South Korea's 'Don't Worry Village' and the People Who Left Seoul Behind

Out in the South Korean countryside, a cluster of buildings called “Don’t Worry Village” has quietly become one of the more interesting experiments in rural living. Built by people who got tired of Seoul, it’s part commune, part coworking space, part farming collective — and it actually seems to be working.

Why They Left

Kim Ji-ung sold insurance in Seoul until 2018. Then he quit and moved to the countryside. “In Seoul, I felt alone all the time,” Kim told Al Jazeera English. “Single and in my early 30s, I spent most of my day at work or isolated in my apartment.”

He’s not unusual. The pandemic accelerated what was already a slow drift away from expensive, exhausting city life. Business Insider reported that Americans who left cities during COVID were chasing cheaper rents, lower crime, and green space. Similar pressures apply in South Korea, where housing costs in Seoul are brutal.

What Don’t Worry Village added was structure. The architects didn’t just build houses — they designed the layout to make people run into each other. Shared courtyards sit between private homes. Common kitchens open onto walkways. The residents call it “alone together,” which feels about right.

How the Place Is Actually Built

The architecture borrows from traditional Korean hanok design but uses modern sustainable materials. Here’s what’s on site:

• Clustered homes around shared courtyards
• Coworking spaces with fast internet
• Communal kitchens and dining areas
• Farm plots scattered throughout
• Solar panels and rainwater collection
• Hanok-style elements reworked for current building standards

“We wanted the buildings to push people toward each other without forcing it,” said Lee Min-ji, one of the architects. “The layout itself carries the community’s values.”

I think this is the part that separates Don’t Worry Village from a lot of similar projects. The physical design does real work. It’s not just houses in a field with a manifesto stapled to the fence.

Money, and How They Make It

Most intentional rural communities lean hard on farming. Don’t Worry Village doesn’t. Plenty of residents work remotely for companies in Seoul or run their own online businesses. Others are in tech, design, teaching, or healthcare.

That mix matters. A community built entirely around one crop or one industry is fragile. Having a software developer next to a farmer next to a physiotherapist gives the place some economic cushion.

“Rural communities don’t have to choose between making a living and having a life,” said Dr. Park Sun-hee, who studies rural development at Seoul National University. “With decent planning and good internet, you can have both.” Fair point, though I’d add that “decent planning” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

The Hard Parts

It hasn’t been smooth. Local government rules were written for rice paddies, not hybrid live-work developments. Permits were a headache. And the existing rural population wasn’t immediately thrilled about a bunch of ex-urbanites showing up with ideas.

Kim Hae-won, an early resident, was honest about it: “We had to learn to be neighbors before we could be innovators. Building relationships with the broader community took time and humility.”

The village adapted. They opened their weekly market to local farmers. They joined regional festivals. They showed up. Slowly, the friction eased — though I suspect it hasn’t disappeared entirely.

What This Means Elsewhere

Rural depopulation is a problem across the developed world. In Spain, The Conversation has reported that decades of people leaving the countryside made recent wildfires worse — fewer people means less land management, more fuel for fires. Keeping rural areas populated isn’t just a lifestyle question. It has real consequences for land stewardship.

Don’t Worry Village is one model. Whether it scales is another question. “Physical spaces shape how people interact,” said Maria Gonzalez, an international rural development consultant. “Get the design wrong and the community falls apart no matter how good the intentions are.”

Five Years In

The village is now mentoring similar projects in other parts of South Korea and a few abroad. They run workshops on sustainable building and community design.

Kim Ji-ung, the former salesman, seems settled. “The name ‘Don’t Worry Village’ started as a bit of a joke,” he said. “But it turned into something real — a different way of living that takes the best of rural tradition and plugs in a Wi-Fi router.”

Whether more places like this will spring up depends on boring things: zoning law reform, broadband infrastructure, and whether governments see rural repopulation as worth investing in. The idea is sound. The execution is the hard part.