Direction and Stages of Redevelopment Policy in Seoul

Abstract

Our Department of Urban and Regional Planning was engaged in a study of the urban renewal process in Seoul for over a year. In this article I will briefly review some of our conclusions and methodology. Before I begin I would like to make one or two points about urban renewal as it affects developing nations. Urban renewal begin in the United States in 1949. Renewal efforts have been pushed when cities have deteriorated or become ripe for different land uses or when traffic needs have created the need for arterial widenings and the removal of existing impediments to health or progress. In the last decade interest in city planning has spread into the developing nations. This interest on planning has been accelerated by a growing awareness that population migration and industralization have resulted in slums, insanitary conditions, congestion and traffic problems. The growing competition for space in or around the urban cores has added to a growing pressure on governmental power to regulate land uses and to acquire land for an expanding number of purposes now considered to be for the public benefit. In adopting an urban renewal program, the policies and experiences of one country must be carefully construed in the context of that country's particular environment, its problems. its policies and experiences. In the U.S., for example, urban renewal is being undertaken in cities which have been experiencing large vacancy rates and mass migration and of the central city to the suburbs. The vacancies left have made for less difficulty in evicting tenants than in courries experiencing rapid urbanization and heavy in-migrations into their cities.