Daejeon
Daejeon shows ecosystem-engineering paradox: deliberately built R&D cluster with 1,000+ labs and 30,000 PhD researchers, yet population shrinks as talent migrates to Seoul.
Daejeon exemplifies ecosystem engineering at national scale—a city deliberately constructed to produce knowledge. Before 1905, it was a rural backwater. Then Japanese colonial railways created a junction: the Gyeongbu Line from Seoul to Busan crossed the Honam Line from Daejeon to Mokpo, making an unremarkable village into a transport hub. This infrastructure accident would determine the city's fate a century later.
In 1971, the government founded KAIST here as Korea's first research university, then systematically built Daedeok Innopolis around it. Today this engineered research ecosystem hosts over 1,000 public and private laboratories, 2,300 venture companies, and 30,000 doctoral researchers. Nature journal named Daejeon one of eight global science cities to watch. The 2025 International Space Summit brought aerospace firms including Perigee Aerospace and Satrec Initiative, while a 2024 PASQAL partnership established Korea's quantum computing cluster.
Yet the engineered ecosystem shows unexpected source-sink dynamics. Despite producing Korea's highest concentration of advanced degrees, Daejeon experiences persistent out-migration—its population declined from 1.5 million in 2021 to 1.44 million by late 2025. Students arrive, earn credentials, then flow to Seoul's larger opportunities. Like beaver dams that create wetlands benefiting species that then migrate elsewhere, Daejeon produces intellectual capital that accumulates in the capital region. The city that replaced ancient Gongju as regional seat now faces a different question: can an engineered knowledge ecosystem retain the talent it creates?