Departing from the overly development-skewed urban policies, nowadays, Korea has to tackle unprecedented social matters, primarily originating from dynamic changes of demographic structure and dampened real estate market. Confronted with low marketabi...
Departing from the overly development-skewed urban policies, nowadays, Korea has to tackle unprecedented social matters, primarily originating from dynamic changes of demographic structure and dampened real estate market. Confronted with low marketability and demand reduction, the number of the abandoned and incomplete buildings in Korea has shown ever-increasing trends and it is almost certain that the situation in the future would be worsened. These buildings have been regarded as the typical social stigma, exerting negative impact on the various social issues.
That is, they have become the main target of criticism as they have strengthened negative images from the urban landscape perspectives, even threatening daily lives of citizens from the urban amenity and safety dimensions. After diagnosing physical and non-physical conditions as well as institutional arrangements related to the abandoned and incomplete buildings in Korea, this research presents major points derived from the interdisciplinary approaches including ownership surveys, statistical analyses, case studies, and interviews. From the legal and institutional aspects, it also provides a series of effective improvement alternatives geared towards prevention and rearrangement measures against the abandoned and incomplete buildings.
The followings are major findings: First of all, the two major sources of the abandoned and incomplete buildings come from financial difficulty and/or bankruptcy of construction companies. Considering the business setbacks combined with sluggish real estate market, it seems almost certain that the volume of abandoned and incomplete buildings would not be dwindled away over period if drastic measures to boost construction industry in specific and economy in broad are not adopted.
Secondly, this research confirms that the safety deposit system introduced in 2006 has not been so effective as it cannot exert any impact on a higher portion of the abandoned and incomplete buildings prior to 2006. Even though the public authorities have repeatedly issued administrative measures, requesting construction companies or equivalent private partners to take care of safety management or construction removal, this study finds that the administrative measures have been almost useless as long as they don't carry any implementation power. To make things worse, as the legal and institutional back-ups are not ready, it seems more difficult for the third party to be involved in getting rid of existing construction materials and taking-over from the previous construction organization(s).
Thirdly, this research pays attention to harmfulness rating determinants of the abandoned and incomplete buildings. It pinpoints out that exterior factors including story and building number have exercised the most significant impact in deciding the harmfulness rating. In contrast, the progress of work, the amount of contract money, and total floor area are not statistically significant. In terms of regional variation, the Capital Region has presented that the abandoned period is in inverse proportion to harmfulness rating. That is, the shortened abandoned period has resulted in higher harmfulness rating. Nonetheless, the Non-Capital Region has yielded the opposite result of the Capital Region. Concerned with causal verification based on structural function modeling focused on harmfulness rating determinants of abandoned and incomplete buildings, three hypotheses have been adopted: 1) Exterior factors is in direct proportion to harmfulness rating; 2) The amount of contract money is in inverse proportion to the abandoned period; and 3) The shortened abandoned period produces higher harmfulness rating.
It expects that this research may significantly contribute to overcoming the existing legal and institutional constraints, facilitating the design of specific administrative measures. In this vein, this study would also encourage derivative approaches, setting the degree of public involvement and evaluating the suggested indicators.