Lee Myung Bak, South Korea's next President.

Lee Myung-bak, the 65-year-old South Korea's president-elect, owes much of his victory to a wildly successful project he completed as the mayor of Seoul:

1. The restoration in 2005 of a paved-over, four-mile stream in the city's downtown, over which an ugly highway had been built during the growth-at-all-cost 1970’s. The new stream became a Central Park-like gathering place here, tapped into a growing national emphasis on quality of life and immediately made the Mr. mayor, Lee Myung-bak, a top presidential contender.

Prosperity came at a cost of worsening pollution as like developing countries. A clean environment was considered an unaffordable, Western extravagance. But Lee had the courage to realize that for South Korea's newly affluent middle class, the deal needed renegotiating. "When the Korean economy was just trying to get back on its feet after the war, having parks was a luxury," Mr. Lee told TIME last year. "But now we try to achieve a balance between function and the environment, and we try to put the environment first."
He pursuaded the city's people that he would tear out the jam-packed elevated highway that ran through the heart of Seoul and restore the buried Cheonggyecheon stream. But, His opponents insisted that the plan would cause traffic chaos and cost billions. Three years later, Cheonggyecheon was reborn, an environmentally friendly civic jewel that has changed the face of Seoul.

2. Moreover, Lee also revamped the city's transportation system, adding clean rapid-transit buses. But his lasting accomplishment was in changing the Asian political dynamic, showing that environmentalism can go hand in hand with development.

Back then, they called him the Bulldozer. As a driven young executive for Hyundai Construction in the 1970s and '80s, Lee Myung Bak helped build much of postwar South Korea, working with others to transform a bombed-out agrarian economy into one of the most dynamic industrialized nations in the world. He saw his brother and sister killed during the Korean War, and he hauled trash to pay for his university tuition, yet he rose to become CEO by age 35. Today, Lee is elected as South Korea's next President.