This study examines how satisfaction with urban environments influences perceptions of urban community practice, reconceptualizing urban community as perceptions of what kinds of social practices are possible in everyday life. While previous studies h...
This study examines how satisfaction with urban environments influences perceptions of urban community practice, reconceptualizing urban community as perceptions of what kinds of social practices are possible in everyday life. While previous studies have primarily focused on the decline of urban communities or levels of social interaction, this study distinguishes three types of community practice perception—isolated, interaction-oriented, and participation-oriented—and empirically analyzes how these perceptions vary according to the characteristics of urban environments and mechanisms of spatial use.
Using survey data collected from residents of Seoul in 2024, this study employs multinomial logistic regression analysis. The results indicate that green environments, pedestrian environments, neighborhood daily-life conditions, and cultural environments affect perceptions of urban community practice in different ways. Satisfaction with pedestrian environments and neighborhood daily-life conditions strengthens interaction- and participation-oriented perceptions, whereas satisfaction with green environments and with cultural facilities and costs tends to weaken perceptions of community practice. These findings suggest that repetitive everyday experiences do not uniformly enhance community practice perceptions; rather, their effects vary depending on the purpose of spatial use as well as spatial and temporal contexts.
In addition, this study incorporates interaction terms for length of residence in Seoul and length of residence in the current dwelling to examine how the effects of urban environmental satisfaction are reconfigured by residential experience. The results show that among short-term residents, satisfaction with green and cultural environments tends to strengthen participation-oriented perceptions. However, as residential duration increases, the same environments become fixed in meaning as spaces for personal purposes, and their association with perceptions of community practice weakens. This finding demonstrates that residential duration functions as a variable indicating the stabilization of spatial use practices.
In sum, this study shows that perceptions of community practice are shaped not only by the physical conditions of urban environments but also by how spaces are used and meaningfully integrated into everyday life. These findings offer a new analytical perspective on urban community and suggest that policies aimed at fostering urban community should move beyond the quantitative expansion of environments toward micro-level environmental design that takes everyday life structures into account.