Capability Development for the neighbourhood

Planning System of Seoul. Source: SI

Banghak-3 Dong Community Asset Mapping. Source: CLC/SI

Community Power Station at Banghak 3 Dong. Source: CLC/SI

Seowon neighbourhood with fenceless houses. Source: CLC /SI

Citizens are engaged when they have a meaningful role to play in the decision-making and implementation processes of projects that impact their lives. Two case studies in Seoul pertaining to Dong-level community planning and Residential Environment Program illustrates this case in point.

Dong-Level Community Planning: Community Power Station at Banghak 3 Dong

Community engagement as source of planning inputs to complement big data
Urban planning often utilises big data to inform planning decisions, which is inadequate to fully capture the needs and aspirations of residents within each local community. These local and sociological inputs need to be uncovered through a systematic process of surveys and engagement. Hence community engagement could serve as a source of planning inputs to complement big data analyses.

As follow up to the Seoul 2030 Plan (Seoul’s equivalent of Singapore’s Concept Plan), Seoul initiated a comprehensive Community Planning exercise that divided the city into 116 communities1 with local plans prepared for each of these communities. Through direct involvement from residents, the exercise helped to uncover local needs systematically throughout the city and incorporate these into the urban planning process. The community plans serve as an intermediate level plan between the master plan and the urban management plan (Seoul’s equivalent of URA Master Plan, used as basis for implementation). The plans have legal status; hence Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) will be regularizing and incorporating the discrepancies between the community plans and the urban management plans.

The local engagement processes increase community consensus and help to reduce downstream implementation problems due to resistance from the local communities. On top of that, the local community plans are also useful in providing an alternative bottom-up perspective to the planning of each locality.

Capability development as the basis for community empowerment
Empowering local communities to solve their own problems not only create more effective solutions tailored to address local issues, but also encourages greater ownership of the solutions. However, empowering local communities cannot simply occur by entrusting communities to make decisions. A process of building capability within the community is required to ensure that the communities are capable of making informed decisions in a sustainable manner.

Seoul’s community planning programmes place consistent emphasis on capability building among community volunteers to equip them with skills to self-organize, communicate, and garner consensus with their fellow neighbours. The Dong-level community planning programme, for example, has 5 training sessions of 2–3 hours each for the resident volunteers to help residents learn about communication and leadership skills as well as understanding their respective communities better through surveys and mapping exercises. While the early stages of the community planning process require active public sector involvement in the form of skills and knowledge transfer, the later parts of the process involve the community taking a more active role in implementation.

Community Power Station at Banghak 3 Dong
Community power stations in Seoul are established as autonomous community spaces created in the administrative facility of the community service centre. The steering support group of the community power stations including the community are in charge of organising public-private partnership group, supporting activities, planning and management of these community spaces. One important success factor for Banghak-3 Dong was champions like local government officers who were active in community engagement efforts. The local leader in Banghak-3 Dong personally hand-wrote letters to residents to encourage them to participate in the town planning and activities. Similarly, the Seoul Community Support Centre shared its best practices and learning points with other local community support centres, which helps to create a network of expertise in Seoul. On the measure of project’s success, while the specific key performance indicators may not be quantifiable, the focus is on changing residents’ mindsets through the organised community initiatives.

Post-engagement evaluation
The post-implementation survey for the first phase of Dong-level community planning demonstrated positive results. Rather than being dependent on the government, there was a significant increase (43.9%) in the proportion of residents attempting to solve issues within the community. The proactive attitudes in turn contributed to reduction in administrative budget requirements for the Dong office.

As the community planning programmes in Seoul were only introduced in recent years, Seoul had been actively conducting project evaluation after completion of the initial pilots to ensure that these projects achieve their objectives and improve the processes for subsequent phases. Pre- and post-surveys were conducted by SMG for the initial phase of Dong-Level Community Planning with the aim of improving Phase 2. The key indicators for evaluation includes evaluating the process, percentage of community-led execution of plans, citizens’ satisfaction level, willingness to participate and recommend the programmes.

Residential Environment Management Programme: Seowon Neighborhood

The Residential Environment Management Program (REMP) in Seoul provides an alternative avenue to the new town and redevelopment programs under the Urban & Residential Environment Improvement Act (UREIA). REMP is targeted at low-rise residential area (average land size of 40,000 to 50,000 square metre residential housing) to improve infrastructure and public facilities where redevelopment plans do not apply. Residents may make their requests to the Seoul City but the identification of REMP sites depends on the percentage of residents’ consensus towards REMP, the type of housing in the area and ageing state of the residential facilities.

Seowon village was initially selected as pilot for the liveable village project in 2001 by SMG, which eventually morphed into REMP where four workshops were held. During the first workshop, the residents came together to discuss how to recreate and reshape the village. In the second workshop, they debated on what is required for shared space and common areas as well as things to be built and installed. The third workshop encompasses deliberation on the utilization of the rest of the areas, including personal and private areas. In the final workshop, participants discuss on how to realize the big picture with more details. All town residents gathered to decide on the final decisions to be made. Expert involvement is also important for community processes at neighbourhood level where the urban designer consultant played a key role as the mediator for different voices within the community on the improvement plans for the neighbourhood.

Under REMP, the local resident committee managed to implement bold urban design ideas, including lowering and removing all boundary walls for private properties in the neighbourhood to make the environment friendlier and facilitate sharing of car parks; and restricting the building height to 2 storeys when planning regulations allow for 3 storeys. These bold ideas required some compromise in terms of privacy and financial gains, but helped to make the neighbourhood a safer, friendlier and unique one. These were achieved through active communication and engagement by the resident committee, which took pains to reach out to every household to convince everyone about the proposal in order to integrate them into the legal urban design guidelines for the neighbourhood.

For various community programs in Seoul, the key objective is not driven by outcomes of the projects. Rather, the aim is to use the projects as a platform to build a community of active citizens and increase social capital among residents. In both Dong-level community planning and REMP, community groups initiated through the project process help to sustain the solution-making process at the local level after the initial phases.

The site visits to the Community Power Station at Banghak 3 Dong and Seowon Village are part of the collaborative research project between Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC) and Seoul Institute (SI) on “Community Planning and Rejuvenation”, where officers from CLC, Housing & Development Board (HDB), People’s Association (PA) and Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY) Office for Citizen Engagement participated in a study trip to Seoul, South Korea from 5-10 February 2017. The research aims to deepen the Singapore research team’s understanding of policies and case studies in Seoul on community planning and rejuvenation through site visit observations and distil learning points from Seoul case studies and policies that are applicable to Singapore.

About the Writter

Phua Shi Hui
Manager
Centre for Liveable Cities