South Korea To Move Capital To Rural Utopia

Many people in Seoul can list the problems with their sprawling city of 10 million: pollution, traffic, exaggerated housing prices. One of them, President Roh Moo Hyun, has given up on the city entirely. His Committee on Relocation selected rural Yeongi County, sixty miles to the south, as the next home to the world's 12th-largest economy. Designed for a half-million residents, construction could begin on the unnamed city in 2007, cost $40 billion, and be finished around 2030. Many Koreans are wondering what will happen should the peninsula ever be unified, an event many believe will happen well before the 2030 completion.