As society gets complex, citizens' needs on urban environment vary. Citizens' needs, which pursue the quality of life beyond the basic needs, are now aiming at the life in pleasant and safe city.
Considering the fact that the scale of urban develop...
As society gets complex, citizens' needs on urban environment vary. Citizens' needs, which pursue the quality of life beyond the basic needs, are now aiming at the life in pleasant and safe city.
Considering the fact that the scale of urban development is expanding and land prices in downtowns are soaring, it comes to a government as a huge burden to provide resting places by spending public capital.
Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify the effect of district unit plan on "Public Open Spaces" by comparing and analyzing users of those in two different districts. One is in Gangnam-gu under "District Unit Plan" which provides a guideline for "Public Open Spaces," and the other one is in Jongno-gu under the plan of "Seoul Down town Redevelopment Project Area" which does not suggest any guidelines. We chose 'awareness,' 'proximity,' and 'convenience' as the evaluation factors and put 'location,' 'level difference with adjacent roads,' 'existence of traffic blocks in entry paths,' 'width of entrance,' 'length of bench,' 'the area of the landscape,' 'total floor area,' and 'usage of lower floor' on the list of evaluation elements. Then, we researched the status and the number of users in the two spaces inside our target districts and compared/analyzed the data based on the designated factors and elements to arrive at the following results.
Firstly, the result, which is incompatible with the preceding studies and is unaffected by the difference in the number of external users measured by the volume of pedestrians, showed that the number of users of the "Public Open Space" in Jongno-gu was less than that in Gangnam-gu while the latter has the smaller total floor area than the former.
Secondly, even though the measured numbers of some evaluation elements, such as 'total floor area,' 'the area of the garden,' and 'length of installed benches,' in the "Public Open Space" of Jongno-gu are higher than that of Gangnam-gu, the latter recorded 1.35 times more users than that of the former in average and, furthermore, the average user per unit area (100㎡) of the former has to be multiplied by 2.9 in order to make it even to that of the latter.
Also, after looking into the sides and the rear of the "Public Open Spaces" in Jongno-gu, we found out that it is hard to put the spaces into practical use even though they are authorized as "Public Open Spaces" by the law. More detailed guidelines on "Public Open Spaces," which are in line with the district's general development plan, are needed to convert the literally abandoned lands into the true resting places for citizens.
This study targeted "District Unit Plans" in identifying the source of effects on the usage of "Public Open Spaces" in a bid to differentiate from preceding studies. However, even though we supposed that the role of the number of external users as an explanatory factor is minimal due to the small deviation in the volume of pedestrians, there were some limitations that we could not reflect the differences of the two "Public Open Spaces" in terms of the patterns of pedestrians and conditions of complementary areas of main streets.
Considerable time has passed since the adoption of the system in "The Building Act" and continuous research activities on "Public Open Spaces" have been made. However, still, the spaces are not functioning well to achieve their initial mission. Thus, sustainable studies, with various perspectives and directions, must be conducted on the vitalization of "Public Open Spaces" so as to utilize the areas as both private properties and public spaces and to promote them to become the representing resting-places in downtowns.
․ Key words: Open Spaces, Vitalization, Seoul Down town redevelopment Project, District Unit Plans, Awareness, Proximity, Convenience