• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.76-88
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• 2017

The urban park plays important roles in protecting the urban landscape and improving citizens' health, recreation, and the emotional life. Above and beyond these roles, the urban park is expected to rearrange urban spatial structures as a kind of urban system. The purpose of this paper is to identify empirically to change urban spatial structures by construction of the urban park. This study regards gentrification around the urban park as a process to change urban spatial structures. The gentrification means the regeneration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by the middle class or commercial developers. The site of case analysis is the Seoul Forestry Park in Sungdong-gu, Seoul. The Seoul Forestry Park is regarded as a representative urban park of Seoul, and caused gentrification around park after the 2005 opening. This study operationally defines the gentrification index and the accessibility index from an urban park and offers an empirical analysis of relation among the urban park, the gentrification and urban spatial structure in a statistic district which is the minimum unit of Korean statistic data in 2000, 2005, and 2010, using Difference-in-Difference method and linear probability model. The results of this empirical study show that the Seoul Forestry Park changes urban spatial structures by gentrification. It reverses a trend of migration of gentrifiers before and after construction of the Seoul Forestry Park. It suggests urban park construction as an alternative method for urban regeneration by inducing the middle class into the inner city of Seoul.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.125-137
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• 2021

How can we explain the phenomenon of small, old alleyways in the city becoming rising commercial places attracting people from an aesthetic perspective? This research discusses distinctive aesthetic experiences of urban commercial alleyways, which are located on inner roads and consist of small-scale stores and explore the specific aspects of Sharosu-gil, located in Gwanak-gu, Seoul. The aesthetic experience of urban commercial alleyways is generated by the contrast with the refined urban fabric along main roads in terms of space, the gap between the old and the new, and the antagonism between the known and the less known. The approach to Sharosu-gil consists of the high-rise buildings along the main road built in the 2000s, then encountering low-rise buildings on inside roads built from the late 1970s to the present. Therefore, it is judged that the site has sufficient conditions to generate the aesthetic experience as an urban commercial alleyway. As a result of analyzing the street improvement projects, first, the official announcement of the name 'Sharosu-gil' was interpreted as an escape from the place specificity and garnered the acquisition of the characteristics of an alternative. Secondly, the improvement project for old-established signboards was interpreted as harmony between the new and the old and the loss of temporality. Thirdly, in the pedestrian priority road project, the pavement was interpreted as a reinforcement of the identity as an alleyway and the visualization of the area. Since the reality of urban commercial alleyways depends on the user's visiting, it is necessary to interpret alleyways from the perspective of the senses and aesthetics, not just from social phenomena or capital logic perspective. The study will cast implications for relevant schemes and data-driven research.