2021, Vol.111, No.

The Korea Spatial Planning Review 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.2

pISSN : 1229-8638
https://journal.kci.go.kr/krihs

In Korea, the last few decades have witnessed unplanned urban expansion, along with explosive population growth and rapid industrialization. Afterward, entry into the era of depopulation was accompanied by a decreased demand for land, thereby provoking intensive debates on building compact cities, where efficient land use is the norm. Although precisely defining a compact city is difficult, its pattern of high-density mixed land use is recognized as providing a conceptual springboard for further discussion. In consideration of these issues, this study was conducted to determine an index that measures the compactness of land use in Korean cities using building registry data and perform a national-level empirical analysis of indices on the basis of 162 cities and counties. To these ends, the total floor area and the number of different uses in each 500 m square grid were calculated and aggregated into city and county boundaries to identify compactness nationwide. High total floor areas and land uses were distributed along the Seoul metropolitan area, other metropolises, and major cities around the highway between Seoul and Busan. Given that building registry data are periodically updated, the compactness index proposed in this study is useful for ascertaining changes in the urban spatial structure of Korea. The index is expected to provide empirical information that supports the process of formulating urban and regional policies in the future.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of the Cheongju‒Cheongwon integration?the first autonomous amalgamation driven by the two local governments in Korea‒and to derive policy implications for future regional policies based on the analysis results. For the empirical analysis,the aggregate data of regions were used as analysis data, and the synthetic control method, which is widely used as one of the quasi-experimental design methods, was employed as an analysis method. The analysis shows that the Cheongju‒Cheongwon amalgamation resulted in an improvement in fiscal conditions. On the other hand, the amalgamation did not affect the budget size,which suggests no economies of scale. Finally, there was no statistically significant effect on the GRDP per capita. Based on these findings, we argue that more policy interventions aimed at regional integration are necessary to achieve balanced national development and local autonomy system given the rapidly changing demographic dynamics. In addition, results of this study provide implications for the special local governments and related policy directions to effectively respond to the decline in local population.

Residential mobility in the city is the most important factor in the relocation of the population. For desirable density planning and house policy, the areas of interaction of residential mobility should be identified. This study delimitate Residential Mobility Areas(RMAs) by households types using migration data of South Korea. Through the network community detection method using random walk, it is possible to delimitate geographical boundaries of inter-regional interactions through residential mobility. As a result of examining the change of the RMAs according to the change of Markov time, it was found that the RMAs is affected administrative boundary, topographical factors, and housing characteristics and hierarchically integrate regions with similar characteristics. Also, there is a difference in the RMAs by households types, which seems to be attributable to the different housing demand by households types. When the pattern of RMAs and the residential mobility patterns were together, the RMAs represented the boundary that correspond to the main patterns of residential mobility. Therefore, the derived RMAs can represent the density planning, housing supply planning, or the effective area by policy, and has a policy implication that it can be used as a method of delimitate geographical areas for density planning and housing policy.