Urban Policies and Strategies for Balanced Regional Development in Korea

Abstract

Endeavors to enhance the city-region competitiveness in Korea are becoming a central task for national government in the age of globalization and a knowledge-based economy. To begin, this chapter reviews the city challenges which are derived from the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the Republic of Korea over the past decades. This resulted in overcrowding and congestion due to the over-concentration of people and jobs in the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA), which has led to increasing economic gaps between the SMA and other regions, and lowering its quality of life. In response, the central government, in facing these economic, social, and environmental difficulties, pronounced new urban policies and strategies to construct four new cities at the national level in the decade of the 2000s. They are the Multi-functional Administrative City (Sejong City), Innovation City, Enterprise City, and Livable City/Community making. The first three new city projects aim at resettlement in order to deal with the SMA’s crowding and congestion, and to balance regional growth. The last city project has an object to change the urban development paradigm from quantitative growth into qualitative growth with measurable improvements to the living environment.