The new address system in Seoul

It's been already a few years since I've become aware of the plans for a new address system in Seoul, and in the summer of '02 when I was in Korea the last time the street signs were already up. But I've yet to hear of any actual use of these street names and addresses based on them; I'd really like to see that happen, but it seems this one piece of Japanese colonial legacy is not so easy to get rid of... Ended up, browsing for whoknows what, at the Seoul Metropolitan Government new address system site. There's also a search function for the new addresses, found from the link 주소찾기, but seems that I can't get the han'gul to show most likely because of the Java. But my original entry site through googling to the main Seoul site was this, where there are only Gwanak-gu addresses; the Korean characters appear, but without the Java script map. (And that's fine with me, cause that's my hood.)

Below is a map snippet from Sillim-dong, found by clicking my way through the map from the main site linked above. This is the place where I've spent most time in Korea, and this is the place where some of the locals bantered me that "there comes the ward chief again", for my habit (no, research!) of going around from place to place. The street (or alley, as the locals call it, kolmok) in the middle is Eunhaengdanji-gil (은행단지길); also the side alleys have the same street name. The houses are numbered so that odd numbers are one one side and even numbers on the other: Eunhaengdanji-gil 4, Eunhaengdanji-gil 7 etc. Houses on the side alleys are numbered by adding a dash and a number to the house number on the main line of the street: Eunhaengdanji-gil 7-1 etc. The street going downwards is Bongmaeul-gil (Bok-maeul-gil, 복마을길) and the ones on the right and lower right Sutgama-gil (숯가마길), of which there are numbers 1 to 5.

My wishes for a successful implementation of this system; the street names look ok, and I won't be missing the old system if it's sometimes gotten rid of. (Well, feel some nostalgy perhaps.)

The romanized forms of the new street names are at the English language site.


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Categories at del.icio.us/hunjang: cities ∙ technicalities ∙ urbanspace ∙ Sillim/Gwanak