Two Tails of Housing-led Urban Regeneration Policy Network: The UK and South Korea

Abstract

As the previous service delivery mechanism initiated by government is not desirable anymore, institutional agency on behalf of government is necessary to intermediate public and private interests through policy network. The focus of this study is to identify the role of different intermediate agencies of Cardiff and Seoul within policy network towards sustainable community building through housing-led urban regeneration. It was identified that the policy network of Cardiff was a horizontal network administration organization-type issue network, which favoured inclusiveness, sequential legitimacy and stability with a private-like, bottom-up relational role and a wide coverage of functional role. The policy network of Seoul was a hierarchical, lead organization-type policy community, which favoured efficiency, internal legitimacy and stability with a public-like, top-down relational role and a narrow range of functional role. Finally, it was suggested that housing-led regeneration should be networked effectively through the better role of intermediate agency.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2011-013-C00067).

Notes

1. Similarly, Williams (2004) identifies the role of a policy mediator in governance as functional, territorial and network mediation.

2. Cole and Goodchild (2001) distinguish social mix from social balance as follows: the former suggests that the neighbourhood in question varies on some or all socioeconomic characteristics while the latter connotes an external reference point with which comparison with wider district, city or nation can be made.

3. The interviewee of the UK case was Dr. Bob Smith, lecturer of School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, who participated in the process of case study regeneration as a committee member. Three informal interviews with questions and answers were conducted in the Cardiff University meeting room. The interviewee of the Korean case was Mrs. Bomi Shin, deputy manager of Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs, who designed and implemented the case study regeneration as a member of civil servant. Several interviews were conducted through e-mails and telephone with questions and answers. Questions were those about which were not identified from documentary analysis.

4. Propositions suggested by Provan and Kenis (2008) were used as a key framework in this study to analyse the situation rather than as an a priori hypothesis to be tested. Instead, this study tried to explain different approaches of urban regeneration in terms of policy network, which were not studied enough.

5. Main resources for this section are documentary data and information from the interview was used to confirm the implication derived from the data and to specify models of network type for both cases.

6. These events are well introduced in CCHA's project homepage (www.loudounsquare.org.uk/Community).

7. Many parts of this section is based on authors own analysis (Woo, 2012).

8. There were some local communities such as Self-governing Residents Committee or People and Village, but they were not included in the policy network from the initial stage and were a kind of target group of public relations.

9. While doing a pilot project, Happy House Centres were opened in each area with 2−4 staff temporarily transferred from local governments. However, they acted as a kind of call centre for the service and are not related to the policy network of the scheme.

10. They represent more general approaches rather than specific cases of this study. Various kinds of policy network governance form can be applied to analyse different housing/regeneration schemes of course.