URBAN TRANSFORMATION OF ASIANS’ TRADITIONAL CBD AREAS BY LEGAL REDEVELOPMENT PROJECTS: CASE STUDY OF SEOUL AND TOKYO

by SEUNGYEOUN CHO

After World War II, Seoul and Tokyo developed modern planning systems to modernize their urban structures. Seoul and Tokyo had very similar planning schemes for redevelopment, which consisted of legal urban redevelopment projects and subsidies under the Urban Redevelopment Law. They also had similar problems as part of their rapid urbanization. The differences in their government operations system and application of development tools caused differences in their urban structures. This article describes each government's efforts and legal systems to illustrate the spatial transform of central areas in Seoul and Tokyo using documentary research and GIS data.
There were many low-level cozy wooden buildings without 4m-wide roads and public spaces in central areas of Seoul and Tokyo. Since WWII, these two cities have tried to develop planning systems for infrastructure by promoting individual redevelopment projects. The establishment of the Urban Redevelopment Law converted traditional central business districts into modern spaces. Seoul designated the Urban Redevelopment Area (URA), which allowed only large- scale development projects based on the legal redevelopment master plan. In fact, the central government wanted to inhibit URA from constructing commercial buildings that would increase the population. A few large-scale projects were allowed based on a deregulatory policy to improve public spaces according to political issues. On the other hand, the government of Tokyo did not have enough power to control individual redevelopment projects because of the strong power of land-owners. Thus, diverse incentive zoning and subsidies were designed to control individual redevelopment projects as to improvement of public spaces.
Seoul and Tokyo have lost many traditional urban structures under legal redevelopment projects which allow a high floor-area ratio. They have constructed skyscrapers under the legal redevelopment projects. There are still low-level cozy buildings along narrow alleys behind of modern high-rised buildings, though. Fortunately, they added new development tools into the legal system in the late 1990s to gradually improve urban structure. Seoul allows small and mid-size redevelopment projects to conserve traditional urban structures. Tokyo also launched additional measures to deregulate traditional central areas, such as relaxation of set-back rules. It is important to change the planning scheme of Seoul and Tokyo by making them aware of how redevelopment projects should make conserve traditional urban structures.

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more about Japan:

Low Carbon City Development Guidance [Outline]

Comparative Study of Pedestrian Travel Culture in Different Cities in Japan

A STUDY ON URBAN PLANNING /URBAN TRANSPORTATION ISSUES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN COUNTRIES AND JAPAN’S TECHNICAL CORPORATIONINS

GIS Infrastructure in Japan — Developments and Algorithmic Researches

A STUDY ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PEDESTRIAN NETWORK AND PEDESTRIAN VOLUME ACCORDING TO LAND USE PATTERN

by Haeng Woo Shin, Young Ook Kim, and Ah Hyun Kim

This study aims to clarify the characteristics of pedestrian space use patterns according to land use by analyzing the correlation between pedestrian network and pedestrian volume in downtown Seoul. The study method is as follows: first, the present condition of the land was investigated; second, a pedestrian network was created using space syntax and pedestrian volume examined; and third, the correlation between pedestrian volume and pedestrian network according to land use was analyzed.
The results indicated that the correlation between pedestrian volume and spatial network in residential areas was very low (R^2=0.07), while there was a close relationship between pedestrian volume and spatial network in business areas (R^2=0.872). With respect to the commercial areas, the pedestrian volume characteristic of the entire commercial area surrounding Namdaemun Market and that of Namdaemun Market itself were different: where the correlation between pedestrian volume and spatial network was high (R^2=0.694) in the commercial area excluding Namdaemun Market, but became low when the market was included.
As the results show, there was a very close correlation when it was broken down and analyzed according to the type of land use, which signifies that correlation between pedestrian network and pedestrian volume differ according to land use. The study results also suggest that when planning for pedestrian space, business and commerce areas need a plan that puts more emphasis on spatial network over comfort of pedestrian environment, and in case of residential areas, comfort of pedestrian walkways are more important than spatial network.

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more about urban Korea:

New City Landscape - Seoul

The Colourful Buses of Seoul

seoul: buses that tell you where they go?

New City Landscape - Seoul

Via UrbanTick

Seoul is the capital and largest city of South Korea. A megacity with a population of over 10 million, it is one of the largest cities in the world. Seoul proper is noted for its population density, which is almost twice as concentrated as New York and eight times greater than Rome, though slightly less than that of Paris. The use of technology in everyday live is very integrated, even more so than in western cities that only are discovering the connectedness. In this sense the number of tweets being sent from Seoul is very high, with a high percentage of location based tweets.
The Seoul New City Landscape (NCL) map is generated purely from geolocated tweets, sent over the period of one week using the devices GPS information. This is virtual landscape generated from tweet density sent from within a 30 km radius of the Seoul. NCL is an ongoing project and we have covered earlier that can be found through HERE. 

In terms of the morphology, the Seoul NCL is a type with more than one centre. There are two main centres with additional smaller centres of high activity. Even though it is not visible, the river dividing the two main centres can be imagined from the landscape. The smaller centres dotted around belong to 'new towns' built around 1980 with predominately residential usage.
  

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more about South Korea:

The Colourful Buses of Seoul

seoul: buses that tell you where they go?

The Colourful Buses of Seoul

by John Calimente

It takes time to become familiar with a transit system, especially its bus routes. While rail has the advantage of being very legible - one can always see the directions that the rails are headed - buses are another matter. Transit systems try to help by providing route maps at stops, naming routes after their destinations or neighbourhoods they pass through, or through their route numbering system.

In Vancouver, for example, buses with triple-digit route numbers leaving downtown and beginning with 24 are headed for North Vancouver, 25 to West Vancouver, and 13 to Burnaby. Surrey routes start with the number 3 and Richmond routes start with 4. But that’s rather obscure, rather like learning the codes on Coca Cola cans that tell you where and when they were produced.

What bus systems really need is way to make their routing easily understandable even to those who have never ridden them before. I recently found out that Seoul, Korea has implemented a system that goes a long way towards solving the bus legibility problem.

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Seoul bus, by Kaba

A green Seoul bus, photo by Visionstyler Press

some posts about urban transportation in Asia:

THE EFFECTS OF PROPOSED BRIDGES ON URBAN MACROFORM OF ISTANBUL: a syntactic evaluation

A STUDY ON URBAN PLANNING /URBAN TRANSPORTATION ISSUES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN COUNTRIES AND JAPAN’S TECHNICAL CORPORATIONINS

Despite planning MRT, BRT and SRT lines, Bangkok still suffers from traffic congestion

seoul: buses that tell you where they go?

by Jarrett Walker

Seoul has done something that I often hear people ask for, a simple citywide color scheme that helps make the structure of the bus system obvious.  The four colors of bus correspond to four types of service:

• Blue buses run in reserved median busways on major arterials, and appear to be mostly radial (into and out of the urban core.)
• Green buses are feeders that tend to run locally within a particular area.
• Red buses are "express" to and from outer suburbs.  It's not completely clear if this is peak commuter express or frequent all-day service (which I usually call "Rapid").  Express is a slippery word.
• Yellow buses are orbital lines, thus tend to be perpendicular to the blue and red ones.

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A green Seoul bus, photo by sarahkim

more about urban transportation in Asia:

Urban Transport in Bangalore - The Worsening Crisis

Urban Transport Sector in Developing Countries

Car Ownership Rate for Japanese Households Decreases