Wangsuk2-Namyangju Winning Proposal ⓒG.S Architects Consortium
Cities Are Long, While City Plans Are Brief
As it turns out, cities have a longer lifespan
than many other man-made fields including states and systems. Despite the rise
and fall of the Roman Empire, founded by Romulus and Remus, it legacy lives on.
Hanyang, founded as the new capital of the Yi Dynasty, is now the capital of
Korea and one of the most impressive metropolitan destinations in the world.
Relying on cities endure across the centuries, the notion of the Anthropocene
has entered academic discourse, creating states and systems, developing a
science, technology, and economy of the anthropocene, and supporting the lives
of its communities and individuals.
In Korea, urban design and development began in earnest with the Ansan New Town in 1977, devising a cluster of structures in an industrial production area, Gwacheon New Town in 1979 was created to house administrative functions, and large urban management plans took hold in the mid-1980s under the thrall of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. In 1989, the five 1st Generation New Towns began to develop motivated by the goal of supplying 2 million new houses. With the ongoing construction of 2nd Generation New Towns from the 2000s to the 3rd Generation New Towns releasing their plans now, we have been responsible for the development of many large public housing sites, urban renewal, and the development of new towns. Over the last 40 years, the towns, though not always perfect, have served as places to live, work, rest, and play. In spite of our efforts thus far, it is almost impossible to plan a city that can immediately accommodate tens to hundreds of thousands of people. As a new city is completed by overlapping with the spaces of its original plan, chance happenings, substantials efforts and individual choices must be made which often divert from the intentions expressed in the plan, and when the result is materialised, the city is usually visibly different from the initial plan. Nevertheless, we plan cities, and in fact we are still planning cities. Here, I offer a few remarks about new towns in Korea and the impressions I gathered in the process of creating a third generation new town when participating as a member of the winning team behind the design for ‘The Competition for Urban Design Concept and Three-Dimensional Urban and Architectural Space Plan, Wangsuk2-Namyangju’.
An Unsustainable New City
The first virtue of a city as a background to vibrant nature of
urban life and as a settlement environment is its sustainability.
This applies to new cities that are created for specific purposes and are the result of problem solving. Unless it is a preserved relic in a museum, the ‘sustainable’ is a concept that allows for renewal at an appropriate cost in the future, and that includes flexibility and inclusiveness so that it can be adapted at any time to accommodate changes in social demands. In addition, since sustainability is projected over a long period of time, the goal of urban design and planning should be something more basic and fundamental, not ‘a quick solution to temporary problems’. Otherwise, the planning and construction of new cities without securing sustainability will result in a meaningless waste of national territory, the most valuable resource we have in our relatively small Korea. However, I am skeptical as to whether we have had held sufficient discussions and made sufficient efforts to achieve sustainability—an important and basic virtue of a city as established over four decades of witnessing our urban design history in Korea. The programme of new cities has exposed many problems even before they are fully completed, such as rush-hour traffic jams due to poor metropolitan transportation systems, desolate office sites that linger unsold, empty commercial areas with few visitors, and bed towns with withered selfsufficiency, all of which reinforces suspicions of sustainability. It is a concept on the brink of a population cliff today.
