Let the waters flow free once more

Big news in Seoul right now is the official opening of the Cheonggyechon stream in a few weeks time. This small river has naturally flown through Seoul for hundreds of years but has a less than noble history recently. In the early 1900s peasants from the provinces came to build a shanty town along the banks of the Cheonggyechon and for decades used the stream for washing and sewage disposal. For many decades the stream area became equated with poverty and disease, having the highest mortality rate in all of Seoul. This led to the stream being sealed over to make way for an expressway in the late 1950s, but the stream secretly survived as a sewer slowly eating away at the beams and rods holding up the expressway and costing the Seoul city government millions of dollars in repairs every year. A very radical city mayor has been putting a lot of emphasis on environmental spaces for Seoulites to relax and as a consequence the government has spent the last two years dismantling the expressway and completely reinventing the stream system with an ambitious makeover involving reconstruction of 26 bridges and stream water that will be clean enough (hopefully) to drink from as it enters the stream system.
I could see the bigger picture as I walked along the banks of the stream for a good three hours yesterday and think that this really will be an amazing place in a year or two once the plants and river life along the banks grow and provide a more natural, ecological environment. The city center is long overdue for environmental programs like this and Seoul is slowly but surely becoming a much more beautiful city than ten years ago. Taxpayers remain more sceptical about the outcome.