2. Overview on Seoul Urban Planning Experience

Rapidly Urbanizing World and Overview on Seoul Urban Planning Experience

To solve the issues facing urbanization we need metropolitan urban planning and governance. UN forecast states that we will see more megacities in the future.

This shows megacities of the world which have over 10 million in population. We will have more megacities and most importantly most megacities will happen in the developing world including Indian cities and Chinese cities. These are today’s metropolitan areas with population of over 10 million. As you can see New York has over 20 million. LA, London, Paris and Tokyo are also big urban areas with population of over 20 million. The urban areas have been expanding over the course of history regardless of administrative boundary.

So in the old days, the cities’ size were about 4 or 5 kilometers radius. Because that time the majority of the people moved by walking. But as transportation developed and we began to have cars the city expanded further up to 20 or 25 kilometers. And with the highway system, cities began to expand even farther up to 30 or 40 kilometers. But the issue here is that this urban expansion happened beyond the administration boundaries. This is the example in the United States and Korea of administrative cities with over 1 million Population.

The US only has 9 cities with over 1 million population, which are New York and Los Angeles. New York only has 8 million population, but as you have seen in the previous slide the New York Metropolitan area has over 20 million people. So one urban economic area is far bigger than the administrative city. So that’s why the administrative boundary of the cities no longer reflects the physical, social, economic, cultural or environmental reality of urban development and that’s why we need new forms of metropolitan governance.

And the UN statistics show that we will see even bigger urban areas with more than 1 million, 5 million and even 10 million people. That’s why we need metropolitan planning and metropolitan governance.
So urbanization requires metropolitan governance in many areas and also requires good management of land as a key resource, which is also the base to provide public services efficiently. Good urban planning is critical for sustainable development of cities, states and the world.