Jeonju Hanok Village, home to roughly 700 traditional Korean houses, is the only downtown hanok settlement of its kind in the country. Unlike most hanok villages or folk villages, which were preserved from an earlier era largely intact, Jeonju Hanok Village in its current form is, in large part, the result of an active tourism-oriented redevelopment that took place mostly after the 2000s. Along the way, it picked up an international credential worth noting: in November 2010, Cittaslow International (the International Slow City movement, founded in Italy) certified the Hanok Village district as the 133rd Slow City in the world and the 7th in Korea.
The story didn't stop there. In 2016, certification expanded beyond just the Hanok Village district to cover the entirety of the city of Jeonju. This matters because the Slow City movement was originally designed for towns with populations under 50,000 — a philosophy built around small-town scale. A city of over 500,000 people receiving certification as a whole was, at the time, the first case of its kind anywhere in the world. In effect, Jeonju took an international movement explicitly built around "slowness" and small scale, and flipped its own defining assumption on its head. Walking beneath the tiled roofs of the Hanok Village, it's worth remembering that this certification wasn't just a marketing slogan — it was a city attempting to redefine, on its own terms, what kind of growth it actually wanted.