Reporting, analysis, and commentary on busan news from Breeze in Busan.
For years, Busan has tried to revive its old hillside districts with small lifts, monorails, and planning models borrowed from flat cities. None of them have worked. The terrain—steep, fragmented, and rapidly aging—keeps breaking the plans long before they reach the ground.
Busan presents a striking contradiction: a city saturated with innovation programs, workation zones and startup hubs, yet steadily losing the people and industries that once defined its strength. Its quiet unravelling reveals the deeper limits of South Korea’s activity-driven regional policy.
Despite producing thousands of engineering and science graduates each year, Busan struggles to retain them. Limited research positions, fragmented data systems, and thin institutional depth leave the city at a disadvantage as AI reshapes national competitiveness.