The glossy pictures of North Korean propaganda magazines leave no doubt about how North Korea’s power elite would like their cities to appear to the eyes of outsiders. Such pictures nearly always depict large, multi-story apartment buildings (the higher the better) standing in rows along impossibly broad streets that are more or less devoid of traffic. This is the picture of Pyongyang that North Korea’s agitprop has peddled for decades, and this was presented as the sole type of dwelling worthy of Juche-style socialism.

However, such “gorgeous”-looking apartments are to be found almost exclusively in the revolutionary capital. Some large provincial cities like Wonsan and Hamhung might also have a few such high-rise buildings, but in medium- (let alone small-) sized cities they are all but unheard of. Even in Pyongyang, only a relatively small part of the population inhabits such houses, which essentially remain places for the rich and successful.

But how does the North Korean city-dweller live? Which type of living spaces are available for North Koreans both in the privileged capital city and in some small towns in the remote parts of the country?

INDOOR FACILITIES

If the officially published results of the 2008 census are to be believed, traditional one-storey houses make some 6.4 percent of all Pyongyang dwellings. In smaller cities their share in is much higher, close to 18 percent. The houses in such surviving traditional neighborhoods are usually quite small. Nowadays, most of these houses have finally got access to running water, but some still lack flushing toilets. Among the urban population in general, some 67 percent are said to have access to the flush toilet nowadays – as a matter of fact, much more than in the 1980s. In less advanced neighborhoods, every block often has its own public toilets that its inhabitants share. In some places, especially in smaller cities, one still can also encounter a public water pump shared by a neighborhood where the tap water is still absent.

Heating, which is vital in North Korea’s harsh winters, is usually done by the ondol (Korean-style floor heating). The ondol is fueled by briquettes made from pressed coal dust mixed with a gluing agent. Such coal briquettes, first invented in Japan in the late 19th century, are known in South Korea as yontan and are widely used across all East Asia. In the countryside, people sometimes use wood for fuel, though this is quite unusual in the cities.

One step above traditional houses are so-called “harmonica houses.” I do not know why the name of an Eastern Europe musical instrument came to be attached to these houses, but they can be described as basically a poor man’s version of European or American terraced housing. They are one-storey-high, and usually long, being comprised of several (up to a dozen or more) separate sections which join one another wall to wall. Usually in front of each section there is a tiny garden. Going into one, you will pass through the kitchen and find yourself in a living room. There are no separate bedrooms in “harmonica houses”: Families have to sleep in their living room. The flat in a “harmonica house” is usually small, the total area being in the region of 25-30 square meters.

LOW-RISES

The next step up in the dwelling hierarchy are low-rise multi-storey apartments. A typical North Korean apartment block has between three and five floors. The first floor is frequently (but by no means always) used for shops, while all other floors are taken up by tenants. Most apartments have a long corridor on each floor which goes through the length of the entire building. Individual flats can be entered from this corridor. Flats are larger than those of “harmonica houses” and, sometimes, there might be a bedroom or two attached to the living room. The total area is still quite small though, seldom in excess of 40 square meters.

A feature of these apartments is the frequent absence of bathing facilities and individual toilets. Even though the official statistics classify those apartments as “apartments with individual toilets,” this is somewhat misleading. Each corridor might have a public toilet used by all inhabitants of this particular floor, while bathing facilities, if present at all, may be located on the ground floor. In some smaller towns, sewage systems are not installed inside, thus inhabitants have to use public toilets located next to the building instead. Given the small size of such buildings, this is not as arduous as it might sound, but it cannot be seen as the embodiment of convenience.

Interestingly enough, many successful tenants of such apartments have recently spent significant sums on remodeling. They often have chosen to spend their newfound wealth on installing shower facilities and flushing toilets. Such work does not come cheap for North Koreans: a bathroom with shower and water heater would cost in the region of $1,000 or more – still within reach of North Korea’s new rich. The government is rather ambivalent about such spontaneous construction activities because such improvised shower and toilet facilities can leak and often add additional pressure to archaic and overloaded sewage systems.

ELITE HOUSING

The top of the hierarchy is occupied by the housing of the rich and powerful. In the past, such housing was reserved almost exclusively for those within the corridors of power – military generals, spy masters and Party Central Committee officials. Nowadays, though, this group has been joined by successful business people who have made money in the unofficial and semi-official market economy. After all, nowadays it is quite common to sell and buy your houses even though, theoretically, nearly all housing is considered to be a state property.

There are two broad categories of elite housing. On the one hand are old Soviet-style apartments like the ones constructed on Victory Street (back in the 1950s known as Stalin Street) in downtown Pyongyang. They had high ceilings, thick brick walls, and were spacious. Flushing toilets and bathrooms were also de rigor. However, these houses are now aging and hence have lost much of its earlier appeal.

Another, more modern, type of prestige housing can be found in apartments that have been built since the 1980s in Changwan and Munsu streets. These apartments are usually very tall; the recently collapsed 23-storey building was quite typical in that regard. They have elevators, though they do not usually function around the clock – being on at late night and sometimes early in the morning. This, coupled with the unreliability of the water supply means that the flats on the higher floors are usually significantly less valuable. Today, with North Korea’s vibrant property market, the flats in the higher parts of the building can sometimes cost as much as 10 times less than ones lower down.

In essence, they are basically no different in form from the apartments one can find in Seoul, though the construction quality leaves much to be desired. Larger flats might have area of 100 and even 150 square meters. An individual flash toilet, a bathroom and, likely, a water heater are all present.

The latter are the best-known kinds of dwellings, since they are pretty much the only kind of North Korean housing that are ever visited by foreigners (in very special cases). They are also the only kind of dwelling that ever feature in North Korean news and movies (well, admittedly traditional houses can be also shown as long as they are located in the countryside). However, only small percentage of the entire population can afford to live like that.

Main picture: E. Lafforgue

The glossy pictures of North Korean propaganda magazines leave no doubt about how North Korea’s power elite would like their cities to appear to the eyes of outsiders. Such pictures nearly always depict large, multi-story apartment buildings (the higher the better) standing in rows along impossibly broad streets that are more or less devoid of