Since the middle of 1990s cultural infrastructure of Seoul has been expanding, highlighting cultural welfare and regional culture. Also the culturenomics performance has boosted the expansion of facilities for performance, exhibition and creation. Especially theaters have played a leader role in increase of cultural infrastructure and since 2000, it has been dramatically growing in openings of theaters.
In 2011 there are 225 officially registered theaters in Seoul, consisting of 114 private and 81 public theaters. The ratio of private theaters is slightly higher than that of public ones. The number of theater seats is 9.1 per 1,000 of the population. While it is intensively distributed in both the city area and the Gangnam area such as Jongno-gu, Jung-gu, seocho-gu, Gwangjin-gu, and Gangnam-gu, there is also the district in which no theater is. However, because the density of private art theaters is much higher in certain districts, it can be said that the gap among districts of public art theaters is lower than that of the private ones.
Owing to the expansion of cultural facilities as well as cultural policy promotion, the satisfaction degree regarding Seoul cultural environment has been increasing and there has been also a positive change in the recognition of Seoul citizen toward cultural environment. On the other hand, it would be true that we need self-reflection in that expansion of theater infrastructure and growing number of performance have not led increase of cultural activities of Seoul citizen.
One of the reasons for decrease in art viewer ratings can be an effect of economic stagnation since 2007. But it would be a more fundamental cause in the management of cultural facilities. Most public art theaters have been built up before securing concrete management, which has brought themselves insecure identities and inefficient management.
The problem for inefficient management of public art theaters in Seoul lies in both an insufficiency of specialized feature strategies and lack of cooperative strategies between the public art theaters. In addition, it would be necessary to encourage cultural mind and specialty for managing agents, establishing their life-up-close theater role as a district public theater.
In order to improve the above problems, this paper suggests four strategies for efficient management of the public art theaters：theater-specializing support methods, cultural governance and cooperative strategy supporting methods, specialty consideration of related workforce and methods for promoting culture and art mind, and managing direction suggestions of the public art theaters.
In specific, we suggest improving the resident art group supporting system, upgrading evaluation items for incentive scheme in the cultural field of autonomous districts, obligating operation-planning for establishment of public art theaters, managing and developing integrated audience DB, setting theater cultural governance, retraining professional(planning) workforce, encouraging culture-art-mind of top policy decision makers. Finally, three types of theater operating directions are drawn out considering regional specific cultural settings and each public art theater conditions：a professional performance type, a regional culture creation type, and a professional education type.
The above suggested types should not be treated as a single absolute standard since there are various directions depending on the location specific conditions and performance settings.
However, it would be helpful to take concrete shape to a current ambiguous managing goal like ‘contribution to cultural enjoyment of residents’, only if these types would be applied to in harmony with regional conditions when we design a basic plan during remodelling and establishing new theaters.