A small section of the Pyongyang city map, marking just a handful of its many grand buildings.
Not every building in North Korea is a drab, Soviet-style block. The People’s Culture Palace and the People’s Grand Study House have impressive traditional Korean tiled roof designs. Parts of the city even have a slight European touch: Greek-style theaters, neoclassical congress halls, and an Arch of Triumph have been built, the final as a tribute to Korean resistance fighters against Japanese colonialism from 1925 to 1945. The arch is similar to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, a testament of national power commissioned by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.
The only minor difference is that it is 30 feet (10 meters) higher, but overall it gives an international flair to the narrative of North Korean glory. Other examples aren’t quite façades of antiquity, but give off a more contemporary chic vibe. Wavelike and cylindrical apartment blocks line the relatively affluent neighborhoods along Liberation Street (in Korean, Kwangbok Street), located about 5 miles (8 kilometers) west of the city center.
In 1991, Kim Jong Il coined the term “Juche architecture,” which he defined as the expression of “the harmony of national virtues and the modernity in the design.” It was meant to develop a distinctive national identity, separate from the rest of the world, although Soviet influence was imposed on North Korean edifices.
These projects also display a sort of North Korean craft-excellence, the ability of the efficient command government to pool together labor and resources and to impress their imagery on citizens. In most laissez-faire economies, scarce resources usually aren’t allocated so quickly and efficiently.
NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE
Apartment blocks could go somewhat high to forty floors, a minor feat that places Pyongyang ahead of poor but growing cities like Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Yangon, Burma. Still, while many around the world enjoy the view of a penthouse flat up top, North Koreans preferred, for more practical reasons, modest rooms near the bottom. Elevators frequently broke down thanks to the regular power cuts, a nightmare because they’d instead have to take a dozen flights of stairs.
When there was no electricity to operate the water pumps, residents carried empty buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetched their water from rivers for cooking and washing. In the countryside, where everyday life remains starkly different from that of the capital, people get water from simple old village wells. During the wintertime, people carry water upstairs as water pipes are bound to freeze, at least in the upper floors of unheated buildings.
Regardless of power supplies, I had to get used to the fact that we didn’t have running water all the time. I had to adjust to my new schedule, as a privileged foreigner, in which I could enjoy running water only three times a day in tandem with meals: between 7 and 8 A.M., at noontime for an hour, and from 6 to 8 P.M.
Having water did not necessarily mean we had hot water either, so I got used to cold showers. I felt more healthy and fit, particularly in winter. Cold showers not only activated my immune system, according to folklore, but led to a life free from colds, flu, and a runny nose. Average Koreans, however, were not as lucky as me. My home, unlike theirs, was almost always heated. This sad reality came back to me in a very direct way. I realized there was a reason behind the soaring winter sales of cold, flu, and respiratory tract infection medicine produced by my pharmaceutical company, PyongSu.
Neighborhood units called inminban dominate every apartment block, guarded by volunteers who are usually elderly women or men sitting at the entrance. Their duty is to greet and keep an eye on every visitor to “prevent undesirable elements from gaining a foothold,” as described by local media. Such “undesirable elements” include people with a potential political agenda, vendors, and burglars. The citizens, called dong mu (a comrade at the same level or below the speaker) and dong jie (a comrade at a higher rank than the speaker), are from time to time reminded in newspapers and through propaganda posters to, according to one poster I saw, “heighten revolutionary vigilance.”
Whenever I passed by and saw the old guards, one of the most famous claims I came across in foreign media came to my mind. Pyongyang, some newspapers alleged, had been “cleansed” of old people—along with the handicapped as well as pregnant women—who were relocated to the countryside to gentrify the city. If this were really the case, the rules must have been relaxed after I arrived in Pyongyang. The city was home to more diversity than the mass media claimed.
The residents were also responsible for keeping their neighborhoods clean. Indeed, the order and cleanliness of Pyongyang is exemplary. On my walks around the capital, I observed locals, mostly women of various ages, cutting and yanking out the grass sprawling chaotically on streets and pavement. Since the city authorities didn’t have lawnmowers, the same manual procedures were applied at parks. Hedges were always neatly trimmed. Not only were streets and pavements spotless, but the pavement edges and trees were painted a very pure and clean white and surrounded by small stones. The rivers running through the city did not have rubbish floating around, and unlike other poor Asian cities such as Manila and New Delhi, I never came across garbage dumps.
Because of the difficulty of nonfunctioning elevators, the elderly lived in apartments on the first few floors of the buildings, while stronger, younger people were expected to live on higher floors. Those who were rich by North Korean standards and who owned a bicycle carried it up and down the stairs, which was no easy task for residents in buildings with twenty or thirty floors. While bicycles were safe in the apartments, thieves took them quickly on the ground floor.
This does not mean that violent crime is rampant, although petty wallet and bike thefts do happen. To give one example of the atmosphere, North Koreans never left shoes in front of their doorways. A Korean joked to me that if they did, the shoes would “walk away all by themselves.” Over the years, I observed iron bars being erected outside windows and balconies of lower-story apartments, a sign that either thefts were on the rise or people were becoming less trustful of each other. Or both.
The view of Pyongyang from the top of the television tower, which is home to a bar and a restaurant. At a distance the capital looks impressive with its high-rise buildings.
In the “backyards” of the best buildings in Pyongyang, small buildings in poor shape line the streets.
The best buildings in Pyongyang and other cities are built along main streets. In the “backyards,” small buildings in poor shape line the streets. Shoddy buildings in the “backstreet areas” are surrounded by walls, and the streets in these areas are mostly unpaved (please see illustration on following page). The Pyongyang People’s Committee, the official name for the city government, is trying hard to replace these, although it has few resources to do so. New four- and five-story buildings that emerge in these areas are usually constructed by hand, the impact of which is clearly visible because the quality standards aren’t consistent.
Around the time I arrived, the North Korean government had set the year 2012 to be a milestone for the development of Pyongyang. Mr. Pak, who was vice director of the country’s leading design institute and who helped construct the building for one of my cofounded companies, explained the rationale to me: “Our great founding leader and president, comrade Kim Il Sung, will then be one hundred years old,” he proclaimed. “In his honor, we will make a huge effort to modernize our capital and build new buildings.” The plan was a partial success, but did not reach its full potential thanks to the scarcity of resources.
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