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SUM M ARY
The Making of Livable Cities in Korea
Jae-gil Park, Hyun-Sik Kim, Kwang-Ik Kim, Wang-Gun Lee, Pillsung Byun, Seung-Mi Hwang.
This study deals with the making of livable cities in Korea. Concretely, the study focuses on the following issues: why livable cities need to be made in Korea, what the making of livable cities means, and what role the Korean national government should play in making the Korean cities livable.
In Korea cities have so far been developed chiefly to accommodate urban population of which the size has been increased by industrialization. Thus, the making of cities has been unfolded mostly in the form of urban physical development from a supply-side perspective (e.g., land developers). However, statistics show that a large number of residents are not satisfied with urban living environment created by the existing supply-side development. And the survey of 8 cities that our work has conducted finds out that the citizens’
satisfaction with such crucial elements of urban living environment as public transit, cultural infrastructure, and landscape is very low-level. The
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supply-side development also weakens social capital(e.g., tie, norm, trust), thereby generating social costs. Moreover, such development deprives many existing residents of the meanings that neighborhoods, villages, or cities can have as a place.
Given this, the supply-side urban physical development has to shift to the resident-led urban management which seeks compact development rather than urban excessive outward expansion and which prefer social and community-based programs over physical and top-down planning.
Considering that population recently stabilizes in many cities, especially in the Capital Region of Korea, such a kind of paradigm shift can be pursued in Korea.
In fact, the shift was undertaken in foreign countries earlier. In the 1960s
‘garden city’ as well as ‘skyscrapers in the park’ was criticized for being based only on experts’ views. Jane Jacobs also argued that the livable cities had to be created not by experts but by citizens. This new thinking led to the New Urbanism which has strengthened since it surfaced in the 1990s. In this context, Urban Village Campaign has also been driven forward in UK.
However, the resident-led making of livable cities is still in an infant stage in Korea. At this juncture, we have to discuss what part the national government has to play to promote such resident-sided efforts given the cooperation with local governments and civil society. This implies that the national government should have no more and less than the roles for motivating and enriching discussions concerning the making of livable cities.
In order to secure policy implications for the making of livable cities in Korea, our research examines not only several cites in foreign countries as significant cases but Machi-Zhukuri in Japan. The cases include the City of Irvine in US, Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany, Strasbourg in France,
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Newcastle upon Tyne in UK. The common features among these cases are citizens’ active participation in and public-private partnership for making such cities securing high-level livability. Importantly, Machi-Zhukuri in Japan also presents crucial implications for the Korean context. Machi-Zhukuri indicates all the local-level programs that intend to improve the living environment of cities and villages from a resident-side perspective. The programs commonly possesses the following important components: civic participation, local autonomy, the cooperation between residents, civic organizations, and local jurisdictions, and the financial and institutional support from the central government.
By investigating the statistics and survey results showing the Korean situation and the foreign countries’ experiences, this research intends to conceptualize the making of livable cities and to present an ideal model for implementation of relevant polices. First, according to our conceptualization, the making of livable cities should have the following components: ① protection and formation of life world and living environment, ② consideration of diverse spatial scale, from a neighborhood to a metropolitan region, ③ consistent partnership between civil society and local jurisdictions,
④ improvement in social and physical environment from a resident’s viewpoint, ⑤ embedness on residents’ everyday lives, ⑥ residents’ pursuits of as well as learning of the citizen-side making of livable cities under the support of local and national governments.
Second, in order to establish an ideal model for policy implementation, we also refer to ‘the Charter of European Cities’ that the European Parliament established in 1992 and ‘the Visions for Urban Policies’ in Japan. Our model basically encompasses civil society, local jurisdictions, and national government as main stake-holders. More importantly, the model emphasizes
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community-based citizen participation, public-private partnership, national government’s institutional support in advancing the resident-side making of livable cities.
On the basis of the conceptualization and the model that we have established above, this research recommends that the Korean national government should play the following roles: ① The national government has to continuously communicate and cooperate with civil society and local jurisdictions to share and spread good experiences and ideas in the making of livable cities. ② The national government has to build the institutional foundations or organizational systems for cross-departmental policy design and implementation within the government because the making of livable cities crosses over various fields such as physical planning and social programs. ③ The government has to taking into account the way of extending local autonomy to the scale of everyday lives for facilitating the resident-led making of livable cities. ④ The government should take all the measures that can vitalize multi-disciplinary studies on the making of livable cities and relevant issues.
