Who Can Busan Keep?
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: On June 12, a 57,000-won studio room in Seomyeon—Busan's central business district—was relisted at three million won, fifty times the normal rate, for the night of the BTS concert. BTS themselves addressed the price surge on a Weverse livestream after winning at the American Music Awards; foreign fans posted they would not spend a single won in the city outside the concert ticket. This essay is the eighth in Busanloop's "18 Questions for Next Busan" series, published six days before Busan's June 3, 2026 mayoral election. Taking the BTS concert weekend's accommodation price surge and the city's reliance on temples and a public enterprise as a stopgap response, it analyzes—through Mo Jong-rin's concept of the "nomad city" (Creator Society, 2024)—the structural reasons why Busan cannot keep global nomads or its departed young. Where Fukuoka built a dedicated city department thirteen years ago, Busan in 2026 is patching the same function together with thousand-year-old temples and a city-owned budget hotel. The essay reframes Busan's physical, geographic, and economic assets through a nomad-infrastructure lens, and closes with two specific calls: (1) consolidate the city's retention functions into a single ordinance-backed body—a "Settlement City Bureau"—surviving election cycles; (2) on the builder side, who lays the first infrastructure. This piece marks the series' pivot from diagnosis (Q1–Q7) to proposal. Korean original DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20403204
Author: Kim, Hyunseung
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162392736
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