Enhancing sustainability in downtown by triple-value adding to urban redevelopment efforts: A case study of Seoul, Korea

The need to better understand urban redevelopment efforts has been recognized numerous times. Indeed, the shortcomings of theoretical and empirical contributions in urban redevelopment make urban redevelopment projects a process fraught with many dilemmas, conflicts, and contradictions related to the connection between economic activity and its social and environmental context.; The major objective of this research is to discover or develop a new approach in urban redevelopment in order to make downtown areas more sustainable. To achieve this objective, the study aims to apply the concept of sustainability to urban design in downtown redevelopment projects. Then, through a survey instrument, this study identifies the relationship between urban design and occupants' satisfaction in urban redevelopment projects in downtown Seoul and the underlying factors that account for the variance in stakeholders's perception on sustainable values with respect to urban design.; This research proposes the concept of sustainable urban redevelopment, which combines urban redevelopment programs as a process and urban design as a substantial tool in the battle over sustainable values. I develop the concept of sustainable urban redevelopment as a new approach to balance the economic, social, and environmental outcomes through the urban redevelopment process in which social and environmental multipliers are used to enhance economic as well as social and environmental benefits. The survey results supports the conclusion that good urban design leads to higher level of satisfaction from occupants. The factor analysis conducted on the survey results also identify the underlying structure that accounts for the relationship between a set of urban design features and triple-values associated with sustainability (economic viability, social benefit, and environmental support).