Living in my hometown of Ann Arbor after 29 years away has helped me connect my past. The old pictures of Ann Arbor posted in a local history group that pop up on my Facebook timeline stir memories, but also questions for the present and future.

One picture that caught my eye recently was taken in front of the downtown movie theater where I saw “Jaws,” “Star Wars” and “Alien” as a teenager.

The most striking thing about the photograph was how clear the sidewalk was. No trash cans, no public art, no historic markers or tourist maps, nothing except a few required traffic signs.

The day after seeing that photograph, I walked along the sidewalk that appeared in the photograph and noticed how many things had been added: trash cans, bike hoops, a tourist map, local history markers and a few more traffic signs. 

At first glance, the additions didn’t look like much, but after a few minutes of looking at the street, I noticed how they forced people to walk in a narrower band on the street.

As I walked, my thoughts moved from Ann Arbor to Seoul, my second hometown. I remember major street corners full of large cloth banners hung tightly to street lights, blocking the view of the street from the sidewalk. On narrower streets, the banners hang over the street instead of on street corners. Banners of political parties and local politicians are most common. Another common type of banner is for an official event sponsored by a local government or established cultural institution.

Not all banners stay up. When I headed a neighborhood organization in 2011, we put up a few banners to advertise an event that we were sponsoring in the neighborhood. One banner was taken down within an hour of being put up. The other two disappeared by the next morning. We never found out who had taken the banners down, but we wondered why our banners had been targeted for removal because the event we had proposed was apolitical and related to the neighborhood in which we lived.

As time went on, I noticed the pattern of officialdom in the banners. The problem, of course, is that most people don’t want to see officialdom. They are tired of it and hardly swayed by the banners’ trite phrases and dull design. Korea has one of the highest rates of Internet use in the world, and most people get their information online or, as elsewhere, through casual talk with family and friends.

Banners aren’t the only thing on the streets and sidewalks of Seoul. Like Ann Arbor, there are various signs and markers, but there are fences and short concrete posts designed to keep people out of the street. Some streets have trees and others planters. A look down a long street reveals a crowded “sidewalkscape.” And like in Ann Arbor, the business forces people to walk in a narrow path, but this is a much bigger problem in Seoul because of the much higher population density.

A deeper problem lies within the banners. During years of dictatorship before the Internet, banners were one of the main ways for the government to get its message out to people. Their primary purpose was to mobilize the people to do what the government wanted them to do. The government also used media censorship and control of contents of education, both more sophisticated techniques. During the transition to democracy in the 1980s, banners too became more democratic, but they remained the voice of officialdom.

With so many things competing for attention on the streets in Seoul, the banners are nuisance and should be banned. That will also solve the problem of which organizations are permitted to hang banners. Government and cultural, political and social institutions should, of course, be allowed to hang banners on their own buildings, but not randomly on the street. Banners should also be allowed during street events to help make for a more festive atmosphere.

Banning banners is only a start. The various fences, concrete stubs, planters and the hodgepodge of signage should be simplified with the goal of making the sidewalks more walkable. Commercial buildings are already full of garish signs with bright colors that fight for attention from passersby.

Hodgepodge and mismatch, of course, are part of the charm of Seoul, but the banners, needless signs and other relics of tax money spent are largely ignored. Instead of playing with the sidewalkscape, officialdom should focus on the most basic thing of all: building public trust. 

By Robert J. Fouser

Robert J. Fouser, a former associate professor of Korean language education at Seoul National University, writes on Korea from Ann Arbor, Michigan. — Ed.