What is the Next Busan?

Back to the First Question

Eighteen days ago, we posed the first question: why must the next Busan be Busan?

At the time, we wrote this: Busan will soon elect its next mayor. Yet we only talk about who we're electing, hardly discussing what kind of Busan we're choosing. Today is that election day. After seventeen questions, we have returned to that same place.

This series was not meant to provide answers. It was meant to organize questions. But after seventeen pieces, one thing has emerged through the questions. We write it down as the last.

Seventeen Pieces Were One

The questions seemed scattered. Why do young people leave, what is the sea to Busan, why can't it become a gateway, what does Busan fail to measure, who does it recognize as Busan people, how does it cultivate, gather, and connect people, how does it build.

But after seventeen pieces, those different questions converge into a single thread. Trust. What Busan failed to measure was trust, what it failed to recognize was also trust, what broke with those who left and what disappeared with each person was all trust. What Busan lacked was not resources. What was missing was the work of building resources between people and turning them into trust.

And trust begins with one thing: recognition. The work of recognizing who is good at what, who is truly building something. From there trust grows, accumulated trust becomes institutions, and institutions outlast individuals. The seventeen pieces were different faces of that single thread.

The Next Busan is a Busan That Recognizes

So now we can answer the first question. What is the next Busan?

The next Busan is a Busan that recognizes people. Not the port's ranking, not the budget's scale, not newly constructed buildings. Other cities can have those things, and some have them better than Busan. But the work of recognizing people who come to Busan to build something, turning that recognition into trust, and building that trust into institutions that remain even when people change—this cannot be bought with rankings or built with budgets. That is why this becomes the one thing Busan can offer the world.

In the first piece, we asked: is the next Busan a museum built from yesterday's nostalgia, a city where today's builders work, or a port where someone arrives and stays tomorrow? Now we answer: a Busan that recognizes makes all three into one. Because it recognizes builders, they work; because it recognizes those who arrive, they stay; and what is built that way is passed on to the next generation not as a museum but as a living city.

The Last Work Remaining in a City

One thing must be written honestly here. Why recognition, why now?

This is an era when more and more work is transferred to tools. Measuring, recording, analyzing, connecting—tasks once done only by people are now done faster and more accurately by tools. The efficiency and data cities once boasted will soon be the same everywhere. But one thing will not be transferred to tools until the end: the work of people recognizing people. Looking into someone's eyes and knowing this person is real, making space for them and placing trust in them—this is not measured, not automated.

So in an age when everything becomes the same, only this last thing makes a city different. If Busan makes this its work, Busan becomes a different city not because it has less, but because it has what others cannot have.

From Busan

We did not know all the answers when we began posing eighteen questions. But one thing was clear: Busan has let too many good things slip away. People, opportunities, trust that was about to be built.

We hope this time will be different. To recognize, to trust, to build into institutions and not let slip away. That will not happen with one election. Whoever is elected, there must be people who recognize others every day after that day. A city begins again that way, from one person recognizing another person.

It begins in Busan. It does not end in Busan. This time, we will not let it slip away.