Elsevier

Cities

Volume 42, Part B, February 2015, Pages 242-257
Cities

City profile
Sejong Si (City): are TOD and TND models effective in planning Korea’s new capital?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.10.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This paper explores the characteristics of Sejong City’s urban structure and neighborhood design.

  • Sejong City’s ring-shaped design makes the city structurally distinct from other modern cities.

  • Approximately 20 neighborhood units are located in accordance with the ring-shaped structure.

  • The TOD and TND models has been effective in terms of Sejong City’s urban structure.

  • These results are expected to provide a better understanding of future development projects.

Abstract

Sejong Si (Sejong City), the second capital city of South Korea, is a new city initiated to achieve the national policy agenda of balanced territorial development by mitigating the excessive concentration of public and private facilities in the Seoul metropolitan area (SMA). The master plan for Sejong City was formulated in 2005 through a project initiated by the Korean government and is noteworthy in that it presents a new urban design paradigm of construction reflecting the Korean experience. This paper explores the characteristics of Sejong City’s urban structure and neighborhood design. One major characteristic is Sejong City’s ring-shaped design (decentralized and empty in the central area), which makes the city structurally distinct from other modern cities with hierarchical and symbolic structures. Another major characteristic is the presence of approximately 20 neighborhood units located in accordance with the ring-shaped structure. This is consistent with the transit-oriented development (TOD) and traditional neighborhood development (TND) systems. The urban design method based on TOD and TND models has been effective in terms of Sejong City’s decentralized urban structure. These results are expected to provide a better understanding of urban design for future development projects.

Introduction

Planning a new capital city requires a full combination of the country’s urban design techniques and political, economic, and academic knowledge, and the physical planning of a new capital involves not only a solution to the country’s urban spatial needs but also its national vision and philosophy. That is, a capital city has crucial implications for urban design.

For example, Canberra, designed by W. Griffin, is a representative capital city planned in the early twentieth century famous for its modernized planning based on the concept of a symbolic axis and a garden city. Brazilia, designed by L. Costa, also reflects modernized planning in which central government buildings are located along the symbolic axis. These new capital cities of the modern era have been criticized for their excessively hierarchical planning, but they are all symbols of urban design trends. Plans for these new capital cities have meaningful implications not only for urban planning and design but also for national land-planning strategies for balanced development.

Since then, in the late twentieth century, several new capital cities were established in developing countries, such as Putrajaya in Malaysia, Islamabad in Pakistan, and Astana in Kazakhstan, which were under construction or completed. In addition, developed countries such as Japan planned to build new capital cities for balanced development. Japan planned to mitigate its overly centralized metropolitan area (i.e., Tokyo) but never achieved it. These new capital cities were planned and built for the purpose of developing national lands, achieving balanced development, and facilitating political gains, but their urban structures and designs also had some symbolic meaning in terms of representing urban design trends.

Section snippets

Historical development

In the case of South Korea, there was a plan for a new capital in the 1970s, when the country saw steady national economic growth, but at that time, the policy to move the capital was not realized because the then president of South Korea (Jeonghui Park), who pushed this policy, was killed in 1979. Planning a new capital city scheme in those days typically aimed at addressing the problem of overpopulation in the Seoul metropolitan area and ensuring enhanced security. Because the confrontation

The basic physical plan for Sejong City

Sejong City, the second capital city of South Korea, is a new city initiated to achieve the national policy agenda of balanced territorial development through the mitigation of the excessive concentration of the Seoul metropolitan area (SMA). As in the case of other countries, one objective is to reduce the disparity between the SMA and other regions in South Korea. Sejong City is designed to host the main central government facilities from the SMA, and these facilities are expected to serve as

A decentralized urban structure

Sejong City has adopted a decentralized ring-shaped urban structure with a large-scale space at the center and thus is open for sharing among residents. There are many differences between this decentralized urban structure and contemporary cities, where main functions and buildings are concentrated at the center of the urban space because of environmental, ecological, structural, and technical considerations (Fig. 6).

Distinct from a modern urban structure, a ring-shaped urban structure has no

Discussion

The master plan of Sejong City is designed to achieve the national policy goal of balanced development. The plan highlights a self-reliant city by relocating central government departments and agencies and research institutes (which have played an important role as a think tank for the plan) from the SMA to the central part of the country 150 km away from southern Seoul.

Sejong City carries momentous meaning in that it represents the collective experience of South Korea in the planning and

Future development

Sejong City is currently under construction and is expected to be completed by 2030. The city is now in the first phase of development, and the relocation of central government buildings from the SMA is completed. As in the case of other new towns, the planning and construction of Sejong City aim to mitigate the excessive concentration of political, economic, and industrial activities as well as people in the SMA (Keramatollah, 2006). The administrative district of Sejong City has been enlarged

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Research Resettlement Fund for the new faculty of Seoul National University. This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (NRF-2014R1A1A1005367). I thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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