As you read this, South Korea is voting.

June 3, 2026 is the 9th simultaneous local election day — a national exercise in choosing the people who will run the country’s cities, counties, and provinces for the next four years. 17 metropolitan mayors and governors. 226 municipal mayors. Thousands of local councillors. And 14 parliamentary seats in by-elections.

The Seoul mayoral race is the one that matters most for the questions this newsletter has been asking all week.

Monday: Japan lost 3.1 million people in five years, and the cities that need immigration most are the ones least designed to integrate it. Tuesday: the world’s best-run cities score the worst on social integration. Tokyo and Seoul are at the bottom of every measure of how welcoming they are to newcomers. The analysis pointed to a structural problem: East Asia’s cities were built for residents. Not for arrival.

Today, Seoul elects the person who will have to change that — or not.

The incoming Seoul mayor inherits a city with the world’s lowest recorded fertility rate: 0.72. A city that lost population to its own suburbs last year as young Koreans moved to Incheon, Suwon, and Uijeongbu to find housing they could afford. A city where the foreign-born population is growing — 783,000 as of last year, up significantly from five years ago — and where those residents live in parallel to Korean society rather than inside it. Itaewon is international. Seoul is not integrated.

The new Seoul mayor will face two questions that have no easy answers and no popular constituencies.

First: how do you make housing affordable enough that the young Koreans who were born in Seoul can afford to stay and raise children there? The pronatalist policies that previous administrations have funded at enormous scale have not moved the fertility rate. The mayors who come to office today across Korea are inheriting thirty years of failure and a shrinking tax base.

Second: if the births are not coming, how do you build a city that immigrants can actually belong to? Not a city where foreigners live in designated neighborhoods while Koreans live everywhere else. A city where arriving from another country does not consign you to a parallel social existence for the remainder of your working life.

Both questions require mayoral courage. The first requires confronting real estate interests that dominate Korean political finance. The second requires confronting a social conservatism that has deep roots and loud advocates.

The cities in today’s Many Views have tried both. Some have found partial answers. None has solved the problem entirely. But all of them — Barcelona, Bologna, Vienna, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Medellín — are on the new bcdW City Intelligence Index for the same reason: their mayors made decisions that changed what their cities were capable of. The decisions were contested, imperfect, and sometimes wrong. They were also decisions.

Whoever wins in Seoul today will have to make some.

(Sources: National Election Commission of Korea / Statistics Korea / Global Citizen Solutions / bcdW City Intelligence Index — June 2026)

(All six cities are on the new bcdW City Network announced June 1. Each has something specific to say to whoever wins in Seoul today.)

Barcelona 🇪🇸 — Tier 2 · What Seoul’s New Mayor Should Do in the First Hundred Days.

Barcelona has the highest social integration score of any major European city. 26.4% of its population is foreign-born. The mayor who produced this did not do it through cultural programming or awareness campaigns. She did it through two specific policy decisions: changing the visa architecture to allow residency without employment contracts, and investing in neighborhood-level social infrastructure — community centres, shared public spaces, urban design that puts different kinds of people in the same physical location without requiring them to have arranged it. Barcelona’s integration is not warm and spontaneous. It is structured and deliberate. The warmth follows the structure. Seoul’s new mayor cannot change Korea’s national visa architecture alone — that requires legislation Seoul’s mayor cannot pass. But the mayor can invest in the neighbourhood infrastructure that makes integration structurally possible. That is a budget decision. It is a first-hundred-days decision. Barcelona’s mayor made it. Seoul’s can.

Bologna 🇮🇹 — Tier 2 · The City Where the Immigrant Becomes a Member, Not a Guest.

Bologna is the capital of the cooperative economy. More than 15,000 cooperatives operate in Emilia-Romagna, employing approximately 40% of the regional workforce. The cooperative model creates a specific kind of social integration that neither employment programmes nor cultural events can replicate: membership. When an immigrant joins a workers’ cooperative, they are not an employee serving an owner. They are a member with a vote, a stake in the enterprise, and a social identity inside the organization. Bologna’s mayors have consistently supported and invested in the cooperative sector as an integration mechanism rather than purely as an economic model. Seoul has cooperative traditions — the iCOOP consumer cooperative, the worker cooperative sector supported by the Seoul Metropolitan Government — but they have not been positioned as integration infrastructure. The new Seoul mayor can change this framing without changing the law. Membership is the mechanism. Bologna proved it.

Vienna 🇦🇹 — Tier 1 · The Warning: You Can Build the Most Livable City on Earth and Still Build It Against Newcomers.

Vienna’s mayor should be on the wall of whoever wins in Seoul today — not as a model but as a caution. Vienna has run consistently excellent city governance for decades. Social housing. Public transit. Healthcare. Parks. The infrastructure of a dignified urban life, available to everyone. And the lowest social integration score among the top ten cities in the Global Citizen Solutions index. What Vienna demonstrates is that excellence in governance does not produce excellence in welcome. A city can invest enormously in the quality of life of its existing residents while simultaneously building a social architecture so formal, so closed, so dependent on years of established relationships and language fluency, that newcomers spend a decade feeling foreign in a city that is technically excellent. Seoul is Vienna’s structural twin: a highly administered, highly functional city where social life happens inside closed networks that take years to enter. The new Seoul mayor needs to understand that adding more excellent infrastructure does not solve this problem. It requires a different kind of investment: in the informal social fabric, in the third places, in the physical environments where accidental belonging can happen.