Opinion

Songhwa Street boasting a distinctive large architectural group of 10 000 flats and Pothong Riverside Terraced Houses District built in an excellent location were significantly inaugurated in Pyongyang in April last year on the occasion of 110th anniversary of the birth of President Kim Il Sung, showing as splendid entities what the places for the people’s happy living erected to fulfil the long-cherished desire of the Workers’ Party of Korea were. 

In April this year, 10 000-flat construction was completed in the Hwasong area as the first-stage project, enveloping the whole country with seething excitement and joy again.

The housing problem is an issue in which the people are most interested and the primary one to make people directly feel the benefits of the socialist system.

It is the firm will of Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, to usher in a new era of comprehensive development of socialism from the construction of houses by dynamically pushing forward with it without any delay even if other construction projects could be adjusted as the people are actually interested in it and it is directly linked with their life.

He proposed the plan for building 50 000 flats in Pyongyang and noted that 10 000 houses should be built every year by concentrating the construction forces on the project at the Eighth Congress of the WPK.

Saying that building 50 000 modern flats in Pyongyang is something the WPK has long intended, prepared for and aspired to, in order to provide its citizens with more cultured and stable living conditions in his speech at the ground-breaking ceremony of Songhwa Street, he noted that the large-scale operation for the construction of houses launched by the WPK and the state is an ennobling undertaking to turn the state’s assets and the fruits of creative labour of the working masses into the welfare of the working people themselves.

Modern streets have sprung up one after another in Pyongyang to represent the times over the past 10-odd years, including Changjon Street, Unha and Mirae scientists streets and Ryomyong Street, under the wise leadership of the WPK which adopts all that people want as its policy and cherished desire.

Thanks to the noble ideal and grand aspiration of the WPK to make the people it worships like heaven and loves so much enjoy all blessings in the world without fail, today the construction of houses in the capital for the people is going on in a three-dimensional way without a moment’s delay, on an unprecedentedly large scale and in a distinctive and modern style.

It is evidenced by the sounds of huge blasts which rang out in succession in February heralding the start of the second-stage 10 000 flats in the Hwasong area and the ground-breaking of a new street in the Sopho area and the Kangdong Greenhouse Farm. 

The kernel of the construction of houses is to give priority to convenience of the people.

Accordingly, the layout, residential neighbourhood plan and architectural styles have been renewed year after year to provide the people with added convenience in their living.

Pyongyang changes its looks every day along with the new history of construction in the capital city, with high-rise apartment houses and skyscrapers which could be seen in only architectural miniatures a few months ago springing up as miraculous entities in a short time.