With more than half of the country’s population of 50 million living in the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea’s other cities, even those with strong infrastructure and attractive surroundings, can seem eerily hollowed out. Certainly, the farther I travel away from Seoul on my urbanist’s odyssey, the older the average age of the people around me gets.

Governments at several levels have launched ambitious, verging on the surreal, efforts to recalibrate the balance between Seoul and the jibang (the word literally means ‘region’, but is often used derisively to refer to ‘anywhere other than Seoul’). Two such projects in particular demanded visits on my whistlestop tour.

I first heard of Paju Book City from a friend employed at a publishing house there, who makes the 90-minute commute north by bus from Seoul every day. His situation seems typical: few people actually live there, instead travelling in only to work in one of its many publishers, bookstores, book cafés and art galleries.

Paju Book City – with a touted ratio of 20 books to every human – arose as “a place devoted to planning, producing and distributing books by well-intentioned publishers”, according to its website, in the dramatic, slightly contorted English typical of Korean publicity materials. “Our [purpose] is simple and clear: the city aims to recover the lost humanity.”

Said humanity has gone missing, apparently, in older cities such as Seoul – and this brave attempt at rediscovering it has been inspired by Wales’s famously bibliophilic market town of Hay-on-Wye. Sadly, the South Korean version has produced not a town or city in any sense but rather, a literary theme park, built to aesthetic principles of a rigidity in league with Disneyland. And yet, perverse as it may seem to concentrate so many bookshops and reader-friendly coffee spots well outside Korea’s cultural centre, the place has proved popular with Seoul’s weekend literati.

Its host city, Paju, itself became a city only in 1997. Located just south of the Demilitarized Zone, which separates South Korea from North, its ample space affords town-building visionaries the chance to construct communities from scratch. Other fruits of Paju’s expansiveness include Heyri Art Village, a hybrid tourist attraction and colony inhabited by painters, sculptors, photographers, performers and other artists, and Provence, a low-lying pastel village geared, I suspect, toward Koreans of a certain age who are possessed of a certain idea of France.

No designer city in South Korea, however, has attracted more attention than Songdo, the skyscraper-intensive, apparently eco-friendly ‘smart city’ built along reclaimed waterfront land in Incheon, home of the country’s largest international airport. People know the place by various English names, from Songdo International Business District to Songdo Ubiquitous City, so called because of the ‘ubiquitous’ data-gathering technology meant to inform those in charge of how best to keep the city humming along.

“You have the strange feeling that this city was planned not for people but for architectural photography,” wrote Robert Winter and David Gebhard of Century City, a district back home in Los Angeles built on a plot of land purchased from 20th-Century Fox. You sometimes get the same feeling in Songdo.

Yet its creators have set their sights far higher than did the creators of Century City. The $40bn price tag of this largest private real-estate development ever includes not just all those skyscrapers but a convention centre, a network of bicycle paths, four universities, an arts complex called the Tri-Bowl (so named for its shape, which brought to my mind Brasilia’s National Congress Building), an enormous shopping mall (with unexpected sculptures including a series of glazed-eyed office workers, frozen in mid-stroll through its fountains), and an elaborate Central Park, complete with canals you can traverse by renting a rowboat or buying a ferry ticket.

I went on a Sunday and, to my mild surprise, saw plenty of families doing both. I’d heard Songdo so often called a ‘ghost town’ – and one doomed to remain so, especially on weekends – that I half-expected to find myself alone on the water. Yet a crowd of Koreans rode the ferry alongside me, snapping pictures of all the same features of Central Park I did: the informal take-a-book-leave-a-book library booth; the tiny island populated exclusively by rabbits; the trio of fountains shaped like urinating little boys, their trousers dropped and faces expressing unbridled glee.

The idyll went almost unbroken, but for the buzz of a camera drone overhead. Or at least the people around me pointed up and identified it as such, not that they did so with much suspicion; to them, it seemed a predictable component of the Ubiquitous City’s mission of better living through constant data extraction from the environment.

And indeed, Songdo comes across as possibly the most humane space of its type I’ve yet encountered. Not that the others set the bar terribly high: I think again of Brasilia, Brazil’s planned capital built whole in the late 1950s and later described by critic Robert Hughes as “miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens”. Living in Songdo wouldn’t feel like purgatory, but it would, at 35 miles and about 50 subway stops from central Seoul, feel like exile. Despite its technological sophistication, architectural profile and stated aims, it can seem strangely provincial; only here, in this flags-of-the-world-bedecked ‘international city’, have I had my foreignness pointed out by a passing child.

That encounter, contrary as it is to Songdo’s image of itself as a place for high-powered western businessmen to congregate after jetting into Incheon International, speaks to the folksy flair that colours even the most deliberately sterile of environments in this unusual country. I admire much about the Korean people, but above all – and I say this with the memory of those peeing statues fresh in my mind – their instinct to keep things interestingly askew. This, as well as their love of convenience, keeps afloat that vague but all-important metric of 21st-century urbanism: ‘liveability’.

• Read day one of the urbanist’s tour of South Korea here

• Day two: from alien spaceship to discount socks