The concept of resilience implies uncertainty and the ability to adapt to unexpected changes. Projects in cities that require long periods of time and extensive budgets, which include large parks, need resilience to flexibly cope with political, economic, social, and physical changes. The concept of resilience emerged from the design of large parks in the early 2000s and has continued in more recent urban design competitions, but there is still a lack of research on specific planning strategies in the literature. This paper aims to interpret the process of creating a large park and to explore the strategies needed for a resilient process by examining the first national urban park being planned in Seoul, Korea as an example. After discussions began in 1990 and the General Basic Plan was established in 2011, the winning design was announced through an international design competition in 2012. Although the park master plan was considered complete as of 2018, its progress seems unclear because of various changes in the surrounding urban planning and political and economic conditions. This study intends to examine the processes that have already been executed and to assist in setting the future direction of the project. Through the framework derived from prior research on the concept of resilience, this project’s process is examined and analyzed in six main categories: park infrastructure, social dynamics, economic dynamics, health and well-being, governance networks, and planning and institutions. The results show that the categories park infrastructure, health and well-being, and planning and institutions are consistent with the resilience planning strategy to some degree, but social dynamics, economic dynamics, and governance networks are unsatisfactory. From a resilience perspective, a holistic approach to designing the process is most important in planning a large park, beginning from the conceptual stage through to the long-term implementation phase. An integrative process should aim to incorporate specialized knowledge and experiences from a variety of fields, not to resolve single aspects in a piecemeal fashion. This study aims to provide a practical link between large-scale park projects and the concept of resilience for the future.

Gathering public consensus about long-term urban open space development is more difficult than ever, even though public engagement is crucial for sustainable long-term policymaking. Routine evaluation of public awareness is important for retaining project momentum and designing appropriate public engagement processes for the future. This study focuses on the Yongsan Park Development Project, which has been in progress for more than three decades. An online survey of 2,000 respondents was conducted and analyzed to evaluate the current public awareness and ask questions about respondents’ expectations for public engagement. The results of this study reveal that 1) a hybrid methodology is needed to effectively approach different age groups; 2) an online survey can offer new insights for projects that repurpose U.S. army base and military sites into urban open spaces; 3) the survey results will enable us to design a better public participation process that is appropriate for post-pandemic society, in which virtual meetings and socially distanced communications are part of the new norm.

한국조경학회지(Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture)

Unlike urban planning processes have actively used empirical approaches, the urban park design and planning still uses the conceptual research approach; therefore, discrepancies often arise between the designer’s intention and real phenomena. In this work, we examine and propose a trade-off method for sustainable urban park design and planning that integrates conceptual and connectivity analyses, specifically for the Yongsan Park master plan. Yongsan Park is a mega-scale urban park project with a unique history as being a military post-industrial site for a long time. To re-link the isolated park site to current urban context, the park connectivity requires careful consideration both conceptually and empirically during the design and planning process. We used the spatial network analysis and statistical methods to investigate the potential visitation proposed by the park master plan and to understand the correlations with built environment factors. The results indicate that an iterative process is needed between conceptual design ideas and empirical connectivity analyses to properly reflect the designers’ intent and improve the long-term outcomes of large urban park design and planning. The trade-off method also provides insights of the urban planning strategies for nearby neighborhoods to enhance park connectivity and potentially contribute to the park management phase.

한국조경학회지(Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture)

Understanding how urban parks are utilized and perceived by the public is crucial for effective urban planning and management. This study introduces a novel dataset derived from Instagram, using 42,187 images tagged with #Seoul and #Park hashtags from 2017 to 2023. These images were filtered using InternLM-XComposer2, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), to confirm they depicted park scenes. GPT-4 then annotated the filtered images, resulting in 29,866 valid image annotations of physical elements, human activities, animals, and emotions. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/RedBall/seoul-urban-park-analysis-by-llm.