Pursuing Sustainable Urban Development in North Korea

Abstract

The North Korean media refers to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, as a “city in a park” and promotes Pyongyang as a representative example of a sustainable city, emphasizing the fact that green building technology has been applied to newly constructed apartment complexes. However, considering that the North Korean media is a propaganda organization that defends the Kim Jong Un regime and continuously writes favorable articles about it, there are other more objective ways of evaluating whether or not Pyongyang can be viewed as a sustainable city. In this chapter, I seek to find unsustainable aspects of Pyongyang through an analysis of satellite images, while keeping a certain distance from the North Korean media, which monopolizes the production of knowledge that defines Pyongyang as a sustainable city. The results confirm that in the socialist city of Pyongyang, there are politically, economically, and socially privileged areas, even if they are not as clearly evident as in capitalist cities. These areas exhibit instances of a privileged urban nature, as evidenced by the less polluted and higher-quality natural environment found there. For Pyongyang to truly become a sustainable city, policy efforts are needed to eliminate the political, economic, and social factors that produce instances of (under-)privileged urban nature. © 2025 Taylor & Francis.