The Kaesong Industrial park in North Korea is located 16 kilometers north of the DMZ and South Korean borders. Kaesong, having opened in 2004 as a joint project between the north and south, now operates as a conditional industrial 'experiment' with productions of low-quality garments and commercial products owned by South Korean companies and with labor supplied at the hands of North Korean workers. Currently more than 40,000 workers populate the park with plans for more than double that over the next decade.
The industrial city is directly connected by train and bus to and from Seoul, making it the only active civilian link, between the two countries along the heavily fortified DMZ- although for the moment, visits by the general public have been halted due to rising political tensions. It is a place of transient existence, with a workforce shipped in for operations and then out when the factories close. It remains caught in-between, somewhere as typical industrial area, and yet suppressed by the decades old cold war stalemate still gripping the peninsula.
But could Kaesong be a staging ground for more?
Kaesong presents the possibility of industrialization as a uniting force of disparate ideologies; bridging lapses and filling decades of void. It has become a delicate dance of divergent economics- precariously positioned as a model for unity in the oddest of ways.
