Since the 1960’s, as promoting rapid modernization and industrialization, we have experienced urbanization simultaneously in Korea. It is odd that industrialization was conducted at the same time as urbanization in Korea though people in the West ex...
Since the 1960’s, as promoting rapid modernization and industrialization, we have experienced urbanization simultaneously in Korea. It is odd that industrialization was conducted at the same time as urbanization in Korea though people in the West experienced urbanization after the industrialization. But another characteristic of our urbanization is that it was achieved only within 30 to 40 years whereas it took two centuries in the West. In the process of this rapid urbanization, urban conditions in Korea did change also speedily. Along with these changes, the inner city of a region came in decline rapidly, which resulted in a variety of problems. Among those, the matter of the inner city’s declined commercial function was highlighted as an even bigger social issue that shook the ground of regional economy. Hence, after 2002, various institutional measures were started to be built genuinely in order to vitalize the traditional market located in the major commercial zone of the inner city. However, the vitalization policies were promoted uniformly within the range of the system led by the government without considering its autonomy or competitiveness, so unless the governmental support continued, the project just stopped there very often. To solve this problem, the private sector as well as the government need to make various and new attempts now. Therefore, this study aims to examine the problems of political projects related with the commercial supremacy vitalization system that was first applied to the commercial zone of an inner city. To figure out the problem, the study will comparatively analyze the policies of major advanced countries (England, the US, Japan) that introduced and have been practicing the concept and policy for commercial supremacy vitalization systematically from a long time ago. With this, the paper is going to find out the direction that the policy should pursue to activate the commercial supremacy vitalization project in the inner city commercial zone of a local region.