This study aims to empirically examine how the Street Housing Improvement Project, introduced as an alternative to large-scale redevelopment, has changed the external urban environment and the internal residential environment of actually completed pro...
This study aims to empirically examine how the Street Housing Improvement Project, introduced as an alternative to large-scale redevelopment, has changed the external urban environment and the internal residential environment of actually completed project sites. Since its introduction through the 2012 amendment to the Urban and Residential Environment Improvement Act, the Street Housing Improvement Project has been operated under the 2017 Special Act on the Improvement of Vacant Houses and Small-scale Housing, establishing itself as a regeneration tool for declining urban centers that improves deteriorated low-rise residential areas while preserving the existing street network. However, most prior studies have focused on activation strategies and institutional improvement, leaving empirical analyses of actually completed projects very limited.
Accordingly, this study selected Bucheon City, where the Street Housing Improvement Project has been most actively implemented in Gyeonggi Province, as the research site, and analyzed all 13 zones (3 public-participation type and 10 association-led type) completed as of June 2025. The analysis was conducted using a dual framework consisting of changes in the external urban environment (project implementation scale, road frontage conditions, shared community facilities, and street environment) and changes in the internal residential environment (residential floor area, floor plan characteristics, parking and pedestrian-vehicle separation, and residential convenience).
The analysis of the external urban environment showed that street vitality was visibly improved through securing pedestrian paths using open space within building lots (in 9 of the 13 zones) and through placing neighborhood living facilities at the ground-floor level. In particular, Bucheon City's "apartment-style village parking lot" program—the first public-private partnership model of its kind in Korea—provided concrete evidence that a privately implemented improvement project can supply public infrastructure, thereby securing greater publicness. However, the average project implementation area was only 2,863.74 m², falling short of even 30% of the statutory maximum (10,000 m²), and the average ratio of implementation area to the surrounding street block was only 38.85%, revealing limitations in achieving integrated improvement at the street-block level.
The analysis of the internal residential environment showed that the use of floor area ratio (FAR) incentives and the addition of underground parking led to a substantial quantitative expansion of residential floor area per household, while the installation of communal welfare facilities improved residential convenience. On the other hand, qualitative limitations were also identified: in the process of maximizing the FAR on narrow lots, north-facing units were found in 38.8% of the zones, unit types proliferated excessively around small floor areas, and pedestrian-vehicle separation within the complex was not achieved in zones with piloti-type parking.
Public-participation projects outperformed association-led projects across nearly all areas, both external and internal—including project implementation area, street environment improvement, and the realization of pedestrian-vehicle separation—empirically demonstrating that public-sector participation is an effective means of compensating for the structural limitations of small-scale improvement projects.
Therefore, this study proposes the active introduction of "small-scale housing improvement management zones," which encourage integrated planning across an entire street block, as a means of overcoming the limitations of small-scale improvement projects, together with the expansion of public-participation-type projects through simplified administrative procedures, and the establishment of site-planning guidelines specialized for the Street Housing Improvement Project.