Suwon-si
A king's abandoned 1790s capital became Samsung's company town — city and corporation fused through endosymbiosis, a coral reef that bleaches if either partner withdraws.
In the 1790s, King Jeongjo planned to move Korea's capital to Suwon. He built Hwaseong Fortress — 5.7 kilometres of walls enclosing 130 hectares, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site — exempted residents from taxes for a decade, and prepared to relocate the palace. His death in 1800 ended the bid. Seoul remained the capital, and Suwon settled into its role as provincial seat of Gyeonggi-do. The Korean War severely damaged Hwaseong, but its reconstruction from the original blueprints preserved the infrastructure that would later define the city's identity. In 1969, Samsung established its electronics division on the site. Today Samsung Digital City occupies 1.58 million square metres of Suwon with over 130 buildings, its own hospital, fire station, three kindergartens, and a cafeteria system serving 72,000 meals a day to roughly 37,000 employees — in a city of 1.2 million. A king's abandoned capital became a corporation's actual one.
Reef-building corals are fragile polyps that become architects of entire ecosystems through endosymbiosis. Zooxanthellae algae living inside the polyp's tissue provide up to 90 per cent of its energy through photosynthesis. In return, the coral provides shelter and nutrients. This metabolic partnership allows the polyp to secrete calcium carbonate at rates fast enough to build the largest biogenic structures on Earth. Remove the algae — coral bleaching — and the reef dies.
Suwon and Samsung have achieved the same structural integration. Samsung is not merely located in Suwon; it is embedded in the city's tissue — an endosymbiont whose tax revenue, employment base, university partnership with Sungkyunkwan, and supply chain linkages are load-bearing elements of the municipal economy. Suwon, in return, provides infrastructure, a trained workforce, agricultural supply chains for the campus cafeterias, and political support that Samsung cannot easily replicate elsewhere. Neither organism is what it was before the merger. And Samsung functions simultaneously as a keystone species: remove it, and the surrounding ecosystem — housing, retail, transit — restructures catastrophically.
The result is a reef. Samsung Digital Valley now extends beyond Suwon into neighbouring Yongin and Hwaseong, a three-city semiconductor and electronics corridor built on the calcium carbonate of corporate investment. But the analogy cuts both ways. Suwon is only 11 per cent water self-sufficient, dependent on the Chungju Dam system for nearly all its supply. A city that powers a significant share of the world's semiconductor R&D cannot water itself. That fragility mirrors the coral's vulnerability to even small shifts in ocean temperature.