Pajubookcity is an industrial cluster that strives to be a city. Like all great cities, and as one built for the purpose of producing books, it seeks to speak of meaningful things and create special things. It is an audacious ambition for an urban area with just 160 units of housing, a strategic military zone that prohibits any structure over four stories, and an industrial zone that disallows mixed-use. Yet through its persistent urbanism, its pursuit of an open yet specific architecture, and its will to public speech, Pajubookcity stands at the critical boundaries of Korea's geography, its geopolitics, its political economy, its urbanism, and its cultural formations.



Pajubookcity is most essentially defined by the beauty of the mountains and waters. But it is a beauty filled with tension. Pajubookcity is located at a strategic and symbolic crossroads between North and South Korea. Straddling the DMZ, the last border of the Cold War, Pajubookcity may yet become part of an urban corridor that functions as the site of new social, political, and economic configurations. When the North-South borders eventually open, the boundaries of Pajubookcity will shift radically. Yet it is an open future that is almost impossible to specify.

From the inception of the idea of the book city in the late 1980s to the completion of the first phase in 2007, Pajubookcity has been part of the changing political economy of Korea. Yet from the last years of military dictatorship to the wide-open politics of the internet, city building in Korea has been dominated by central government and large conglomerates. On the one hand, there was too much planning, and on the other, there was too little. In contrast to the large-scale projects driven by central authority and financed by corporate capital, Pajubookcity is unique in that it was initiated by a cooperative of more than 200 small and medium-sized publishers. For more than fifteen years, the cooperative pleaded with and ultimately persuaded the Korean government to support the idea of an innovative cluster for the publishing industry. Pajubookcity was made possible by a cooperative composed of publishers, printers, bookbinders, and distributers of diverse backgrounds, business interests, and ideology; a cooperative whose bonds are as strong as it is emotional and as persistent as it is volatile.