Restoring Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon River / The 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design

The evolution of the Cheonggyecheon River in just twenty-nine months from an outmoded utilitarian highway into a multipurpose performative infrastructural piece of unprecedented size merits recognition as a seminal project in contemporary urban design. The project is a remarkable achievement that recovers the biological and social ecology of the city, and demonstrates the profound ability of design at the urban scale to provoke positive transformation effectively over large territories. The project signifies a broader sea change in Asian attitudes toward city design, from a quantitative model concerned primarily with growth to a more qualitative program that incorporates quality of life and environmental sustainability into economic development strategies. City design cannot be regarded merely as the product of an inspired designer or a skillful politician; projects at the scale of the Cheonggyecheon intervention often do not have a single designer and, in most cases, require exemplary political support and