We visit the very first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, a months-spanning celebration and an exploration of how cities across the world have found innovative ways to use, preserve, and improve their urban and natural “commons.” At one of the Biennale’s main exhibitions at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, we learn from more than fifty different world cities — Rome with its historical cultural spaces, Bangkok with its street food, Reykjavik with its hot tubs, and even Pyongyang, by a replica of one of its high-rise apartments — what Seoul could incorporate into the next phase of its history.

We go just south of the Han River for a nighttime journey — punctuated by cats, coffee, ukulele riffs, tap dancing, and showers of sparks — through Mullae-dong. There an established generation of industrial operations now coexist with a new generation of cultural venues, putting metalworkers and craftsmen right alongside artists and baristas. We’re joined by Yolanta Siu, whose recent piece “Collective Dust” in Places Journal warns that “the situation in Mullae now calls for artists and factory owners to unite in resistance to speculative capitalism. Otherwise the neighborhood will follow the model of Daehangno, Bukchon, Seochon, Garosu-gil, and Jogno in becoming a generic shopping district,” whose popularity led to rising rents that brought about “not prosperity but hollowness.”

We talk about my recent Guardian article on the branding of Seoul and the city’s efforts to resolve its ongoing identity crisis: hiring place-branding consultants, importing foreign architectural prestige, launching high-profile urban regeneration projects, putting up posters that encourage Seoulites to feel good about their city, introducing slogans like “I.Seoul.U,” and even more besides.

We make the journey to Yongma Land, a long-abandoned neighborhood amusement park in eastern Seoul that has recently drawn such crowds as couples on dates, engagement photographers, Instagrammers, and no small number of music videos and television drama shoots. But though it has become beloved again, the question remains: who abandoned Yongma Land, letting all its attractions — its rideable space ships and squids, its Madonna and Bruce Springsteen portrait-adorned disco ppang ppang, its much-photographed merry-go-round — all go to seed? We dig into the park’s conflicting but always fascinating histories, even sitting down with the facility’s current owner to get his idea of how long Yongma Land has lasted this way, and can last this way, in a development-obsessed city like Seoul.

We pay a visit to the well-known institution of the Noryangjin fish market — or rather, to both of them. After beginning near downtown Seoul in the early 1920s, Noryangjin moved in the early 1970s into a larger concrete complex just south of the Han River, and there became both a thriving commercial center as well as a popular tourist spot. In more recent years, as the old structure has shown its age, a government body built a shiny new building, albeit a more expensive one, for Noryangjin’s many fish merchants to move into, but not all of them have done so — and not all have wanted to. We ask those who’ve moved why they’ve moved, ask those who’ve stayed why they’ve stayed, and make sure to get one of them to slice up a fish right before our eyes (and for our enjoyable consumption).

We get up above Seoul Station and onto quite possibly the city’s most anticipated urban development of the decade: Seoullo 7017. Previously known as the Seoul Skygarden, the project has permanently shut down a freeway overpass and turned it into a walkway park featuring not just a variety of Korea’s plants and trees, but snack shops, foot baths, trampolines, and more besides. Given its repurposing of elevated space for cars as elevated space for people, some have called it Seoul’s own version of New York’s High Line, but the two projects have their differences as well. We talk about them as we walk Seoullo 7017, which opens to the public on May 20th, and also about the challenges of building such a space, the hopes for its future as it settles into a sometimes neglected part of Seoul’s urban landscape, and how it could show freeway-filled Western cities the way forward.

We join urban explorer Jon Dunbar of Daehanmindecline for a walk through an old neighborhood called Bamgol Village — or what’s left of it. Urban redevelopment never stops in Seoul, and when it happens it scrapes whole communities off the map, usually in order to replace clusters of low-rise buildings with another set of the high-rise tower blocks that have increasingly characterized the city since the 1970s. Bamgol Village’s bid to save itself with by filling its walls with colorful murals didn’t pan out, and as in all such condemned neighborhoods, some residents haven’t had an easy time leaving: amid the heaps of rubble stand half-demolished houses still strewn with possessions, and at least one may even remain occupied.

We head down into the Euljiro Underground Shopping Center, a nearly two-mile-long subterranean street running beneath downtown from the City Hall to the Dongdaemun History and Culture Park Line 2 subway stations. Initially opening for business in 1983 at the same time Line 2 itself did, its ever-changing selection of shops supply everything from tailored clothing to computer equipment to medical supplies to punch clocks to electronic cigarettes to freshly baked bread and freshly roasted coffee — not to mention a safe haven from the weather during cold winters like this one. The Euljiro Underground Shopping Center can feel like a part of the city time forgot, but now that it has begun providing space for art installations and hosting exhibits like those of the recent Seoul Architecture Festival, what does its future hold?

We’re joined by German-Korean architect Daniel Tändler of Urban Detail Seoul for a walk through Ikseon-dong Hanok Village, a 1930s-era housing development near downtown that has in recent years seen an influx of restaurants, bars, cafés, shops, and studios putting its traditional Korean residential architecture to whole new uses.

We spend a day riding on Seoul’s buses, which form a transportation network even more impressive, in its way, than the world-class Seoul Metropolitan Subway. We reveal three of the lines that provide the best tours of the cityscape a thousand won or two can buy, point out the kind of attractions you can spot out the windows along the way, break down exactly what the various route colors and numbers mean, take a look at the books written specifically about exploring Seoul by bus, and figure out why buses here don’t carry the American stigma, as Lisa Simpson once put it, of being only “for the poor and very poor alike.”