Fire breaks out in Seoul’s last-remaining shanty town

Key Highlights

• More than 1,200 personnel including firefighters and police officers were deployed to the scene, he said, adding the cause of the fire was under investigation.
• The hillside village has occasionally had fires over the years, a vulnerability that observers say is linked to its tightly packed homes built with materials that easily burn.
• The village is located near some of Seoul’s most expensive neighbourhoods, with towering high-rise apartments and lavish shopping districts, and has long been a symbol of South Korea’s stark income inequalities.
• The village was formed in the 1980s as a settlement for people who were evicted from their original neighbourhoods under massive house clearings and redevelopment projects.
• Hundreds of thousands of people in the city were removed from their homes in slums and low-income settlements during those years, a process then military-backed leaders saw as crucial in beautifying the city for foreign visitors ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.