Urban Housing Redevelopment: An Analysis of the Perception of Vitality in Apartment Neighborhood Redevelopment in Korea.

Abstract

This study aims to explore residential preferences, satisfaction, and use patterns in a set of case-studies of apartment neighborhoods in Korea. For this, the case-study method is applied with combined research strategies to examine four cases of apartment neighborhood redevelopment in Korea, namely Weolgok R, Gongdeok R, Jangan H, and Yeoksam E apartment estates. This research employs Canter’s place model for organizing a data collection framework to understand the perception of vitality in Korean apartment neighborhoods. The research approach focuses on three elements of Canter’s place model: physical attributes, activities, and meanings.

Exploring residents’ perceptions of place vitality, this study reveals that the four examples of Korean apartment redevelopment projects demonstrate an increase of physical accessibility and exposure. However, although those four have the possibility to be spatially integrated within their neighborhoods, the redevelopment results demonstrate enhancement of segregation from other neighborhoods nearby. In addition, places with vitality are perceived when places inside and outside the redeveloped estates are integrated and exposed, and when people frequent places. However, these perceptions show conflicts of enclosure and exposure and hierarchy of places inside and outside the estates.

Accordingly, creating places with vitality is associated with (a) considering integration and exposure of physical place conditions, (b) considering the link between people’s daily experiences and these physical places, (c) balancing boundary conditions around redeveloped neighborhoods.

Differentiated, privatized, and semi-gated apartment-dominant context is the model of Korean apartment redevelopment. Findings in the four examples of Korean apartment redevelopment projects indicate that they have an integrated spatial configuration inside, yet generate segregation of these apartment neighborhoods from other neighborhoods. Since everyday life is important in and to place vitality, the current method of apartment-dominant neighborhoods needs reconsideration of, indeed promotion of, daily experiences and balance of boundary conflicts in urban housing redevelopment.