Northern accent: Urbanism and ephemera in North Korea | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/reviews/books/northern-accent-urbanism-and-ephemera-in-north-korea/10027572.article
Going beyond military threat, famine and dictatorship discussions, two new books give a more multi-faceted sense of North Korea
Pyongyang is commonly imagined as the ultimate Potemkin city. A supercharged amalgamation of Mao’s Beijing, Stalin’s Moscow and Walt’s Disneyland, arranged around stupefying axes leading to enormous monuments to the Kims, and to the ‘Juche Idea’ (roughly translated as ‘Self-Reliance’, Juche replaced Marxism-Leninism as North Korea’s official ideology at the end of the 1970s), with people starving behind the curtain. Explanations have to be sought for the apparent splendour of this capital in a country which is assumed to be economically dysfunctional. Urban myths are reinforced by the tight regulation of foreign visits – for instance, it was widely (and wrongly) believed that Pyongyang’s palatial Moscow-style Metro only had two stops, as these were the only stations tourists were allowed to see. Two new books try to go beyond the ultra-totalitarian surface, to give a more multi-faceted sense of what Pyongyang is actually like.
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Outrage: Zones charting unhappy political realities should not be turned into tasteless tourist spectacles | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/campaigns/outrage/outrage-zones-charting-unhappy-political-realities-should-not-be-turned-into-tasteless-tourist-spectacles/10027679.article
Separating North and South Korea, the curious no man’s land of the Demilitarised Zone has become a political theme park
It was difficult to see the view from the panoramic terrace as the fifth coachload of tourists arrived at the Dora Observatory in South Korea, jostling to gawp at the evil empire to the north. A long rank of coin-operated telescopes stood lined up, pointing towards North Korea like a battery of guns poised to fire, while loud-speakers pumped out garish K-Pop tunes at full volume. ‘You’ll notice there are fewer trees in the north’, said one American tourist, as crowds of selfie-stick wielding visitors posed for photos. ‘That’s because people there are so hungry they have to eat them.’