Urban parks present keys to understand the background histories of urban planning formed in modern period. This paper is for discussing the urbanization and transition of park planning in Seoul: 京城, especially focusing on the small sized parks. City parks had already drawn attentions by Kyoungseong citizens from the beginning of 1920s, mainly indicated with rest or recreation functions. In small sized parks so called neighborhood playgrounds, functions for children’s health and education had been added on it. It was in 1930 that the practical ideas of urban park planning were suggested through ‘Kyoungseong City Planning’, prepared based on the investigation report of 7 pre-existing parks in Kyoungseong prefecture such as Namsan Park in 1927. Proposals in Kyongseong City Park Planning in 1930 laid a base to found later park planning, in the respect that it tried to place park sites applied from the results of calculating the open space areas with the whole planning areas and populations, even though it is hard to be considered the plan had covered comprehensive ways of functions and uses properly.
Park planning got newly arranged a turning point with the promulgation of Kyoungseong Street Planning in 1936. Final plan was announced in March, 1940 completed with Street Planning and Land Readjustment Project promoted by Kyoungseong prefecture. It would be firstly cited as the most apparent differences compared to 1930’s park planning that numbers of isolated neighborhood playgrounds-small sized parks got created by the Land Readjustment Project. The number of total parks became increased to over 3 times as before from it and the way of classifying park types simple to follow the sizes not much to considerate the functions. Types of 140 parks including 38 areas prepared for parks in 1930 were rearranged as three types of grand parks, neighborhood parks and neighborhood playgrounds: large, medium and small sized.
Neighborhood playgrounds in Seoul actualized just before Korea was liberated from Japanese governor, which had their main functions shifted from ‘education for children’ to ‘urban sanitation’. When they became finally showed their details through Kyoungseong Street Plan, the functions of ‘evacuation or air defense’ were put priorities on the same as other park types. The ideas of ‘vacant sites’ for emergency continued its transition to ‘public sites’ after the liberation and the Korean War. However, prepared open spaces were substituted for housings or education facilities according with their first necessities after the war. The park sites that had left their roles for civil affairs have transfigured to recreational facilities for residents, and have restored to civil parks occasionally.