Even smart-growth planners believe, or say they believe, that Le Corbusier‘s Radiant City would be an awful place to live. If you agree, then Seoul is a scary place, as much of it consists of hundreds of high-rise apartment blocks.
Seoul occupies less than 2 percent of Korea’s land area but contains 40 percent of the population. From the air, it looks like the worst of both Radiant City and urban sprawl, but the sprawl appears to be mostly factories as modern assembly-line methods require horizontal operations. Despite this factory sprawl, the average population density of the Seoul urban area is about the same as that of New York City–meaning it is five times greater than the New York urban area (which includes northern New Jersey).
