(click to enlarge)
The street
It's not the monumental buildings but the concrete apartment blocks that
dominate the streetscape of Pyongyang. Sober residential towers that differ
from one another in form, colour (or what remains of it) and detailing.
Older development of four to eight floors in height is located to the
east of the city, and there's a dazzlingly white new development in the
Mangyongdae district to the west: 25,000 apartments in green surroundings.
Residential blocks flank the roads and hide from view the messy inner
courts and less appealing development behind.
Pyongyang is a city with a reported three million inhabitants. Only after
seeing the Mangyongdae district can you imagine where these people live.
But where they work, buy food and relax remains a mystery. Offices, shops,
museums, sports halls, restaurants all look empty.
Since the flow of aid from former communist allies ceased in the early
1990s, the country has been in a permanent energy crisis. Hardly any cars
are on the roads and streets are unlit in the evening. Only around seven
in the morning and six in the evening are the streets crowded, and commuters
pack into trolley busses and come trooping out of the subway.
Cyclists are a rarity in Pyongyang. The lack of privately owned vehicles
means that there are almost no traffic signs, no parking meters, no traffic
lights, and scarcely any parked cars on the streets.
Add to this the similar lack of street furniture (no benches, bins, cycle
racks, bottle banks and rubbish containers), security cameras (everything
is still recorded by hand in the old-fashioned manner), advertisements
and shops with displays behind the windows or on the pavement. And the
fact that Pyongyang is said to have 48 square metres of green space per
resident - this figure more likely denotes public space - runs contrary
to the picture we have of a city with over a million inhabitants. The
streets are empty and bare, and the residential blocks are emphatically
present in all their sober simplicity. But there's one exception: Changgwang
Street, Pyongyang's answer to the PC Hooftstraat, with shops and restaurants
clearly recognisable in the plinth.
Colour on the street comes from a pair of red boots, a yellow jersey,
the blue uniform of the traffic officer, the billboards trimmed in gold
(a rare form of street furniture) with an image of the Kimilsungia (a
pink flower similar to an orchid) and the Kimjongilia (a red begonia),
revolutionary wall paintings and mosaics.
These incidental explosions of colour cannot conceal the fact that the
country is suffering. Since the mid-1990s almost nothing has been built
and housing blocks are no longer maintained. The Paektusan Academy of
Architecture, the state architecture office whose employees have designed
almost all major buildings and monuments in Pyongyang, occupies itself
with studies, among them a linear city from Pyongyang to Nampo 55 kilometres
away, and conducts research into ways of dealing with future traffic congestion
and parking problems.
The most painful evidence of the state of the country is the Ryugyong Hotel. The skyline of Pyongyang is dominated but this pyramidal building, not by a heroic monument or a statue of the Great Leader. A hotel, 320 metres tall, 3000 rooms, and many restaurants including five at the top that rotate. A 105-floor hotel that started construction in the mid-1980s. The Ryugyong Hotel features prominently in all folders, tourist guides and coffee table books about Pyongyang. It was to be the tallest building in Asia, the fifth tallest in the world, the crowning achievement and proof of the successful architecture of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The shell is finished, and a construction crane is visible right at the top, but all building work ceased long ago.
It is tempting to view Pyongyang with Western eyes as a pure example
of communist planning: long broad streets along which huge crowds can
move, monumental buildings and tall residential blocks. The question,
however, is if these characteristics are particular to communist countries.
What is fairly unique is the way in which urban design in Pyongyang helps
to sustain the memory of the struggle for independence against the imperialists
by the well-chosen siting of monuments in veneration of the Great Leader
Kim Il Sung, his son the Beloved Leader Kim Jong Il, the Juche Idea, and
the soldiers of the Korean War.
In its determination not to relinquish autonomy and independence, the country aspires to be self-reliant. According to the North Korean rulers, the difficult situation in which the people find themselves in is the result of the disappearance of the communist allies with whom trade was conducted under favourable conditions, the permanent threat of war, and the food scarcities that have afflicted the country. A speedy improvement in the situation is to be hoped. The effects it will have on the streets of Pyongyang are pretty predictable, as we can see in communist China: gridlocked roads, Prada in Changgwang Street, and Starbucks on Kim-Il-Sung Square.