Balanced national development strategies: The construction of Innovation Cities in Korea

Abstract

Korea has had a long tradition of centralized planning systems for national development. National spatial planning has played a crucial role in achieving the rapid economic growth and in stimulating the regional development that have been achieved over the last 40 years. However, as the national spatial planning has mainly been concerned with the creation of effective physical environments for economic development in certain areas, the concentration of political, economic and social activities has intensified in those areas, especially in the capital region. Despite the implementation of various policy measures, attempts to mitigate this concentration in the capital region have not been successful in achieving balanced national development. Due to the repeated failures in these attempts to balance the national development, the current government has created an ambitious plan for reducing regional disparities between the capital and non-capital regions. The central part of the plan is to construct Innovation Cities in the non-capital regions to reorganize the existing, regionally unbalanced, national spatial structure. However, the overall plan seems overly ambitious and optimistic due to its disregard for the national and regional political as well as spatial relationships.