Changwon
South Korea's first planned industrial city—purpose-built in 1973 for heavy machinery manufacturing—now exports $22.7 billion annually from a basin engineered to support 4,500 companies, but specialization creates the vulnerability it was designed to exploit.
South Korea's machinery industry needed a body, and Park Chung-hee's planners built one from scratch. In 1973, they selected a basin in South Gyeongsang Province—5,000 hectares of flatland surrounded by 500-to-800-meter mountains, with bedrock solid enough to support heavy presses—and designated it Changwon, the nation's first planned industrial city. Modeled on Canberra's urban layout, with separated residential and industrial zones, the city was designed as a purpose-built organism for heavy manufacturing.
The Changwon National Industrial Complex broke ground in 1974, part of the Heavy Chemical Industrialization drive that also birthed Hyundai Shipbuilding and Pohang Steel. The strategy worked. Machinery enterprises now account for over 60% of local manufacturing employment, generating $9 billion in annual exports—13% of South Korea's national machinery total. LG, Hyundai, Doosan, and GM operate among 4,500 companies employing 110,000 workers. By 2024, total exports surged to $22.7 billion, the highest since 2012.
In 2010, Changwon merged with neighboring Masan and Jinhae to create a unified city of 1.05 million—South Korea's largest non-metropolitan municipality. The merger aimed to generate 762 billion won in administrative savings over a decade through consolidated governance. Masan contributed its Free Trade Zone (Korea's first foreign-exclusive industrial complex), while Jinhae added its naval base and port facilities. The three cities had always shared a cultural and economic basin; the merger formalized what geography had already dictated.
Changwon's planned-city DNA gives it unusual coherence. Unlike organically grown industrial cities that sprawl around a resource or port, Changwon was engineered for a specific metabolic function—converting raw steel into precision machinery for export. Its vulnerability is the flip side of its specialization: when global machinery demand drops, the entire city feels it. Gross regional production has doubled from 37 trillion won to 82 trillion won, but the question facing all specialized organisms applies: can Changwon diversify before its niche shifts?