Urban Sustainability Pathway Essay

Annex A. Moving Up the Urban Sustainability Pathway

A city’s sustainability focus likely reflects both its place along the urban development pathway and its level of ambition for the future. To help cities determine what their sustainability focus should include, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC 2015) proposes three possible lenses through which they can examine themselves:

• Basics. At a first level, a city must provide basic services to its citizens and create sufficient infrastructure for its growth - especially health, housing, air quality and public transport.

• Differentiators. A city must also identify its differentiating factors or positive attributes, such as a high level of higher education, public spaces and parks, international connectivity

After the Korean War, Korea was one of the world's poorest countries, with per capita income of only $64. In the 1960s, economically the country lagged behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. However, by 2010 Korea's GDP per capita had risen to approximately $30,200. It exceeded that of Argentina in the 1980s. Korea today has a higher GDP per capita than Spain and New Zealand and is less than 10 percent behind the European Union, on which it is gaining quickly. Seoul, Korea’s capital, is a prosperous metropolitan area in a prosperous country.

By using coordinated planning and connecting policies, Korea successfully managed its journey from an incipient to an advanced level of urbanization. To address economic development and urbanization, Korea’s government implemented the Five-Year National Economic Development Plans and the National Territory Comprehensive Plans. Under these plans, Korea began a journey of economic progress, with an average economic growth of 22.6 percent in the late

Before the complete introduction of an urban planning system, land development programs were set up, with a regulation of the use of land. The transport system was developed in the following order: in a first stage, the railway system, followed by the expressway network in the period of intermediate urbanization, then, in the advanced period, the motorway network and high-speed rail. In the interim period, relocation policies were implemented to eliminate slums, but without success. At the beginning of the advanced period, the disappearance of shantytowns was mainly due to market action in residential redevelopment