Finding Urban Identity through Culture-led Urban Regeneration

Firstly, this paper examines urban decline in order to better understand urban regeneration and the need for multidisciplinary management, and also, by considering the necessity for and universal types of urban regeneration, investigates the characteristics of culture-led urban regeneration as a tool for realizing socio-economic revival and urban identity. In particular, this study suggests the action techniques and benchmarking points for urban regeneration by analyzing cases of culture-led urban regeneration in Korea. Three subjects were considered as case studies in this paper: 1) Hanok village in Jeonju city, which changed from a twilight zone to a tourist attraction; 2) Changdong district in Changwon city, which recovered from an area of declining and dark alleyways that had been the hub for arts and culture in the 1970s to become a new artist village; and 3) Cheongju city, which is being transformed from an idle industrial facility into a cultural space. This thesis suggests the implementation process of culture-led urban regeneration to find an urban identity through analysis of the causes of urban decline, the methods of regeneration, and the results of urban regeneration in the three aforementioned cases. In the conclusion section of this paper, the implementation process for culture-led urban regeneration is summarized as consisting of 5 phases: Phase 1, the diagnosis of decline; Phase 2, understanding the reasons for decline and local characteristics; Phase 3, making a database and establishing a direction; Phase 4, applying various techniques suitable for Phase 3; and Phase 5, monitoring and feedback.