Socio-Economic Considerations for Planning of a New Capital City

Abstract

Capital cities embody and exemplify the nature of their mother nations and are a reflection of the wealth, organization, and power of the political entity. Some nations have poured considerable resources into their wholly new capitals in order to create there an image of the nation as it hopes to be in the future, a goal for the people's aspirations, and a source of national pride. The creation of a new capital city, however, has not always been based on such a wide range of motives. The transfer of the capitals of some nations to new sites have invariably been political acts. In the case of Korea, the decision to shift the capital to a new site is based on several diverse motivations. The first of these is national security. More than ten million people are under the risk of direct bomb attack from aggressive North Korea, living only 40 miles away from the Demilitarized Zone. One out of every five Koreans is now living in Seoul, and the pace of immigration into Seoul shows no prospect of slowing down. The locational disruption raised by the national territorial division has jeopardized the spatial efficiency of rational development, as the over-concentration of people and industries in a skewed location of the capital city at the northeastern corner of the country has been generating much more movement than would occur with a central capital. External diseconomies of scale in Seoul already have become significant and are expected to become aggravated as time goes on. All of these facts have incrementally combined to bring about the decision to move the capital.