An urban landscape acts as an indicator that signifies the degree of a city's development in terms of its political, economical, social, cultural and technological development, in addition to presenting the history of the city. Moreover, it displays d...
An urban landscape acts as an indicator that signifies the degree of a city's development in terms of its political, economical, social, cultural and technological development, in addition to presenting the history of the city. Moreover, it displays distinctive landscape characteristics of places where various networks across the city and spatial interaction, as well as all kinds of input and output, occur. In this respect, this dissertation studies the meaning of an urban landscape and the fundamental causes of the formation and transformation of Seoul, as well as the characteristics of Seoul's landscape, which accordingly came to exist currently. There could be various causes, or even reciprocal actions of multiple causes, that have brought the formation of a city and the changes it went through. In examining all those possible causes, this study chooses to discuss it from four different angles that are thought to have had crucial influences on it. Those four categories of examination are as follows: ideological factor, socioeconomic factor, technical factor, and regulative factor.
This study uses both synchronic and diachronic methods. This study takes a comprehensive, holistic approach. Utilizing the typo-morphologic method, Seoul's landscape is examined through four different steps, in order of i) its formation at each phase of its history, ii) the causes of its transformation, iii) pattern distribution, and iv) the characteristics of the landscape. The typo-morphologic method assumes that the developmental stages of a city are blended in with the current urban landscape, which enables tracing the history and accompanying changes that the city has undergone.
The researcher concludes that: 1) The ideological factor played a substantial role in deciding the developmental directions Seoul had to take and the ultimate form of it, by having an urban planning come up so as to manifest the governing ideology of the nation and the spirit of the age; 2) The socioeconomic factor had a great influence on the creation of current urban landscape of Seoul, as people and goods concentrated in Seoul due to the fact that it has been a political, economical, social, cultural, and transportational core; 3) The technical factor significantly contributed to the formation of new paradigm of Seoul's landscape, especially by giving it a three-dimensional skyline; 4) The regulative factor had a great impact on the formation of Seoul as it is today, by moderating the conflicting interests of the community members and presenting rational standards for judgement.