As the deterioration of large-scale apartment complexes supplied in the 1980s and 1990s accelerates in South Korea, remodeling and reconstruction projects are gaining attention as core urban renewal measures for improving residential environments in c...
As the deterioration of large-scale apartment complexes supplied in the 1980s and 1990s accelerates in South Korea, remodeling and reconstruction projects are gaining attention as core urban renewal measures for improving residential environments in city centers. However, unlike reconstruction projects based on the ‘Urban and Residential Environment Maintenance Act’, which consider the integrated urban context and entail public contributions such as infrastructure, current remodeling projects under the ‘Housing Act’ heavily focus on improving the private residential performance of individual complexes. Consequently, there is a lack of institutional management standards to control urban planning ripple effects—such as the load on surrounding infrastructure, landscape obstruction, and degradation of the residential environment—caused by the increase in density and the number of households.
Therefore, this study aims to empirically compare and analyze the urban planning characteristics of remodeling and reconstruction projects targeting apartment complexes in Seoul. It seeks to evaluate the impact of remodeling projects on urban space, derive institutional and policy improvement measures for a sustainable renewal model, and highlight the necessity of a paradigm shift in urban redevelopment. To this end, 25 remodeling complexes in Seoul with confirmed project plans(architectural deliberation) and 27 reconstruction complexes with similar scale and location conditions were selected as the control group. A quantitative and qualitative empirical analysis was conducted focusing on six core urban planning elements: land use and density, infrastructure and public contribution, visual corridors and landscape, front open space and street connection, sunlight and residential environment, and traffic handling plans.
The empirical analysis confirmed a clear gap in urban planning between the two renewal methods. First, in terms of density, remodeling complexes showed a densification trend with expanding building coverage and floor area ratio(up to 571.4%) due to vertical and horizontal expansion within limited sites, whereas reconstruction projects lowered building coverage and secured ground-level openness through a complete layout rearrangement. Second, despite densification, the remodeling projects compliance rate for public contributions, such as infrastructure expansion, was merely 12.5%, exacerbating the load on urban infrastructure. In contrast, most reconstruction projects actively returned public benefits by providing parks, roads, and public housing. Third, remodeling projects caused the loss of visual corridors, worsened sunlight access, and invaded privacy among households due to massive building masses and relaxed separation distance regulations(maximum 0.06H). Reconstruction projects, however, formed pleasant residential environments and harmonious skylines by complying with statutory sunlight standards and securing wide visual corridors. Nevertheless, remodeling projects also showed positive effects in mitigating internal parking shortages and improving pedestrian environments through the comprehensive expansion of underground parking lots.
In conclusion, current remodeling projects are fundamentally based on the expansion of private space and lack the ‘urban planning publicness’ commensurate with the increase in density and households. For complexes that essentially have no other renewal options—such as those with established housing associations, an existing floor area ratio exceeding 300% making zoning upgrades impossible, location restrictions like height limits, or small-scale isolated complexes—policy support measures including streamlined procedures and technical or financial support should be provided. Concurrently, regulations must be revised to mandate infrastructure expansion matching the density and household increase, establish remodeling-specific architectural planning standards, and manage these projects as urban planning maintenance actions. Furthermore, the future paradigm for maintaining aging apartment complexes should center on reconstruction projects that guarantee wide-area infrastructure expansion and qualitative improvement of the overall urban environment. To induce this, active public policy support is required, such as the application of a ‘business feasibility adjustment factor’, ‘recognition of current floor area ratio’, and ‘zoning upgrades’.
Finally, unlike previous studies that remained at the level of evaluating individual project feasibility and revitalization, this study holds academic significance by identifying the impacts of remodeling projects through comparative empirical data with reconstruction from the perspective of ‘urban planning influence’.