He is not a real estate developer. Nor a market-entry consultant, nor a city marketer.
His job, plainly put, is to be a storyteller. To put it more precisely, his work lives in the space between storytelling and story-doing — between writing the story and actually doing the thing the story is about. Story-making, on its own, remains a fiction. Story-doing is what brings it into the real.
Paul Joseph Junhwan Kang treats the city as a medium — the way a canvas is to a painter, the way language is to a novelist. And the materials he works with on that medium are people, time, memory, and relationships not yet forged.
Twenty-five years have passed. In all that time, he has never left the city — physically, he has stayed in more than 100 Airbnbs and earned top VIP status on Booking.com, but the core of his work has remained constant. To build stories with the city as his medium, and then to do what those stories ask to be done.
So let us begin with who he is.
ONE — Seoul: A City as a Unit of Emotion, and as a Unit of Policy
Seoul is the city that taught him that a city can be a unit of emotion. And at the same time, it is the city that taught him that a city can be a stage for national diplomacy and global policy.
Translating the city into content
As CEO of Cosmic Station, he translated Alain de Botton's original work into Seoul. The Romantic Movement: Seoul — a four-part short film series starring Min Hyo-rin, distributed globally through DramaFever, with 147 million cumulative views on YouTube. The work proved that "loving in Seoul" could become its own urban genre.
Beyond that, Streaming Seoul (a content experiment in which the physical movement between cities was itself the artwork), Business Director at Ddanziilbo, Editor-in-Chief of the Melon (SK Telecom) Webzine — a series of projects translating Seoul's tone and emotion into text and moving image.
Treating the city as a stage for policy and diplomacy
In the same period, he learned early that the city is not only content but also a unit of policy and diplomacy.
UNEP 8th Global Ministerial Environment Forum (Jeju, 2003–2004) — IT & Online Manager. A global ministerial forum co-hosted by UNEP and the Korean Ministry of Environment. His first experience watching, from the inside, a single city become the stage for global environmental governance.
2005 APEC Summit Busan Bid Task Force / IOC Session Election Task Force (2005–2007) — Technical Director & Planner. Busan Metropolitan City. He worked at the heart of the process by which a city rewrites its own story to host an international summit.
Seoul Metropolitan Government Global Marketing Advisory Committee (2013) — Advisory Member. Policy advisory on how the city of Seoul should speak about itself to the world.
For him, treating the city as content and treating the city as policy were never two separate tracks. They were the same city in different languages.
TWO — New York: A City Reread Through the Eyes of an Immigrant
If Seoul is his mother tongue, New York is the stage where that mother tongue gains meaning only when translated.
He founded StepintoCity and served as the Seoul Business Agency (SBA) Official Representative for the U.S. East Coast — under a three-year Certificate of Appointment. Not a market-entry agency, but a curatorial practice for "Seoul stories that only make sense when placed in New York."
During the 2020 pandemic, he led an agreement with the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, SBA, and the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President to deliver 10,000 Quarantine Pouches from Seoul to the Brooklyn community. Two cities actually helping each other in the middle of a city-scale crisis — proven not in documents but in action. Story-doing, not story-making.
The Hyundai × Brooklyn Mobile Clinic project sat in the same lineage: connecting a major Korean corporation to a New York local community through mobile healthcare as public infrastructure.
THREE — Connecting Two Cities in a Single Sentence
His work in this period was not about "introducing Seoul to New York." It was about enabling the two cities to imagine each other's futures.
Seoul Made in New York (the official partnership between SBA and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce), the Incheon Global Ambassador Program (a pilot network across four U.S. states), and the multilateral collaboration between the Brooklyn Chamber × KAIST × Hyundai Motor Group × CJ × the City of Incheon × the City of Seoul — not separate MOUs but cities at one table.
And he began building conferences of his own around the city.
TEDxShanghai 2016 — Invited Speaker. His first overseas stage translating Seoul's sensibility into another language within the East Asian cultural sphere.
Create The Future Summit (Silicon Valley) — Planning Committee Member · Global Partnership Director.
Meet The Table Conference (2020, online — New York · San Francisco · Tallinn · Seoul) — Host and Speaker. Post-pandemic business innovation and the city. A distributed conference connecting four cities at a single table — an attempt to hear, in one place, how cities were enduring the same crisis in different languages.
Death and The City Conference (2023, DDP, Seoul) — Host and Keynote. Death and the future city. The proposition that to handle the city is, in the end, to handle the endings inside it — the conference that became the starting point of what would later be the core philosophy of IWBFD Storytelling Studios.
In hosting Death and The City, he made one thing clear. In the story of the city, the most honest seat is the seat of the ending. To speak of the city without speaking of its endings is to see only half of it — and that recognition is what carried him into the next chapter.
FOUR — Where Will the 101st City Be?
He has now passed 100. His Airbnb history reads like a map in itself, and his top VIP rank on Booking.com testifies to the thickness of that map. The Americas, Europe, East Asia — twenty-five years of treating the city as a medium have also been twenty-five years of living inside the city.
Right now, he is asking himself where his 101st Airbnb will be.
