Seoul underwent significant urban transformation in the years surrounding the 1988 Seoul Olympics. A series of projects―CBD redevelopment, construction of Olympic facilities, and the Han River Comprehensive Development―physically reshaped the city...
Seoul underwent significant urban transformation in the years surrounding the 1988 Seoul Olympics. A series of projects―CBD redevelopment, construction of Olympic facilities, and the Han River Comprehensive Development―physically reshaped the city in preparation for the international event. Existing research has primarily focused on what was planned and how it was built. However, the question of how these changes were presented at the time, and what they sought to showcase, has received relatively little attention.
This study approaches tourist maps as a medium of urban representation. Tourist maps are editorial media that select certain places from the city's countless locations and represent them in particular ways. From the perspective of critical cartography, maps are not neutral records but products of selection and omission. Tourist maps, in particular, serve as historical sources through which we can read what contemporary Korean society wished to present to the international community―the landscapes it sought recognition for. Yet tourist maps from the developmental state period have not been substantively examined in urban and architectural research. This study analyzes how Seoul was represented in tourist maps before and after the Olympics along three axes: where was shown, what was shown, and how it was shown.
The research draws on 54 Seoul tourist maps published from the 1970s through the 1990s. As tourist maps from this period have not been systematically collected in domestic archives, the dataset was constructed primarily from the holdings of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Using the 1981 Olympic bid decision as the turning point, the maps were divided into two periods―1972-1981 and 1982-1994―for comparison. The dataset was constructed through quantitative methods; georeferencing and extraction of Points of Interest enabled identification of inset map adoption by district and the distribution of represented facilities. Based on this, the analysis focused on reading qualitative changes―shifts in what was represented, the emergence of specific districts, and patterns of visual emphasis.
The analysis revealed distinct changes in how Seoul was represented in tourist maps following the Olympic bid. First, the city's center was restructured from a single CBD-focused configuration to a dual structure of CBD and Gangnam. The newly emerging Gangnam was selectively represented as a sports district, with Olympic venues comprising an overwhelming proportion. Second, phenomena of preemptive representation―where incomplete facilities appeared on maps before construction―and depiction of high-rise office buildings unrelated to actual tourist use, illustrated on the map face without index listing, were observed. These representational patterns appeared consistently regardless of publisher.
Tourist maps were not merely wayfinding tools but media that visualized the achievements of economic growth and urban development. The repetition of representational methods across different publishers suggests that a shared understanding of how to present Seoul was internalized within contemporary society. Tourist maps from the 1988 Seoul Olympics era functioned beyond their practical purpose of guidance, serving as media that constructed and displayed the respectable landscape the state wished to present. Through the analysis of tourist maps, this study reveals how the achievements of CBD redevelopment and Gangnam development were selected and edited to compose the face of Seoul. Its significance lies in extending the scope of map-based urban representation research―previously concentrated on the colonial period―to the developmental state era, and in reilluminating tourist maps as texts for urban interpretation.