It has been noticed that the numbers of small-sized household has been increasing steadily so that the City of Seoul had to be able to deal with the specific needs for this small scale housing. In the name of the solution for the new needs, the Govern...
It has been noticed that the numbers of small-sized household has been increasing steadily so that the City of Seoul had to be able to deal with the specific needs for this small scale housing. In the name of the solution for the new needs, the Government has set up the new law and ordinance which define the new type of housing called “Urban Multi-family Housing”, in order to supply small scale houses as fast as they could. It is remarkable that this housing type is not all about such a huge development process as being run by the Government and the giant contractor companies. This new housing type has been built on private lands by private investors, in the quite same way with one that people usually think of natural urban growth process, called ‘piecemeal development’. This study started from thinking that this new type of development might be a good chance to initiate piecemeal development again, which means it must be invaluable to analyse how well this piecemeal developments have been done so far, in terms of urban tissue. For this purpose, the development samples have been selected within Seoul area, and the study has been conducted about sitings and urban tissues of these samples.
For the starting of this study, a wide range of backgrounds have been studied and reviewed. Some researches about 1-family member household which is the very reason why this new type of housing was emerged upon this society have been found and reviewed. There is a very important area which is to be reviewed before commencing the study about the new type of housing; modern multi family housing of 80’s. This modern multi family housing which accommodates around 20 families should be considered as a sort of ‘origin’ of this new type of housing. In fact, most of regulations about this new type has been made up on the basis of the previous regulations for that modern multi-family housing. All these studies about background information can be found in Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 is all about site visit report. It is the result of the analysis of new type of housing sites. Almost all “Urban Multi-family Housing have been built within General Residential Area Zone 2, in the type of studio plan. As for the original purpose of this housing type; providing 1-family member household with small scaled housing, they have been developed within subway station area or around universities and colleges. However, much more numbers of this new type housing construction have been done within station area, so that it can be said that the development probability is much more higher in station area than around schools. One more interesting aspect is that we can find many projects of this housing type especially along the subway line number 2 and number 7.
It has been shown that the siting of new housing type has specific tendency or aspect in the City of Seoul, based on the research conducted in Chapter 3. Now is the time to look at this new type of development in a lot scale. The study described in Chapter 4 is concentrated on several urban tissue components; such as building footprint, lot, access road, from which we can diagnose what kinds of effect these new housings can have on existing urban tissue around. Those components are so much related with urban density, outdoor space and parking space that previous studies about modern multi-family housings of 80’s also have dealt with those issues many times. It is revealed that the density of new housings heightens overall urban density around, in a quite same way how previous modern multi-family housings have done. The scale of development is to be thought smaller than that of the previous 80’s model, when concerning site area, households number and unit area for one household. The samples with O.S.R(outdoor space ratio) higher than average have a frontage road of more than 4m wide, or they have more than one roads accessible. On the contrary, the samples with O.S.R lower than average have a frontage roads of less than 4m road, or they have a northern frontage road. The studio type within General Residential Area Zone 2, which are most often foundable type in Seoul has O.S.R of 0.38 or less. Moreover, these types has entrances under the pilotis which is surrounded with parked vehicles. This unavoidable physical results have made urban environment undesirable, especially in residential areas. In almost all cases, parking lots are under the pilotis, and the number of vehicles owned by dwellers does not have any special relationship with the distance to the station.
This study can be meaningful as one of basic data for studying about desirable housing environments, because it has been trying to understand the advent of new type of housing in term of urban tissue components which are criteria or index of good living environment. A number of this new type of Urban Multi-family Housing has been constructed without proper infrastructure and any city-wide or borough-wide masterplan. Any constraints from this fact must be worried about, although this new type housings have good locations in terms of distance to public transportation nodes. As a result, a whole masterplan and guidelines in city-wide, or in borough-wide, or even in street-wide at least has to be preceded before mushroom blossoming of individual lot development happens, only for the cash benefit.