Making Future Cities calls for understanding and evaluating the contemporary urban social system, its recent history, its present dynamics, and its possibilities. Recently, Crisis and uncertainty are increasing surrounding the Korean and global society, and policy forecasting based on future research should be needed and becomes more and more important.
The socioeconomic polarization and social exclusion has been the most important social challenges in contemporary cities. Cities are called upon to appropriately respond to this economic, social and political restructuring. Seoul Metropolitan City has faced same challenges. In the past decades, Seoul has experienced dramatic changes derived from unprecedented technological innovation and unfettered economic globalization. These changes undoubtedly have delivered substantial improvements in the lives of peoples in Seoul. Seoul has developed 10 times in economic growth of GRDP during the past 40 years. In the same period, the social and economic polarization also has increased rapidly. Social exclusion, generational unemployment, material poverty, wealth inequalities and ageing population has continued to deteriorate. Fast development brought economic wealth to Seoul, but it gradually disintegrated the kinship neighborhood, shared local identities, and communal traditions as well. What are the policies currently applied and how can there be a more comprehensive, resource-minded urban development?
The main aim of this study was to highlight the main challenges for Seoul over the following two decades and to identify the main objectives, instruments and methods Seoul can deploy when tackling them. These questions have been discussed within three methods with the participatory citizen survey(townhall meeting survey), expert survey and empirical data analysis on Seoul’s future. We cover the 20 years of Seoul’s social and economic features, so the temporal scope of this study is by 2030 and its metropolitan area is the spacial extent.
In chapter 2, we review the methodology of future study and history of future research. In chapter 3, we analyse future study of cities including Tokyo and United State and recent future trends in Korea. In chapter 4, we propose four mega-trends affecting Seoul, such as population reconfiguration, generation conflict, the mega city region and the climate changes. In chapter 5, we analyse the Mayor’s inaugural address with the text analysis method and issued the enhancing of social quality as the aim of Seoul’s future. In chapter 6, we conduct the citizen participatory survey using the town hall meeting and conduct the expert survey based on the frame of social quality. Finally, we propose the scenarios of social quality in Seoul at the year of 2030. These are the Social Tribe, Me Gray Senior, Nomadingles and Passive Silver.