Court halts Seoul City’s Mount Nam gondola project

A court has halted the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s plan to build a new gondola on Mount Nam, ruling that officials unlawfully changed park administrative rules to circumvent height limits on construction in protected green space. The Seoul Administrative Court on Friday ruled in favor of Namsan Cable Car, the longtime operator of the cable there, in a suit seeking to revoke the decision to alter land‑use designations to make the construction of another gondola line possible. For that project, city authorities removed part of the area from the urban natural park zone and reclassified it as a “neighborhood park,” a category with looser building regulations. “Under the current Urban Parks and Green Spaces Act, it is not permitted to install any building or structure exceeding a height of 12 meters within an urban natural park zone. The defendant maintains this height cap does not apply when installing track facilities, and therefore that it is permissible to install supports exceeding 12 meters in height, but this argument is difficult to accept,” the court said. The verdict