SEOUL: On hazy days, this city looks like nothing as much as a bowl of poured concrete topped by a noxious yellow cloud. The surrounding mountainsides have been blasted away to build grim slabs of high-rise apartments with the names of the conglomerates Samsung or Hyundai stamped on the sides. After being destroyed during the 1950-1953 Korean War, Seoul was slapped back together in the 1960s and 1970s. The mantra of the time was, do it fast, do it cheap.

Now one of the people responsible for paving over the city is trying to make amends.

And if anyone can do it, Lee Myung Bak can — he’s the mayor. As chief executive officer of Hyundai in the 1970s and 1980s, Lee was responsible for much of the company’s work in rebuilding Seoul, going about it with such tenacity that he was nicknamed ‘the Bulldozer’.

“You have to remember, in the 1960s and 1970s, we were just starting to rise above the ruins of war. You couldn’t find a skyscraper in the whole country; there were few cars,” the 63-year-old mayor said.

“We built cookie-cutter buildings. The only concern was getting as many people as possible into as little space.

“We now find ourselves regretting some of the choices we made back then,” Lee said.

Topping the list of architectural atrocities was a 3-1/2-mile-long elevated highway that was built (largely by Hyundai) on top of what had been a stream. Two years ago, Lee had the highway demolished in order to restore the paved-over Cheonggye waterway.

The water pumps were switched on in June, and a gurgling brook now runs through the concrete jungle of Seoul’s central business district. The $330 million restoration, which is supposed to be mostly completed next month, includes fountains, sculptures and 22 bridges in various fanciful styles. One resembles a tall-masted ship; another the spread-eagle wings of a silvery bird. The list of ambitious public works projects goes on.

Lee wants to turn the 630-acre US military base called Yongsan, scheduled to be vacated by the end of 2007, into Seoul’s version of Central Park. He wants to build a new opera house too.

Earlier this summer, a former golf course and racetrack reopened as a park-cum-wildlife sanctuary, stocked with elk, duck, squirrels and six species of deer.

In front of City Hall, Lee ripped out a vast oval of concrete and ordered it planted with grass — ‘Mayor Lee’s front lawn’, is how some residents derided it. On a hot, drizzling day, two boys were doing cartwheels on the grass outside the mayor’s office. Inside, in a conference room of plush blue chairs, the mayor reflected on the changing city.

“In the 1960s, the environment took a back seat to economics,” said Lee, a slim, impeccable man with an elf-like quality about him. “In the 21st century, the priorities have shifted.”

With the possible exception of Taiwan, it is hard to point to another country that has developed as rapidly as South Korea in the last half-century. As South Koreans of Lee’s generation like to stress, the country was one of the poorest on Earth at the end of the Korean War; today it is the 11th-largest economy in the world.

But the aesthetics of the capital haven’t quite caught up to its newfound economic stature.

Modern-day Seoul was designed with huge boulevards on which the ruling elite could drive in comfort. Hapless pedestrians were forced to find their way like moles through circuitous underpasses.

Today, the mayor is trying to overturn this hierarchy — bringing the pedestrians back above ground. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service