The Urban Ma-Eul - Postwar Fragmentation and residential Clusters

Abstract

The City of Seoul_founded more than six hundred years ago is based on a municipal system of 25 different districts. Its urban structure accommodates a variety of socio-cultural elements, which have evolved and matured during the course of history, and which can be traced and experienced when studying the city’s past and presence. Like many other contemporary cities in the developed world, Seoul is subject to a considerable scale of urban rearrangements. Twenty-six large scale Newtown projects are being implanted on both sides of the city’s Han-River, projects which focus far more on matters of economical values rather than historicity or cultural identity. While these Newtown developments have visible impact on the character of urban _public spaces and their tissues of grown neighborhoods, a formerly unique atmosphere is beginning to gradually evanesce. It further seems that we are witnessing an overall loss of appropriately scaled relationships between metropolitan public environments and the life of its residents or visitors. This thesis sets out to investigate the visible indicators of a dilemma, and to suggest scenarios of an appropriately scaled urban envelopment-process. The work will equally investigate matters of formal composition, as well as suggesting a catalogue of measures to improve ratios of economical value, particularly in respect to available land and its usage. The compositional formula of this approach takes an intentionally different perspective from those ones, which are generally applied within existing paragraphs of the Korean_building-codes. Rather than applying the typical concepts of a corporate Newtown-thinking, the work is positive about recent programmes, which were launched in April 2010 und the name ‘Human Town Project’ by Seoul’s City-Mayor OH Se-Hoon. For Seoul or cities elsewhere, issues of communal identity and the question of how to build communities, will remain substantial in every efforts of shaping the urban character of our cities. Methods that are going to be applied in this investigation, will withdraw from a range of topographic research of the site’s existing context_formal and informal, sociographic, from logic of compositional processing to efforts of building a typology of those spatial qualities, which are essential for the way communities experience their built environment. The urban context which will be the focus of this investigation is located in Seoul’s district of Jongno-Gu, a neighborhood called Tong-Eui-Dong and Chang-Sung-Dong.