Seoul

Seoul represents metabolic scaling at maximum expression—a primate city that absorbed so much of Korea's population, economy, and institutional capacity that the nation attempted surgical redistribution. With $779 billion GDP (2023) and 9.6 million residents on 605 km², Seoul generates half of Korea's economic output from 12% of its land. The Seoul Metropolitan Area (including Gyeonggi and Incheon) houses 26 million people—48.2% of the national population—making it the world's fourth-largest metro and sixth-largest metropolitan economy.

This concentration follows preferential attachment dynamics: 59 Forbes Global 2000 headquarters cluster here because other headquarters already do. Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and SK maintain command functions in the capital precisely because financial infrastructure, regulatory access, and talent pools are already concentrated. Seoul ranked 10th in the 2024 Global Financial Centers Index, 15th in Economist Intelligence Unit's 2025 City Competitiveness. Yet the population peaked above 10 million and has declined to 9.6 million as housing costs drive residents to surrounding Gyeonggi province—the city exports population while importing economic control.

Seoul's dominance explains Korea's repeated attempts at spatial redistribution: the Sejong administrative city relocation, the special self-governing status granted to peripheral provinces, the infrastructure investment in secondary cities. Each intervention acknowledges that Seoul's gravitational pull creates systemic risk—a nation where a single city's disruption could halt half the economy. The Constitutional Court's 2004 ruling that Seoul must remain the capital recognized this reality: the city is not merely a location but the institutional embodiment of Korean statehood, too deeply path-dependent to relocate.