The Process of Creating Yongsan Park from the Urban Resilience Perspective

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.