Filling a City with Apartments as Goods
Like the 1st and 2nd Generation New Towns, the 3rd Generation New Towns prioritise supplying houses of significant quantity in a short period of time, which is usually decided by political and policy aims.▼1 In Wangsuk2-Namyangju, more than 68% out of available urban land, excluding terrain for infrastructure such as green areas, parks, and roads, are assigned as housing sites and complex areas for residential and commercial purposes. Housing sites in the new towns are usually filled with multi-family housing names apartments that spring up without prompting questions. In addition, despite efforts to increase the ratio of public rental and public sale, a good portion of the lots for collective housing relies on private purchase. Many problems in the new city seem to stem from this conundrum. The proposed lots for collective housing
developments in new towns, whether for private or public sale or public rental,
often adopt a rectangular form. This is because the rectangular site has an
advantage as a commercially viable layout, sufficient underground parking
space, and maximum floor area ratio, despite strict regulations such as
distance between buildings. In addition, since business operators (constructors
or implementation companies) who purchase land generally prefer a rectangular
site, Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH), a supplier, and puts the site
planned in that shape on the market to make good progress in new city project
and to ensure profitability unless met with exceptional circumstances. A parcel
or a block of collective housing units in a new town have usually been planned
to accommodate at least 500 households. A collective housing project of 500
households or more should provide additional welfare facilities to its residents,
such as a daycare center, a senior citizens’ center, and a neighbourhood park
at the expense of the operator in order to alleviates the financial burdens
placed on local government in a new city. For this reason, in general, local governments
of new town development areas insist upon planning housing sites of 500 or more
households if they do not have sufficient budget. Although it depends on the
size of units to be supplied, the size of a housing site for 500 households is
approximately 30,000 – 40,000㎡ and one side of the site tends to
170-200m long when it is a square (it can be often over 300m long when it is a rectangle).
Such a medium to large apartment block is likely to become a fortress for
branded apartments no matter how much it is tied and connected to public
pedestrian paths and green areas. The inside of the complex provides a haven
only for nominated and financially able residents, often reluctant to open its
bounds to the city outside.
Social-mix
at Stake
For these reasons, new cities, almost
without exception, have been filled with fragmentary blocks of large highrise branded and
standardized apartments. Usually, large apartment complexes equipped with
agreeable community facilities are disconnected and disagree with each other.
This results from the determined self-preservation of the brand and
satisfaction from living within the complex. Thus, when a public rental housing
complex is planned near the apartments, desperate placards opposing the plan
are always raised and affixed to their surfaces, bubbling with concerns about
falling house prices leading to the blocking off of pedestrian paths that
connect the spaces. The consolidated areas always form a boundary along which
conflicts and problems have arisen, such as traffic jams, littering, bullying, and
hate crimes including violent assaults. Defined territories and social
segregation has become social norm, slowly prompting class struggles in schools
for the children of these complexes. While social-mix▼2 within a building seems
to be difficult to enact, so common in developed countries, it is near
impossible to achieve at the level of a complex or a whole new city. This
situation, where a complex is filled with one unit type and there is no
diversity between areas of lease, sale, private and public sectors, is bound to
alienate its residents.
Neglected
City Users
Urban sustainability cannot be discussed
without recognizing its users. Our new town plan does not consider people as
individuals but only the population at large and as a number. This is no
different in 3rd Generation New Towns. The competition presented only the
requirement of ‘supplying tens of thousands of houses’
without definitions or predictions about who its users might be, who the apartments
of supply in large number are targeted towards, where these future residents
come from, the composition of the households (newly-weds, aged, young, and so
on), and their occupations. As such, everything floats; how many rooms in each
unit, the educational facilities required, the kind welfare facilities deemed
to be appropriate, and the programmes to be planned for the parks. When
everything is as vague as this, we are likely to make passive decisions based
on our own typical lived experiences. The problem is that our experience, which
provides the basis for most of our decisions, is not all that successful
either. There is no dwelling place but only residences. A new city that takes
more than a decade to complete faces beginning with the possibility of anachronism
from its planning stages. Speaking more frankly, it will end up as a city with
housing for the young but no young people, a city tailored for childcare
without children, or a city of rental housing that is inaccessible to the end
users.
Meandering
Nature and Conscientious Engineering
I would like to return to the large
squared-apartment-houses blocks that flood our new town. It is difficult to
conclude what came first, but usually it is the straight road networks that are
established between large typical residential blocks. As one side of the
residential block for more than 500 households is 170 – 300m long, there is a
long straight road. The engineering severely cut away and dug out the charming
and winding hills, rice fields, rivers and streams of the new town site to
ensure the smooth flow of traffic and to improve the average driving speed. As
experienced in the Public Administrative Town in Sejong, the original
topography barely recognisable after construction is finished. This explains
why new towns are often followed by the problems presented by environmental issues.
