메가시티 서울 담론을 통한 서울 확대론에 대한 논고

Abstract

This paper is supposed to review critically the arguments for expanding the administrative area of Seoul City, focusing on the Seoul Megacity initiative sparked recently by the ruling party on Korean Political arena. The nuts and bolts of the initiative are letting Seoul to be a Megacity by enlarging it's administrative area, and to fix up the mismatch problems in living areas and strengthen Seoul's urban competitiveness. And as it's typical models, Tokyo Metropolis, Osaka Prefecture, Greater London, and Grand Paris were frequently brought up. Therefore, the task of this paper is to examine what a megacity is and whether it really means expansion of Seoul's administrative district. In addition, it is discussed whether it is contextually consistent with the cases of Tokyo, Osaka, London, and Paris. As the claimants of “Bigger Seoul” are clamouing for, Megacity as a single large city mainly refers to super large cities in developing countries and is associated with urban problems such as slums. Additionally, Tokyo and Osaka were established through the Prefecture-Abolishing processes of Japan in 19th Century, not the urbanization process. Moreover, Greater London and Grand Paris take charge of only wide range functions while leave the functions for small cities to the many cities and small municipalities under the bigger government. So they have nothing to do with expanding the administrative area of their central cities. For the competitive of large cities, the lingkage-oriented concepts like city-region, mega-city region or megaregion are more suitable, than the size-oriented one like megacity.