The recent historiography of the South Korean environment and science in the 1960s and 1970s pays attention to the ignored environmental problems and their social implications in the rapid growth of science and technology. This paper contributes to the previous literature by examining the history of the City Saemaul Movement (도시새마을운동). It examines how urban environmental management was, for the first time, initiated in the form of mass mobilization in early 1970s South Korea. In 1971, the Saemaul Movement (or New Village Movement) took place in order to modernize rural areas. The City Saemaul Movement began one year later was part of it but was quite a contrast to the original one in terms of its targets and aims: it aimed to resolve or mitigate environmental and social problems―so-called urban pollution at the time―in urban areas, especially in Seoul. The City Saemaul Movement was a mass mobilization of urban citizens to improve the residential environment projects; it also aims to instill moral ideals in the urban communities that “urban citizens are more immoral than rural people and should resolve all urban problems on their own hands with responsibility.” Through this work, this paper will shed light on the authoritarian government’s irresponsible response to the environmental degradation in the early 1970s.