Why does Korea have multiple businesses in a single building?
In America, its clean with one big Target, for example. In Korea, there's clinic, shops, businesses in one single building in each floor.
Why is that?
And what is that called in English?
How do you explain that in English, the way Korea building is structured.
Anonymous
The United States is 97 times larger than South Korea. The population density of the United States is approximately 90 people per square mile. In South Korea there are on average, over 500 people per square mile - that's over five times as many people per square mile. It's obvious that South Korea is far smaller and much more crowded.
There's an incredible amount of variety to be found in the United States. There are dense forests, endless plains, lofty mountains, vast deserts, not to mention miles upon miles of rolling hills and farmland, swamps and marshland, beaches, rain-forests, and frigid tundra.
South Korea is smaller than Kentucky. There's very little variety. Nearly 70 percent of South Korea is mountainous. That means that out of 38,000 square miles, over 26,000 contain some degree of elevation. Most of the uplands are modest - we're not talking about mountain chains reaching tens of thousands of feet, but there's an old Korean proverb that says that if it were somehow possible to take an iron and flatten out the Korean peninsula, the land would cover the whole of the Earth.
In the United States, there's plenty of room, it's all wide open spaces. Even in the cities, one can find sprawling strip malls with open car parks that could accommodate several football stadia. And in many places in the US it's just one shopping plaza after the next for miles and miles on end, and even if you were to put all of them together, the combined area they occupy wouldn't come even remotely close to the area made up of wilderness that can be found in the USA.
There's nothing like that in South Korea. Even in relatively "remote" areas in South Korea, you're never really that far from civilization, and therefore never far enough from the endless rows of rectangular apartment blocks and ubiquitous mega-marts that can be found everywhere. From the peaks of most of the mountains, one can see the glistening lights of the nearest city beneath a starless sky. That's not to say that there's no open land anywhere in Korea. In fact, the statistics don't tell the real story at all. While there are over 50 million people living here, over half of them live in the Seoul/Gyeong-gi do capital area. In fact, in the six cities in South Korea that have a population of over 1 million or more (Seoul, Pusan, Incheon, Daegu, Daejeon, Gwangju), you can find about half the population of the country. That means that there's a pretty sizable chunk of the country that's home to the other half.
There are some sprawling outlet malls, there are gigantic ports and national parks and all sorts of things that take up space, but the truth is that the average Korean home is far smaller than the average American home, so Koreans don't need to shop at places like Walmart. And the nationalistic fervor that's so ingrained in Koreans from birth means that they tend to prefer to buy domestic.
Think about it: If you were to visit any small country, let's say someplace like The Netherlands or the Dominican Republic, you'd see a lot of parallels - businesses would be smaller and more compact, things would be more congested and less spread out, and there'd be a lot less nature.
In Korean cities, they really didn't have much of a choice but to build upwards as they couldn't build outwards, so it's pretty common for the average street in an average Korean city to be between 5 and 10 stories tall and you will often see bars and restaurants located in the same building as doctor's offices and dentist's offices or internet cafes or singing rooms.
Anonymous
a mall