[Home Tech] Policy Only Works in Cities That Move with Rhythm

Published 04 Feb.2026 11:07(KST)

Daytime "work and production," evening "consumption and leisure," night "residential"
Activities must overlap and continue across diverse time bands
Housing shortages and commercial slumps stem from breaks in urban rhythm
Cities with rhythm maximize efficiency and asset values

Editor's noteMore than 70% of Korean households' assets are tied up in real estate. A home is our most important asset, and also our closest and coziest place. For people whose lives are bound up with their homes, we provide the information needed to buy and sell them. The Asia Business Daily publishes the [Home Tech] series every three weeks together with Hyosun Kim, Senior Real Estate Specialist at KB Kookmin Bank, to equip readers with the knowledge they need.

Apartment buildings in downtown Seoul as seen from Namsan. Yonhap News

Housing supply in the Seoul metropolitan area has become a hot topic. Starting this year, the number of new apartment move-ins will begin to decline in earnest nationwide, deepening concerns that the supply-demand balance will collapse in the capital region where demand is concentrated. In response, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Seoul Metropolitan Government are rolling out supply measures one after another. The primary goal of housing supply is to stabilize people's housing conditions. However, from the perspective of national competitiveness, our responsibility is not simply to build houses, but to create "successful cities." A successful city is a place where people gather and continuously generate economic and social added value. From the perspective of the real estate market, it is what we might call a "city that moves with rhythm," where transactions are active, urban renewal projects proceed in a virtuous cycle, and asset values steadily trend upward in a stable way.

A city is not a fixed physical space. It is an aggregate of flows created where people, capital, and time intersect. The more natural these flows are, the more a city grows; the moment the flows are cut off, urban decline begins. This is why the housing supply issue in the capital region feels particularly serious. Imbalances in housing supply and demand cannot be explained simply by the absolute amount of supply. The core problem is that the "tempo of time" that governs housing, work, leisure, and consumption in the city is out of sync. Business districts that are crowded only during the day, commercial areas that come alive only at night, and neighborhoods that are busy only on weekends inevitably waste urban energy and head down a path of decline.

By contrast, a city with rhythm is evenly filled over the full 24 hours of the day. During the day, work and production take place; in the evening, consumption and leisure; at night, the residential function takes over, all flowing naturally like movements in a single piece of music. The same logic explains the remarkable growth of commercial districts such as Seongsu-dong, Hannam-dong, and the Hongdae area in recent years. Because they are not locked into a single function, different activities overlap across time slots, keeping the city's heartbeat steady. This is not a mere fad, but a victory of urban structure.

As early as the 1960s, Jane Jacobs argued that a city's vitality comes from mixed uses and varied hours of use. French thinker Henri Lefebvre likewise viewed the city not as a space but as a collection of times, and pointed out that the essence of urban problems lies not in undersupply but in failures of rhythm design. The housing shortages and commercial slumps we are experiencing today are not entirely new crises, but are closer to repeated errors brought about by breaks in this rhythm.

Major global cities abroad point in the same direction. In New York, SoHo and Brooklyn have secured long-term competitiveness by layering residential, creative, commercial, and cultural functions across all 24 hours. In Tokyo as well, from the planning stage of business centers, the city is designed on the assumption of evening and weekend consumption demand so that it never fully goes to sleep. In the global commercial real estate market, assets with diversified usage times show far greater resilience in times of crisis than single-use assets.

From this perspective, the essence of the gap between the capital region and non-capital regions also becomes clearer. The competitiveness of the capital area does not simply come from concentrated demand, but from a structure in which the urban rhythm is relatively well maintained. In contrast, many regional cities rely excessively on industrial or administrative functions, so once you move outside certain time bands, the city grinds to a halt. More fatal than population decline itself is this break in the city's rhythm.

The direction of the real estate market is clear. The common denominator of successful areas is not the age of the buildings, but how many hours of the day they are in use. Going forward, asset values will be determined not only by locational advantages, but also by how much demand they can absorb across different time slots. A city with rhythm naturally tends to have both stable cash flows and strong resilience.

Nevertheless, current policy discussions remain focused on quantities. Quantitative supply is, of course, urgently needed. However, future urban policy must prioritize the question not only of how much to build, but at what tempo to design the city. When residential, commercial, work, and transportation infrastructure come together in a single rhythm, urban efficiency and asset values can finally be maximized. Successful cities always keep time. In the end, the fate of a city is determined by its rhythm.