As historical conditions have changed, global competition among cities has shifted from competition based on the scale of economic construction to competition centered on so-called “soft power,” such as cultural attractiveness, quality of everyday...
As historical conditions have changed, global competition among cities has shifted from competition based on the scale of economic construction to competition centered on so-called “soft power,” such as cultural attractiveness, quality of everyday life, and modes of governance. In response to this shift, the role performed by public architecture within urban governance has also undergone significant transformation. City halls are no longer confined to functioning as physical containers for administrative work; rather, they have come to operate as core spatial mediators that represent urban images, accommodate public life, and regulate social relationships. In this context, publicness—composed of spatial openness, the capacity to accommodate and deploy diverse public activities, and influence on the formation of social relations—has emerged as a key criterion for evaluating the contemporary social value of city halls. Based on this problem awareness, this study selects the Nanjing City Hall in China and the Seoul City Hall in the Republic of Korea as comparative cases, aiming to analyze how publicness is generated and practiced within different urban contexts and what cultural and symbolic meanings it acquires. Furthermore, the primary objective of this research is to construct a framework for analyzing publicness that can be applied across cases.
The city halls of Nanjing and Seoul are representative administrative centers of their respective countries and are situated within distinct trajectories of urban development, spatial governance philosophies, and civic structures. Although the two cities share certain aspects of East Asian cultural tradition, they exhibit clear contrasts in the orientations of publicness they pursue. Nanjing places relatively greater emphasis on maintaining historical order and cultural identity, whereas Seoul highlights citizen participation, plural agendas, and institutionalized practices of innovation. These differences render the two city halls suitable comparative cases for analyzing differentiated modes of publicness implementation. Through this comparison, the study critically examines Western-centered theoretical frameworks of publicness while seeking to deepen understanding of spatial practices grounded in the East Asian urban context.
Considering the complexity of the research topic, this study adopts a qualitative comparative case study strategy. A wide range of materials—including academic literature, urban planning and design documents, historical records, media reports, and visual and image data—are comprehensively utilized. Based on these materials, a four-dimensional analytical model consisting of spatial structure, social structure, cultural structure, and symbolic structure is established and further subdivided into thirteen specific analytical indicators. The analysis compares the two city halls horizontally across each dimension while also examining vertically the causal relationships and structural logics linking spatial form, social interaction, and cultural symbolism. In this process, interdisciplinary perspectives—including spatial analysis, social capital theory, and cultural narrative studies—are integrally applied.
The findings reveal structured differences between the two city halls across the four analytical dimensions. In terms of spatial structure, Nanjing City Hall exhibits the characteristics of an “administrative destination,” with clearly defined functions and emphasized spatial sequencing, as well as strong boundaries and ritualized spatial qualities. In contrast, Seoul City Hall functions as an “everyday hybrid node” characterized by high openness and mixed functions, deeply embedded within citizens’ daily mobility patterns and urban flow networks. Regarding social structure, public activities at Nanjing City Hall are mainly organized around holidays and institutionalized ceremonies, resulting in periodically opened rhythms of publicness and social relations centered on vertical “citizen–administration” connections. Seoul City Hall, by contrast, sustains spatial vitality through year-round, issue-driven plural activities, forming multi-layered social capital networks jointly constituted by citizens, administrative bodies, and cultural actors, with particular emphasis on the complementarity between weak ties and issue-based connections. In cultural and symbolic terms, Nanjing City Hall functions as a “background symbol” within the city’s historical narrative, closely integrated into the urban cultural landscape through restrained and stable architectural language. Seoul City Hall, through the juxtaposition of old and new buildings and systematically curated activity structures, forms a “participatory symbol” that represents urban regeneration, social innovation, and institutionalized pathways of citizen participation.
Based on this comparison, the study conceptualizes the publicness of Nanjing City Hall as expressive and consolidated publicness, and that of Seoul City Hall as practical and productive publicness. The former is characterized by mechanisms that stabilize and reproduce existing orders, cultural identities, and value systems, whereas the latter is distinguished by its continual production of new public values and social connections through open structures, plural participation, and ongoing practices. These two types do not constitute a hierarchical relationship of superiority or inferiority; rather, they represent different modes of publicness production spatially projected from each city’s historical conditions, governance ideologies, and social foundations. Importantly, this study emphasizes that publicness is not a fixed attribute embedded in architectural form or institutional documents, but a social process that is generated, maintained, and renewed through repeated use, interaction, and negotiation of meaning within concrete spatial situations.
The academic contribution of this research lies in proposing a multidimensional analytical framework for publicness and elucidating the pathways and internal mechanisms through which publicness is produced in East Asian public architecture through representative comparative cases. Nevertheless, the study relies primarily on secondary sources such as documents and images, resulting in limitations related to the lack of large-scale interviews and long-term participant observation, as well as a restricted number of cases, which constrain the verification of the framework’s general applicability. In addition, temporal changes in publicness were not sufficiently examined. Future research should supplement experiential data through in-depth interviews and participant observation, apply the analytical framework to a broader range of East Asian cities and other types of public architecture, and incorporate emerging themes such as digital publicness in order to further expand theories of publicness.