Distributed Care, the Problem of Legibility and Ethics Underneath Informality 

A Weekend Notes on Maintenance and Meanings

I'm a month into my time in Korea, spending my weeks in Sejong where I'm working as a Fellow at UNESCO WHIPIC. I find Sejong is a young city with a sense of becoming where everything is designed and already decided. It has nature blended into designed urban spaces, bike lanes that function perfectly, and infrastructure arranged so well it doesn't demand my critical attention! Such a clarity and legibility that honestly feels like relief! While this could easily be called an urban designer's paradise, I opt for weekends where I can spend some time in other parts like Seoul or Daejeon. I'm looking for something I can't name, and I keep documenting the mundane trying to catch if it's there. 

People who've lived there longer tell me things I'm starting to see. The traditional neighborhoods of Seoul are where the 'ajummas' on each block have informal territories, tending not just their storefronts but the sidewalk, the corner! The plants no one officially assigned them they tend. How neighborhoods have rhythms you only catch after weeks like when the food carts appear, which alleys stay lit late, where people actually gather versus where they're supposed to. Someone mentioned how Seoul's streets operate on borrowed space, thresholds constantly negotiated between public and private. I see it now, the restaurant spilling onto the sidewalk, chairs that get pulled in and out, the way a building's edge becomes communal in the evening! 

The repair layers in Seoul I photograph aren't obviously aesthetic! But probably these are the records of who had access to what materials when, which problems got solved immediately versus which got lived with. A wooden frame against concrete against new tile, and that's the story of different economies, different moments of need, but all still functional! Heritage here refuses the frameworks that conventionally the South Asians are trained in. It's not conserved, it's inhabited and that's the beauty of it! 

No doubt Sejong gives me efficiency, but Seoul gives me something closer to what I knew in Old Dhaka! But it's also what Dhaka increasingly lacks. Somewhere the underlying logic is similar, care at hand level, space shaped by ongoing use! But in Dhaka now, a foreigner could comment on her very first day, that care is fraying! The informality tips into carelessness, profit over proximity! A sense the Dhakaites grew that public space is no one's responsibility because it's everyone's to extract from! People build without thinking about the neighbor's light, dump without considering the shared drain! And they occupy without tending. The threshold between informal adjustment and harm gets constantly crossed! Whereas Seoul's ajummas/the old grandmas water her corner plants, but in Dhaka that corner becomes a dump because no one claims it as theirs to care for! 

What strikes me in Seoul is that the distributed maintenance still operates as maintenance and people are still holding the fabric. I loved the mundane experience because they are genuine! The patched wall, mismatched materials, plants on a threshold in neighborhoods beside the accelerated modernity! They're evidence of care that persists even in informality, a sense of responsibility to the shared space even without official mandate. Probably that's what's eroding in Dhaka. Not the informality itself, but the care and ethic underneath it! I don't know if what I'm documenting is resilience or just a different relationship to the commons. Or probably both! Probably that's what I'm trying to understand!