ourist attraction and marketing of global Seoul. The Gwanghwamun Plaza is namely expected to attract new international events and tourists and affect the economic competitiveness and global appeal of Seoul. By providing new public facilities the new plaza also improves the quality of everyday life in the city, yet not everyone seems to benefit equally from such approach. On the contrary the Bupyeong Culture Street improves social amenities, creates new opportunities for social interaction and strengthens the sense of neighbourhood and community attachment.
The Bupyeong Culture Street is a successful example of community-based urban design, where the citizens were involved in the decision-making from the beginning on. The resulting urban design reflects the interests and values that the local merchants, street vendors, residents and visitors attach to the place. On the other hand the metropolitan government took most of the decisions unilaterally in the case of Gwanghwamun Plaza, mainly to complete the project in the shortest time possible. Public concerns about the restoration and symbolic meaning of the place had little effect on the urban design. While Bupyeong Culture Street has become one of the main public spaces in the city, the metropolitan government banned public gatherings from the Gwanghwamun plaza and the riot police still guards the plaza, which questions its meaning as the main public space in Seoul.
Urban development in the metropolitan Seoul used to be characterised by massive urbanization, which paid little attention to the environmental and social consequences or the preservation of local history and culture. Unrestricted economic growth and speculative urban development were instrumentalised in order to strengthen the national power. The civic society was denied participation in decision-making. Comparison of the recent urban design in Seoul therefore shows fresh approach to urban development in terms of the local history and culture, quality of everyday life, economic competitiveness, public use, and civic participation in decision-making as compared to the prevailing approach in the past. At the same time there is an important difference between the recent metropolitan scale urban design projects, which aim to promote the economic competitiveness and global appeal of the city, and the community-based urban design, focused on the quality of everyday life in the city.
The urban design for the Gwanghwamun Plaza, seem to have more in common with the urban development of Seoul in the past. The local scale projects, such as the Bupyeong Culture Street, are on contrary more concerned with preserving the local history and culture, strengthening the social cohesion in the city, creating places of intense social interaction, and fostering civic participation in decision-making. They may in this way provide a departure from the established approaches to urban development and urban design and offer successful examples of community-based urban design for the future in the metropolitan Seoul.
The article was first published on the Asian Urban Epicenters blog.