editorial

Pyongyang, capital city of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is changing into a modern city of world standards, displaying its unique features. This is thanks to the Workers’ Party of Korea that provides accurate and energetic guidance for it.

Over the past five years the WPK has given wise guidance for the capital city construction, which has added a legendary chapter to its history.  

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, reflecting the desire of the people to live a more cultured life in better housing, made sure that a policy was adopted at the historic Eighth Congress of the WPK to build 50 000 flats in Pyongyang, and organized and led a massive campaign of building flats year by year thereafter. This effected a golden age of the construction of the capital city.

At the Second Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party he put forward the housing problem as a major task to be taken on in the effort to provide the people with stabler and more cultured living conditions. On March 23 2021, attending the ground-breaking ceremony of the project for building 10 000 flats in Pyongyang, he affirmed that through the project they would make a further improvement to the appearance of the capital city and usher in an era of fresh dynamic advance, when socialist construction would be confidently developed step by step. 

Saying that the housing construction in the capital city was a project being accelerated by the Party and the state as the most important task to realize their cherished desire and a promise made by the Party and the government to the people, he provided sagacious guidance to make the capital city construction theatre a main front, symbolic of a new period of upsurge and great turn in socialist construction.

During the days from the beginning of construction of Songhwa Street to the completion of the fourth-stage 10 000 flats construction in the Hwasong area, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un gave field guidance on the spot on a dozen occasions, making sure that the WPK’s idea on architecture based on the people-first principle was embodied perfectly in each of the structures.

Over the years when modern streets were built in Pyongyang he examined thousands of formation plans.

He examined the plans for the layouts of dwelling houses and their bird's eye views and repeatedly visited the construction sites late at night and early in the morning to lead the work to steadily break new ground for the development of socialist civilization in construction. Thanks to his energetic guidance, miraculous construction legends were produced one after another during the construction of 50 000 flats in Pyongyang.

To take a typical example, a skyscraper with nearly 900 flats in it, whose building needed excavating 102 000 cubic metres of earth and tamping 34 000 cubic metres of concrete, was erected in a matter of 80 days. Within only one year as many as 160 apartment blocks, public buildings and service establishments–the total building area being 56 hectares and the total floor space being well over a million square metres–sprang up to form Songhwa Street as the first entity in confirming victory in the five-year plan for capital city construction.

Later, on the beautiful Pothong riverside, there was built a terraced houses district, which is an epitome of harmony between buildings and nature with the natural features left as they are, and of organic and scientific layout of the living and ecological spaces. The district serves as a standard and model of residential district in the country.

The first-stage project for building 10 000 flats in the Hwasong area, coupled with the task of building more than 2 000 flats there in addition, was nearly three times greater than the workload for building Songhwa Street, which had been constructed the year before, as it needed to erect hundreds of blocks of skyscraping and high-rise apartment houses, public buildings, service establishments and other facilities in over 150 hectares.

Undaunted by the scale of their assignment, the builders, by dint of their indomitable spirit of self-reliance and self-development, successfully carried out the plan, unfolding a wonderful picture of house moving unique to the DPRK.

As Pyongyang citizens were filled with dignity and honour, the year 2023 witnessed the groundbreaking ceremonies for the second-stage 10 000 flats construction in the Hwasong area and for the building of a new street in the Sopho area. In 2024 the second-stage project in the Hwasong area, whose scale was much greater than the first-stage one, and the Jonwi Street project were successfully completed.

Thanks to the guidance of the WPK the Hwasong area celebrated the third round of inauguration ceremony with the completion of another large architectural group, comprising spectacular skyscraping and high-rise apartment houses and distinctive commercial and catering establishments strong in symbolism–all merging into an ideal harmony of formative art of architecture and advanced civilization.

With the inauguration in February 2026 of Saeppyol Street as well as fourth-stage 10 000 flats in the project in the Hwasong area, which meant successful fulfillment of the last-stage task for the five-year plan of capital city construction, the Hwasong area was transformed into an advanced administrative district.

Seeing the wonderful development of the capital city over the past five years, a period of remarkable transformation, the Korean people are convinced that Pyongyang will continue to change into a still greater city of welfare with socialist culture in full bloom.