The Role of Social Enterprises in Urban Sustainability: Insights from Anyang, South Korea

Abstract

The collaboration of Social enterprises (SEs) and the government to maximize the socio-economic prosperity of citizens, including minor ethnic groups and low-income classes, is one of the key tools that leads to the sustainable development of a city. Notably, though, is that a seamless coordination of development processes between SEs and relevant government agencies is often challenging to attain because it is usually affected by several factors. Some of these factors include lack of enough funding, depletion of natural resources and inadequate social capital. Besides such factors, there has also been another conspicuous factor— the increasing number of emerging cities, an example being the City of Anyang, which is located in Gyeonggi province of South Korea. Based on the issue of emerging cities, the objective of conducting this research was to find out what mechanisms of SEs can positively affect sustainable development and urban regeneration for the City of Anyang. As for the methodology, primary data were collected by use of questionnaires and the methodologies of factor analysis and correlation analysis tools, such as Cronbach and varimax rotation, applied to evaluate the results. The sample of the survey consisted of 1062 stakeholders recruited from over 18 economic sectors. The findings suggest that a significant number of respondents demonstrated a low confidence level in the social enterprises’ abilities to address all the emerging economic and social development issues. Regardless of the low levels of confidence exhibited by the study participants in the ability of SEs to address emerging economic and social development issues, other factors, such as employment creation, support for vulnerable groups, and environmental conservation had significantly high scores. Based on these findings, it is a reasonable assertion that SEs can effectively use these abilities to affect urban regeneration and sustainable development positively. Unfortunately, other values associated with enterprises, such as promoting access to quality education, affordable housing, addressing financial exclusion and disability, provision of the grants to other organizations, and support to other social enterprises, were ranked below the expected level. Based on the results from the study, it is evident that instruments of SEs, such as supporting the vulnerable population, the creation of employment opportunities, and environmental conservation positively influence Anyang’s urban regeneration process and its sustainable development.