Measures to develop desirable urban and regional planning in an era of low growth 

Min Seung-hee, Research Fellow, Lee Sun-ja, Senior researcher, 

Kim Dong-geun, Research Fellow, Cha Eun-hye, Associate Research Fellow

Summary

1> Low growth creates a lot of problems including the increase of disproportionate population distribution to national territories, decreasing demand for the use and development of land, hollowization of old urban districts developed during the growth period, sluggish job and deteriorating vitality in cities, widening gap between regions and increase of excluded regions, diversification on demand for urban facilities, and increase of idling urban and industrial facilities  

2> In the era of low growth, overestimation of population occurs during the process of developing urban and regional planning due to social, political, and administrative reasons 

3> Although the demand for land use and development has decreased due to the low-growth trap, most urban and regional plans adopted the land use plan based on the estimation of growth rate recorded during the economic boom 

4> Overestimation of the target population in urban and regional planning mainly comes from the population growth due to changes in society. A massive size of land has been allocated as urbanization promotion areas during the low-growth period based on the overestimation of population growth 

5> Overestimation on the population growth and land use resulted in overdevelopment of housing sites and commercial districts, and which led to the increase of unsold houses, damage to the natural environment, and hollowization of old districts of city

Policy proposals

① Need to implement related systems and institutions to develop urban and regional development plan based on various conditions and needs of cities and regions during the low-growth period 

② For cities that record a low growth rate, there is a need to use indexes providing diversified population structures, rather than the one based on the total population. Also, it is required to shift from the population projection based on the number of settled populations into ones indicating floating population and residential population

③ Equally important to adopt flexible systems and institutions to use various population projection methods reflecting the characteristics of city to establish urban and regional development plans, rather than to apply a unilateral population estimation approach

④ In addition, make effort to reorganize urban and regional development plan encompassing a large area in order to respond to changes in surrounding conditions of low-growth