Korean apartment complexes and social relationships of the residents

Abstract

Korean apartment housing, where more than half of the population lives, has drawn attention with its spatial, historical, and cultural uniqueness. Among many questions on Korean apartments, this article explains how the socio-spatial characteristics of apartment housing have impacts on the social relationships among the residents. This article first analyses the historical, socio-cultural, and spatial characteristics of Korean apartments, and then synthesizes up-to-date empirical study results to examine how the diverse characteristics can be associated with the residents’ social relations. The empirical evidence clarifies the effects of Korean apartments’ characteristics on residents’ social relations—the exclusive complex design, spatial configurations, shared spaces including community facilities, heights of the units, public/private housing types, social homogeneity, and community programs are all associated with social relations of the residents. Key methodological problems in current studies as well as implications for future apartment planning are highlighted.

Keywords:

• Korean apartments
• high-rise high-density
• social relationships
• residents
• socio-spatial characteristics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Figure 1. Apartment buildings form an isolated complex in Seoul. Source: FreeQration, http://www.freeqration.com/image/General-View-Korea-Seoul-Seoul-City-photos-2033300

Figure 2. Exclusively provided outdoor facilities in an apartment complex, Korea. Source: Author.

Notes

1 Apartment housing in Korea was also provided for the low-income people at first, but due to few public resources available for housing constructions and pressure from the increasing number of urban population, the housing supply gradually changed its aim targeting consumers in the middle classes (Jeong & Ban, 2014; Ronald & Lee, 2012).

2 Under the pre-construction sale system, apartment buyers have to pay in advance for their apartments in instalments before taking occupancy. Thus, private savings from the customers became the main source of construction finance and enable the state to make land available at no cost to itself.

3 According to Korean building regulations, apartment housing is defined as ‘a multi-unit dwelling with more than 5 stories.’ Before 2005, 15 stories apartment buildings were most commonly constructed, but recently built apartment buildings are generally much higher.

4 The volume of public rental housing stock (including public rental apartments) accounts for 5.5% of total housing stock (Jeon, 2016; Seo & Chiu, 2014), which is a low level compared with neighbouring Japan (37%) and Hong Kong (35%) (Jeong & Ban, 2014).

5 C. Park (2013) pointed out that the exclusive services in apartments complexes affect the way of paying living costs/taxes. Outside the apartment complexes, when any kind of service facility is required to be built or fixed, local governments should build and manage it. Individuals do not have any responsibility to pay for or manage the facilities except for paying taxes. However, the residents of apartment complexes are responsible for paying the extra maintenance cost for the facilities in addition to normal tax to the government. Under this circumstance, all kinds of facilities in apartment complexes, such as open space, playgrounds, community centres, libraries, and even streets are built and managed with the money from the residents. So, they become to be reluctant to allow outsiders to use their spaces or facilities.

6 Choi et al. (2013) noted that emphasizing community spaces may have reflected the changes of people’s life styles and heightened awareness of importance of community to some extent, but it was also a result of apartment providers’ marketing strategies which were intended to boost the housing market by making use of this social trend. In other words, apartment construction companies tried to differentiate their products by making an image of a lifestyle that promotes well-being.

7 This spatial structure is similar with the case of a tree which has only one way from the root to the leaf at the end of a terminal branch. Christopher Alexander (1964) already criticized the tree structure in modern cities where each part interacts with the whole only through an inflexible hierarchical and pyramidal relationship. He claimed that with this physical backbone, there should be some essential ingredient missing.

8 According to I. Park (2013), the exceptional focus on individual living units was caused from the fact that Korean apartments have been designed and constructed as ‘products.’ Different from western countries where apartments started to be built as public housing, Korean apartments started as private housing for sale from the beginning. Since public apartments in western countries were not the products which must be bought by consumers, the priority of apartment design was not making more personal space; and these architectural standards were applied to the design of commercial apartments later. In the case of Korea, on the contrary, public apartment housing started to be built and provided after all the architectural standards were set with private apartments; thus, reserving personal space to the maximum has worked as a norm even to the public apartment providers.

9 The explanation of this result was that the studied complexes with straight-line shape buildings had more apartment units and residents, which also can contribute to sense of community.

10 The Korean public rental housing system has different types of houses with diverse lease periods to meet the different housing needs of the vulnerable groups. Permanent rental housing is one of the long-term public rental housing types. The household income of the tenants should be less than 50% of the average, and the priority goes to the beneficiary of the National Basic Livelihood Security System.

11 Although a traditional compositional explanation claims that differences in human behaviour between places exist because of differences in the kinds of people who live in these places, the idea that group properties are distinguished from those of individual members and that macro-level variables can have effects on outcomes independently of individual characteristics has recently gathered strength (Diez-Roux, 1998). Under this circumstance, multilevel analysis has emerged as an efficient way of analysing contextual effects of place as it acknowledges the idea of hierarchy and the nesting of people within places and allows a decomposition of variation to the individual or the contextual level (Kearns & Moon, 2002). Nevertheless, in the reviewed Korean studies, the effects of social characteristics of individual residents were broadly examined without presenting the effects of the characteristics at macro neighbourhood level.

12 According to Koreas’ Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport report (2016), the average length of residence is 10.6 years for home owners and 3.6 years for renters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naeun Gu

Naeun Gu recently received her PhD in the Built Environment at University of Washington, Seattle. Before coming to the US as a Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Yonsei University, Korea and graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Housing and Interior Design. By participating in multiple field research for urban regeneration projects organized by the Korean government, she has come to believe that appropriate environmental settings can work as a strong health intervention. Her current research focuses on how everyday living environments have effects on people’s health and well-being, with a special emphasis on the role of social connections in highly urban settings.