Why the mayor of Seoul sleeps in a shack

“MY WIFE can barely contain her happiness,” Park Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, wrote on his Facebook page on July 27th. The occasion for her ecstasy was that an electric fan had arrived in the household.

In the circumstances, the excitement was understandable. Five days earlier the couple had moved into a rooftop shack in Samyang-dong, a dilapidated neighbourhood on the northern fringes of the megalopolis. The shack is not air-conditioned, and in the sweltering recent weather—South Korea’s hottest on record—temperatures inside topped 50°C. Plus, the fan came with a message of solidarity from the president, Moon Jae-in, a political ally.