Banjiha Stories (2025)

Abstract

Banjiha are everywhere in Seoul. You don’t always see them—tucked below eye level, half-hidden underground—but they’re there. First built as military bunkers after the Korean War, later turned into last-resort housing, banjiha have become symbols of urban failure—spaces of neglect, flooding disasters, a problem to be erased. Both media portrayals and policy responses have advocated for their disappearance. But does removal truly protect the people who call these spaces home? This thesis moves beyond the idea that banjiha are simply failures of the city. Through three homes —three lives, it traces how these spaces are shaped, not only by policies and architecture but by the people who inhabit them. A home vulnerable to flooding, where protections exist—but not with the greatest risk. A place worn by time, held together by quiet repairs. A financial foothold in a city where affordable housing is disappearing. A space of temporary sacrifice. A shelter to return to, again and again. This is not just a story of risk or resilience, neglect or demolition. It is a story of how people live; how they adapt, negotiate, and make do in spaces that were never designed with them in mind. Rather than asking how to erase banjiha, this thesis asks: What can we learn by noticing them? What would it mean to shift the conversation—from removal to recognition, from assumption to understanding? To see these homes is to recognize not just their constraints, but the small interventions that could reshape them: a door that opens both ways so no one is trapped, policies that hold upstairs owners accountable for leaks, materials layered to prevent mold rather than mask it. Not grand reinventions, but deliberate shifts—openings for a different way forward. But before deciding what must change, we must first learn to see.