Sharing the lecture held on August 8, 2023.

Flow and order – Seoul waterways and other urban stitches

SPEAKER: Stephane MOT

SUMMARY:

If humans have tamed Seoul’s mountains and streams, these natural assets keep acting as great dividers and connectors, at the same time hindering and enabling this shapeshifter of a city. Urban planners have realized how key they are for Seoul’s competitiveness, but each time they decide to put a spotlight on them, whole neighborhoods can be revived or destroyed. As Seoul grows more ambitious visions and narratives around these urban stitches, unscripted parts must be left for the city to breathe and evolve, for new stories to emerge.

BIO:

A French author and conceptor born in Paris in 1967, Stephane Mot first met Seoul in 1991, as a young ESSEC alumn at the French Embassy’s economy section. Without ever disowning fiction, satire, and nonsense, this expert in strategy and innovation (serial startup survivor, strategic advisor…) is naturally drawn to what comes next and often writes about innovation, urbanism, politics, culture, or societal trends.

His fictions include ‘dragedies’ (bittersweet-going-on-pungent fictions) and ‘La Ligue des Oublies’ (The League of The Forgotten, a tribute to soccer legends who never existed). ‘Seoul Villages’, his first collection of short stories in English, is now available in Korean and will be adapted into short films; these Seoul urban legends are also a form of revenge on SeoulVillage.com, his non-fiction blog devoted to a city of which he’s walked through every single neighborhood.

Stephane and Seoul have been haunting each other for over three decades.