specific. Some personal data points - my entire family was born and raised in city of >3M population, everyone whom I know in Europe with kids live in fairly big cities.
> Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should not exist
This is the kind of radical bat shit craziness, from posters who are so intelligent they can rationalize anything, craziness that I love to find on HN.
I went to high school in a specialized class in Sweden anyway and I didnt have any internship because if you study all your waking hours to get max grades you don't have time for interning.
Who said internships can't be fun? What I do as a software develop building CRUD apps is basically what I did as a teen, except working in a team is way more fun and there's senior people to help you if you have issues instead of spending 3 days trying out stackoverflow suggestions.
It's not a value judgement, it's just life. Villages should shrink to feed towns which should shrink to feed cities which should shrink to feed the largest regional conurbation. Trying to force the flow backwards like the UK does just makes everyone poorer and leads to worse outcomes in social terms.
Bigger cities are just more efficient and effective.
There isn’t any good reason why the outlying regions of the UK should have lower GDP per capita than Eastern Europe.
Seoul is extremely large, at 26M. Reversing even some of the flow would largely still be aiming at million plus cities in South Korea, of which there are five outside the Seoul Capital Area.
How does moving people from high productivity jobs in high productivity regions to low/low ones help anyone? That's the question here. There is no reason one area should have a higher or lower GDP (GDR) than any other. And if they do, that is not a moral judgement on that region. It's just a fact. People seem to want to reduce everything to the lowest level to make it "fair", but regions are not people, regions should NOT be treated fairly. People should be treated fairly. Regions (and countries) are just made up...
Who says it’s high/high and low/low rather than high/high and high/low?
Making people move, to a place that already has well documented housing and transportation shortages, is not really fair. Unequal GDP per capita is not fair either, particularly since that means less ability to pay for services, which are generally lower quality and much further away from homes.
For fabs it seems like just a bit outside of a city is the optimum location. Chandler (Phoenix) for Intel's new fab and outside of Portland for the other US ones. I expect it's similar in Taiwan and South Korea.
Side note but isn't water a critical input for a fab? Arizona's water problems are going to continue to get worse so this seems like a bad move by Intel.
Yeah, it makes sense to put it not in the centre but within (say) 1h of the centre. Then you can recruit from an 8 figure workforce including multiple universities, offer a huge list of places to live and amenities to workers, meet reliability with everyone from regulators to ambassadors to investors to lawyers, have gold standard infrastructure, etc.
I'm never sure when it comes to water. I think a lot of places in the west chose to have shortages by refusing to build infrastructure and wasting supply on subsidizing things like (export orientated, unnecessarily high water use forms of) agriculture. But I am no expert...
That's why basically any large project basically NEED to be within X minutes of a major city. The saving in land cost setting it up in a rural area is nothing compared to having no staff, no services, no infrastructure, local political problems etc.