The Seoul Museum of History is an urban history museum. A museum that reveals how the city of Seoul was built and how its people have lived within it. It is the role of an urban museum not only to tell the stories of artifacts from the past, but also to document the changes in the city’s appearance. At the foundation of this work exists the Seoul Museum of History’s Seoul Living Culture Research Project. Conducted for the first time in 2007 in Bogwang-dong, Yongsan-gu, this project has continued for nearly 20 years and is documenting 47 districts throughout Seoul as of this year.

The research is conducted by examining an entire neighborhood. It involves tracing the neighborhood’s roots through literature and old maps, as well as sketching and taking measurements of streets and houses. Our research team meets the residents in person to conduct interviews and capture their vivid stories, while documenting the current environment through photographs. The findings from different fields are not accumulated separately, but are woven together into a single narrative. The collected data, drawings, oral accounts, and photographs are published in a research report the following year and are sometimes presented to the public through exhibitions. The sites selected are either those with distinct local characteristics or those anticipating major changes and facing the risk of disappearance. In 2026, the neighborhood our team visited was Ssangmun-dong in Dobong-gu.

Ssangmun-dong is not an unfamiliar name, as you have likely heard of it somewhere before. It is the very backdrop for Dooly the Little Dinosaur, where Dooly floated down the Uicheon Stream and ended up living in Gildong Go’s house as a freeloader; Reply 1988, which reminds us of Deoksun’s house and the alleys; and Squid Game, where it appears as Gihun Seong’s hometown. In these works, released in 1983, 2015, and 2021, respectively, the goal was to capture “ordinary Seoul” through the lens. This makes one wonder: what does the real Ssangmun-dong, which highlights “ordinary Seoul,” actually look like?

Of course, there was the issue of timing. While Ssangmun-dong appears frozen in time on screen, it is constantly changing in reality. With the urban renewal projects—such as redevelopment and Moa Town—throughout the neighborhood, the landscape of low-rise residential areas, built up over decades, will soon change dramatically. Thus, there is not much time left to collect the memories of the generation that experienced Ssangmun-dong’s incorporation into Seoul in 1963. The need to document the alleys and the people who hold memories of them while they are still there. That is the main reason our team was headed to Ssangmun-dong.

For a long time, Ssangmun-dong was considered an area on the outskirts of the city. During the Joseon Dynasty, it was a rural area belonging to Haedeungchon-myeon in Yangju-mok, Gyeonggi-do, and with the establishment of Changdong Station on the Gyeongwon Line in 1911, it became a gateway to Bukhansan Mountain and Dobongsan Mountain. Its incorporation into Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, in 1963 marked a turning point, and with the establishment of Dobong-gu in 1973, the area acquired its own administrative boundaries. As the city expanded rapidly, people who had been pushed out of the downtown area, or who had come from all over the country—such as distant southern regions and nearby northern Gyeonggi-do—flocked here to seek a livelihood. Roads and houses were built where rice paddies and fields once stood. According to some oral accounts, during a time when infrastructure was inadequate, residents took matters into their own hands, building roads and maintaining water and sewer systems in the face of a lukewarm administration. In a way, these alleys are where neighbors relied on one another and built the foundation of their lives together.

Our team met with long-time residents, market vendors, factory owners, members of local civic groups, and young people who had recently set up shops to listen to the stories of their lives. By going through old newspapers, aerial photographs, administrative documents, and vintage books, our goal is to locate the coordinates where these stories will be. At the heart of this lies the work of collecting oral life histories. Official records and data are generally preserved in the language of policies, projects, and numbers. However, a neighborhood’s history is captured in more detail in the memories of the first time one rented a room, raising children, opening one’s shop, and the everyday life shared with neighbors. Documenting the lives of ordinary people through their own voices fills the gaps that written materials cannot, and it is also the most important method the Seoul Living Culture Research has upheld for nearly 20 years.

What did these alleys mean to people? Dobong-gu, where Ssangmun-dong is located, still maintains a thriving sock industry compared to other areas; in a neighborhood where residential areas and factories coexist, these alleys likely served as both the path to one’s home and the extension of one’s workplace.

Houses are an important element as well. Even after apartment complexes were built, Ssangmun-dong remains as Seoul’s representative low-rise, high-density neighborhood, densely packed with detached houses, multi-family, and multi-unit houses. With residential areas formed at different times and in different ways—such as along the riverside, on hillsides, and in neatly zoned plots—the width and shape of the alleys and the way the houses face the street vary from one section to another. Within these alleys, brick houses built in the 1960s and 1970s, Western-style houses known as “French-style houses,” as well as multi-family and multi-unit houses built in the 1980s and 1990s coexist. The shapes of the roofs and staircases, as well as the styles of the gates and fences, sometimes reflect the circumstances and trends of the era in which the houses were built.

Unlike the real neighborhood, shaped by layers of diverse histories, popular culture has portrayed Ssangmun-dong as “a neighborhood that is Seoul, but does not feel like Seoul.” A stage filled with warmth and a sense of community nostalgia. This is likely why there are residents expressing their frustration that Ssangmun-dong is always portrayed as a poor neighborhood. Because to them, Ssangmun-dong is a real place where they are making a life for themselves, even at this very moment. The neighborhood has been constantly changing. Apartment complexes have been built among the low-rise houses, and streets with new names such as “Ssangridan-gil” have emerged near Ssangmun Station. Another goal of this research is to examine the gap between the images created by the media and the reality the residents have lived through.

Most days of 20th-century Seoul unfolded not in palaces, but in alleys like these. What the Seoul Living Culture Research aims to document in Ssangmun-dong is not the nostalgic neighborhood seen on screen, but the true face of “ordinary Seoul,” where people have settled down and established their livelihoods. The goal is not to hold on to these vanishing alleys, but to preserve what they meant to people, just as the past has its own significance, and pass it on to the future. The research will continue through December of this year, and the results will be published in a report next summer, filling a small space in the memory of Seoul. By then, we will likely be sharing the story of Ssangmun-dong beyond the screen, once again.