Localities and Urban Green Growth: Half Century’s Revitalization of Cheong-Gye-Cheon (CGC) in Seoul

Abstract

Sustainable development has become a worldwide issue due to global concerns. The conventional development paradigm is criticized and a new paradigm, known as green urbanization or urban green growth, is introduced which aims to achieve two conflicting goals at once: environmental conservation and economic development. Thus to pursue green growth, various efforts are done such as providing guidelines, principles, or indicators. Among those efforts, there are studies that emphasize the significance of consideration of locality. It is obvious that different approaches are necessary for cities because each of them have unique local conditions. Nevertheless, scarcely there have been attempts to show what should be done to consider locality. This study is designed to show how local conditions can be harmonized into urban green growth and to discuss the key points for this harmonization. For this, this study reviews the half century green urbanizations of Cheong-Gye-Cheon (CGC) to identify the situations, major barriers, and corresponding actions at each point of change. Through this review, authors are identified key lessons for harmonizing locality into urban green growth.