The question is not simply about choosing the next destination. It is a question about where his next work will begin. The cities he is moving toward carry two simultaneous tasks.
The first is the city in need of future storytelling. Cities not yet built, cities whose possibilities have not yet been imagined.
The second is the city that must be saved from disappearing in the present. Cities losing population, cities reshaped by climate, cities aging fast, cities the next generation is leaving. What such cities need is not yet another development blueprint. They need their unheard stories to be heard again — that is, urban journalism.
So he has decided to carry both tasks in one breath. Moving from city to city, building each city's future as a story while documenting each city's present as journalism. The two are not separate work. To imagine the future you must first read the present accurately, and to read the present accurately you must know what kind of future the city could move toward.
The result of these two axes is bcd-W Magazine. The fourth of IWBFD Storytelling Studios' four Original IPs — (1) Sim Eternal City, (2) We Kings Creative Acts, (3) Happy Death Day Collection, and (4) bcd-W Magazine.
If the other three are defined by theme, bcd-W Magazine is defined by a person. To be precise: it is the result of IWBFD's core service, 'Let Me Tell Your Story,' being applied first to a single individual — the first subject being Paul's own story, and the publication that Paul runs as a city storyteller is bcd-W Magazine itself. A living magazine, made by one city storyteller as he moves between cities.
bcd-W Current Today — Daily newsletter, Monday through Saturday. Editorial format: "One City, One Story, Many Voices." Officially launched April 6, 2026.
Cities, Climate and Aging — Weekly newsletter. Reading the world through three axes: city, climate, aging.
A magazine is not made on a desk. It is made inside the city. In which city's café, on which street's bench, at which elder's dinner table the next issue will be written — that is the question he carries as he chooses his 101st city.
FIVE — The City That Does Not Yet Exist
His most recent work is building, in stories, a city that does not yet exist — and then beginning, piece by piece, to do what those stories ask. After twenty-five years of urban regeneration and inter-city connection, and after the recognition reached at Death and The City Conference, he arrived at a conclusion: a city must first be built in imagination, not in concrete.
IWBFD Storytelling Studios — Founder & Chief Storyteller. "I Was Born For Death" — a studio that rereads endings as thresholds for what comes next.
Sim Eternal City: A Framework for Future City Storytelling — A floating city for super-aged societies, climate migrants, and humanoid robot co-citizens. The White Paper Prelude was published on March 18, 2026. The Kindle edition of the book launches May 1, 2026. (Storytelling.)
No Stone Tombstone — An urban funeral infrastructure pilot in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Event scheduled at NYCxDesign 2026, May 18, Cafe Here @ Red Hook. (Story-doing.)
Why the First Client of 'Let Me Tell Your Story' Is Himself
The People section of bcd-W Magazine rests on a single premise.
In the end, the city is people.
It is not concrete and steel that build a city. It is not policy and master plans that save one. What builds a city, what saves one, what makes people leave one and what brings them back — in the end, all of it is the people who live inside it. So a magazine that handles cities must, by necessity rather than by choice, have a section that handles people.
photo by Nate Didomizio
That the first person in that section is the magazine's own publisher is not self-promotion. It is the honesty of order.
The core service of IWBFD Storytelling Studios is 'Let Me Tell Your Story.' People, organizations, cities — whatever the subject, we discover their story, organize it, and rewrite it into a form the world can hear. And the first time this service was applied to a single individual, the result became bcd-W Magazine — beginning with Paul's own story, growing into the publication he runs as a city storyteller, and now standing as IWBFD's fourth Original IP.
The most honest way to prove that this service works was to apply it first to the most demanding client of all. That first client was ourselves. 'Let Me Tell Paul's Story' — that is the name of People 001.
The way a painter painting a self-portrait is at once the painter and the model, Paul is the Founder & Chief Storyteller of IWBFD and at the same time the city storyteller of bcd-W Magazine. The two identities are not separate. They are different sides of the same person — a person who, by his own definition, lives between storytelling and story-doing.
From People 002 onward, other people's stories begin. The people of the cities he has stayed in. The people who are building those cities. The people who have not left those cities. The people who have just arrived. The protagonist of People 002 may well be someone he meets in his 101st city.
That the city is people — this is the proposition we will prove issue by issue. To open the very first page with our own story is, we believe, the most honest way to begin.
"The city is not a market but a medium. Connection between cities is not a deal but a translation. Urban regeneration is not development but restoration. What has declined is not over — it is simply a story not yet told."
Imagine → Creativity → Connection → Content → City.
Every project begins at 'Imagine (Level 0)' and ends at the most local of places. Not at the level of nations but of cities, not in policy but on the streets, not on a platform but between people.
The cities that survive the next fifty years will not be the ones that built the fastest. They will be the ones that imagined it first — and then had the network, the content, and the courage to actually build it.
Paul Joseph Junhwan Kang is the Founder & Chief Storyteller of IWBFD Storytelling Studios, and runs bcd-W Magazine as a city storyteller. His first book, Sim Eternal City: A Framework for Future City Storytelling, launches in Kindle edition through IWBFD Books.
Next in People — coming soon.