The Seoul Museum of History will open a special showcase Friday revisiting the 1966 public launch of the city's inaugural urban master plan, museum officials said Wednesday.

The exhibition, running from Friday through Nov. 8, marks the 60th anniversary of the 1966 Seoul Urban Master Plan, Korea's first comprehensive long-term development blueprint for the entire city.

It revisits an earlier public exhibition held in August and September 1966 at what is now Seoul Plaza, where roughly 800,000 residents viewed drawings and models laying out the city's future development.

In 1966, Seoul's population had more than doubled in just over a decade, growing to about 3.79 million from 1.56 million in 1955, while a major municipal expansion extended its administrative area from 268 square kilometers to over 600 square kilometers. While the city’s administrative boundaries have hovered at around 600 to 605 square kilometers ever since, its population has grown to nearly 9.4 million today.

Jobs and public facilities remained concentrated in the city center even as the population surged, prompting officials to draft the city's first long-term plan for the entire urban area, with a target population of 5 million by 1985. Seoul actually surpassed 5 million residents by 1970, 15 years ahead of that target, the museum said.

The exhibition traces how that master plan shaped areas including Gangnam and Yeouido, now major commercial districts, along with the roads and subway system that developed in the decades since.

It includes hand-drawn planning documents and maps that were once classified, showing early proposals — including a sentence blacked out in a 1966 planning pamphlet — that called for spreading Seoul's administrative, economic and cultural functions across multiple districts rather than concentrating them in a single center, a vision the museum said helped shape Seoul's development into a multihub city.

The exhibition also includes a video installation on the museum's third floor developed jointly by the Seoul AI Hub Foundation and MIT's Senseable City Lab, using artificial intelligence to analyze historical photos from the Seoul History Archive and visualize how the city's use of space has changed over time. The lab's director, Carlo Ratti, served as curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Two related academic events are also planned: an Aug. 14 panel discussion hosted by the Seoul Institute on the city's urban planning monitoring system, and an Oct. 7 symposium with the Korea Planners Association on how master planning has shaped everyday life and urban space in Seoul.

“The Seoul Master Plan is the city’s top-tier spatial policy that has guided Seoul's growth and vision since 1966, and in 2015, Seoul became the first city in the nation to introduce a monitoring system to systematically track its implementation,” said Maeng Da-mi, head of the Future Space Research Division at the Seoul Institute. “I hope this forum serves as an opportunity to review the overall state of urban plan monitoring in Seoul and fosters active discussion on ways to enhance the structure of our city planning.”

This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.