Habiter Cheonggyecheon. L’exception ordinaire

What can a place, discovered by chance and strolled along as any ordinary, permanent or ephemeral, inhabitant tell us? Cheongggyecheon is a small river that had once been turned into a sewer then topped by an elevated expressway and in 2005 transformed into one of Seoul’s most popular public spaces. This place deserves to be observed as an urban project that characterises emerging ways of creating urbanity. This is urbanism for actors, no longer one for authors. It is globalised yet everywhere it takes place, it has an obviously unique character. It aims at making actors’ freedom and environments’ ability to thrive, that is to say spatialities and spaces, compatible. It conveys ideas of some major issues of inhabiting. This example and overall urban agency show how central the concept of inhabiting is in contemporary geographicity.