Korea is not a country that lacks modern retail infrastructure. Supermarket chains operate at a density that makes fresh groceries available within walking distance of most urban households. Con…

Fermentation is not a technique Korean cooks chose from among other available options. It is what the Korean climate, Korean geography, and the practical demands of feeding a household through a…

A hinged door needs room to move. When it swings open, it claims a roughly ninety-degree arc of floor space — space that cannot hold furniture, cannot be walked through while the door is in moti…

Ask anyone in their thirties living in Seoul what they think about housing prices, and the answer will not take long. The frustration is real, widely shared, and backed by numbers that are diffi…

Korea is one of the most densely urbanized societies in the world, and the physical form of that urbanization is overwhelmingly the apartment. Roughly sixty percent of Korean households live in …

Most Korean apartments are not large. The national average floor area for a newly built residential unit sits well below the averages seen in the United States, Australia, or much of northern Eu…

Korea's delivery consumption volume is not a pandemic-era anomaly that has gradually normalized. It was already extraordinary before 2020, and the years since have simply extended a trajecto…

Density and cleanliness do not typically coexist comfortably. Cities with high population concentrations, active street commerce, and constant pedestrian traffic tend to accumulate the visible e…