Fossilisation of Rural Streets Within the Modern City

Abstract

This research presents the urban transformation process in Suwon, South Korea, in particular focus on Wooman town to analyse the conflict between the old and new street patterns. Through the 1970s and 80s, the city of Suwon went through a huge scale of development with a steep population growth. With the expansion of urban territory, Wooman, a small agricultural village has been incorporated to the wider territory of the city. During this process, the urban grid has been imposed onto the old street network, and at the end, the organic form of the village roads became varied within the new urban structure. The old streets in the village which formed the main circulation network for village people’s lives are now hidden, forgotten and abandoned. From the outside, the block of Wooman has a typical modern urban landscape with straight lines of parallel streets. Walking inside it, however, one can find strange irregularity of back streets which used to be a major connection in the old days but are now treated as back alleys, illegally occupied for parking, vegetation and garbage dumping. It is our particular focus in this research to find how this dramatic change of status for these old village streets has happened and how their traces could survive through the mega-scale transformation of the city. We assume these traces are the urban fingerprints though which we can find the embryologic clue to reveal the process behind the formation of the entire city.