A Study on the Urban Archiving for the Establishment of Local Identity : Focused on Old Downtown in Daejeon City
As the sedentism began with agricultural life, mankind has stayed in on place forming their own cultures. These cultures include variou...
A Study on the Urban Archiving for the Establishment of Local Identity : Focused on Old Downtown in Daejeon City
As the sedentism began with agricultural life, mankind has stayed in on place forming their own cultures. These cultures include various factors created in their own regions such as history, nature, society and economy, and the products of the cultures show each region’s identity. As such, local identities are significant in that they are contained in long-time accumulated histories and cultures. In addition, local identities are created as the result of interactions with the region; they are of great value, since they are connected with a sense of belonging and a sense of community, and affect image formation. However, due to indiscriminate development and urbanization, unique local identities have gradually disappeared.
Against this backdrop, we need to focus on archiving, especially urban archiving that requires establishment of identities escaping from standardization. Urban archiving means recording and preserving urban environments well and recording and interpreting memories and traces impressed in urban environments. Therefore, the purpose of urban archiving is to record and preserve rapidly changing daily lives in the city due to development in photos, videos or documents and hand them over to the next generations. This will play an important role in exploring identities inherent in long-time accumulated historical and cultural factors.
Hence, the study aims to conduct urban archiving focused on the original downtown in Daejeon Metropolitan City that have bee losing its own identity. Once an emerging new city with the opening of the Gyeongbu Line, the original downtown in Daejeon Metropolitan City has been on its way down after being classified as an underdeveloped region. Although Daejeon Metropolitan City suggest a few measures to resolve this problem, they are only focusing on maintenance and expansion of facilities regardless of setting an identity. Continued lack of management may result in the possibility of losing recording inheritance. As such, the study aims to suggest the direction of archiving and the utilization focusing on the original downtown in Daejeon Metropolitan City to tackle the threats. The objective of the study is to research urban archiving as a tool for establishing a local identity of the original downtown in Daejeon Metropolitan City. From a wider viewpoint, however, setting a local identity will cause self-respect and self-esteem of local residents, which in return, will create interest and participation in the local activities; this also will be led to growth and development of the original downtown. Therefore, establishing a local identity and urban archiving for it have significant value.