In Wangsuk2-Namyangju, there are three streams that run through it. New town
engineering, which prepares the sites for the possibility of various disasters,
widened and straightened the streams and raised embankments against a possible
200-year flood. This inevitably involves major scale infilling work to increase
the ground level of the adjacent site, while the soil is prepared by cutting
straight hills in the site to reduce construction costs. Box-shaped high-rise
apartment buildings can match exactly on a rectangular residential block. Fast
cars passing along the straight road network will increase noise at which point
the urban planning project operators begin to get worried about civil
complaints. At this point environmental impact assessments suggest easy
solutions such as tens of metres of separation from the road, large berms, and
tall soundproof walls, but they rather become a setback for street environment,
the largest public space in the city. In other words, the biotope should be
protected, but cutting away is necessary for infilling; there is a desire to
increase driving speed, but this will increase noise; and the width of the streets
moves beyond human scale or is surrounded by walls to protect houses and
schools from noise, and the situation becomes messier: this is a portrait of
the contemporary new town. A city should be a holistic world, but engineering interventions
that disagree with planning will lead the new town to an outdated city of
contradictions and antinomy.
Right
Then, Wrong Now
The 4th Industrial Revolution into which we
are entering, prompted by the advancement of new technologies such as IoT and
AI, and the Post Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) era which requires
divergence rather than integration, have rapidly transformed our demands for
new cities. The tenets of urban planning on which we have relied over the past
four decades is set to expire soon. While we continue to plan traffic and roads
suited only to automobiles, new forms of transportation such as autonomous
driving, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and micro-mobility are emerging. In addition,
the statistics reveal that the cases of COVID-19 in Los Angeles, where public
transportation is less developed, have been far fewer than those in New York. This
is suggestive information. As majority of households comprise single-occupants,
we need to prioritise not was right then but is wrong now and make rapid
adjustments. Our title for the competition entry for a small new town, Wangsuk2-Namyangju
was ‘Slothophical City ’. We wanted to create a slower paced and more relaxed
city, maintaining a reasonable distance between people. After cooperating with the
MA advisory, LH, various evaluations, and engineering companies for
construction documents over more than five months, the Wangsuk2-Namyangju which
is in the approval process by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and
Transport is no longer relaxed. Its roads are straightened and widened, and the
blocks were expanded to follow a straight outline. The number of housing
increased by more than 15% compared to the competition entry, and the park with
the Design Campus became just a retrogressive reservoir. It is claimed that this
was right at the time of competition, but it feels wrong when you proceed. The process
and system behind realising urban ideals always seems as if they aim to
eliminate new things; they try to make a city of zero defects rather than a
city of lively advantages.
A
City that Cannot be Satisfied
History shows us that infectious diseases
and Industrial Revolutions have fundamentally changed cities time and time
again. Facing the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution and this new global
health crisis, the city will soon change whether we want it to or not. What I
felt while participating in the 3rd Generation New Town plan was that the
trigger for a new city is still very temporary and trivial, and the biggest
driver of a city is in fact efficiency and profitability rather than
imagination and the goodwill of the many urban designers who participate in the
process. As Henri Lefebvre noted decades ago, a city’s intrinsic festivity▼3 is
inevitably suppressed in the process, and it is regrettable that it will be difficult
for a city or its inhabitants to at last find satisfaction.
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1 A typical example is stabilising house
prices in Seoul and metropolitan area.
2 Social-mix should be based on anonymity,
but Korean apartments are based on the size of the unit. As the situation is
completely exposed, governed by the attitude that ‘low-income people have small
apartments, and high-income people have large apartments’, the situation becomes
distinction and division rather than natural mixing which inevitably leads to
discrimination. In the US, units of the same area in an apartment house are
randomly selected and offered at different prices (low-income units, market-rate
units) to encourage social-mix.