How Busan’s Urban Growth Model Is Repeating the Mistakes of the Past

Busan, South Korea — Over the past two decades, Busan has invested heavily in new residential developments aimed at addressing housing shortages and attracting young families. Massive projects like Jeonggwan New Town in the north, Myeongji International City in the west, and the ongoing Eco Delta City have transformed farmland and wetlands into dense apartment zones, equipped with new roads, schools, and public facilities.

These developments have brought visible change. Population has grown in peripheral districts, housing supply has increased, and younger households have found opportunities to settle in modern, well-planned environments. In many ways, Busan’s new towns have delivered on their promise of growth.

But as the city expands outward, its older core is quietly shrinking. Central neighborhoods like Jung-gu, Seo-gu, and Yeongdo are experiencing rapid aging, declining school enrollments, and increasing commercial vacancies. While cranes dot the skyline in the west, some streets in the historic heart of the city are marked by empty storefronts and for-rent signs.

Urban planners and researchers are beginning to question whether Busan’s current model of development—driven by large-scale, generationally targeted housing projects—is sustainable in the long run. The new towns tend to attract a narrow demographic, mostly families in their 30s and 40s, creating neighborhoods that are socially uniform and aging in sync. Meanwhile, the urban core is left behind, with few policy efforts to restore its vitality or link it meaningfully to the city’s newer zones.

As the gap between new and old districts widens, concerns are growing that Busan may be creating a fragmented city—one where housing supply grows, but diversity, continuity, and cohesion are quietly lost.

New Towns Delivered Homes — But Not Diversity

Busan’s new towns were designed to solve urgent problems: high housing demand, limited land in the city center, and the desire to offer younger families modern, affordable living environments. Developments like Jeonggwan, Myeongji, and Eco Delta City were built rapidly, planned efficiently, and marketed as complete residential packages with schools, parks, and transit connections.

In many ways, they worked. Jeonggwan absorbed a wave of young families in the early 2000s. Myeongji, developed later in Gangseo District, followed a similar pattern. Public housing programs and private construction offered entry points for mid-income households, many in their 30s and 40s. As new infrastructure came online, population grew, and commercial activity followed.

But two decades in, the early signs of a structural imbalance are becoming visible.

In Jeonggwan, many of the original residents have aged into their 50s and 60s. School enrollments are dropping. Some apartment complexes report difficulty in attracting younger buyers. While the buildings remain relatively new, the population is aging in sync, and the area lacks the housing diversity to naturally renew itself through generational turnover.

In Myeongji, the development is newer and still growing, but patterns are similar. Most households fit a single profile: middle-income families with children. There are few rental options, limited services for the elderly, and almost no support for single-person or non-family households. Commercial zones cater to a narrow range of consumer needs, and some mixed-use areas remain underutilized.

Adjacent to Myeongji, Ocean City—a slightly older development—is already facing stagnation. Built during the first wave of expansion in the early 2000s, it now shows signs of early decline, with aging residents, reduced activity, and limited reinvestment. Despite its proximity to Myeongji, the two areas are evolving along separate tracks, socially and economically disconnected.

Across these neighborhoods, one pattern repeats: housing is abundant, but diversity is not. The new towns work well for one stage of life, but offer little adaptability beyond it.

A Growing Divide Between the City’s Edge and Its Core

While Busan’s new towns have brought life to its outer districts, they have also deepened the disconnect with the city’s historical center. As development has concentrated on large-scale housing projects along the periphery, the older urban core has faced accelerating decline.

Neighborhoods like Jung-gu, Seo-gu, and Yeongdo once formed the heart of Busan’s civic and economic life. Today, they are home to some of the oldest populations in the city. Young residents and families continue to move out, attracted by newer schools, larger homes, and modern amenities in planned districts further west or north.

At the same time, public and private investment has followed demand. Infrastructure spending, transit upgrades, and school construction have largely targeted new towns, while central districts struggle with aging facilities, vacant properties, and shrinking local economies. Small businesses close, schools consolidate, and cultural institutions operate with reduced audiences.

The result is a city increasingly divided not only by geography, but by function, age, and opportunity. The periphery grows younger and denser, but often socially uniform. The center grows older and emptier, but retains physical complexity and cultural depth that goes underutilized.

This pattern has raised concerns among planners and policy researchers. Without a deliberate strategy to bridge the gap between old and new—through transportation, service integration, and housing variety—Busan risks becoming a fragmented city where different zones serve different life stages, but fail to support a shared civic life.

The spatial divide also limits mobility. Residents in new towns often commute long distances to work in the city center, while seniors in central districts may lack access to newer services or appropriate housing. Over time, this weakens the city's internal cohesion and reduces its flexibility in responding to demographic shifts.

How Past Housing Policies Still Shape Today’s Urban Divide

Long before the rise of new towns on Busan’s western and northern edges, the city’s housing policies had already laid the groundwork for spatial division. During the post-war industrialization era, Busan faced an urgent housing crisis, driven by war refugees, rural migration, and rapid economic growth. Lacking sufficient infrastructure or financial capacity, city authorities responded with large-scale relocation policies and low-cost housing provisions that would shape the city’s geography for decades.

In the 1960s and 70s, entire communities were relocated to peripheral zones such as Amnam-dong, Jangnim, and hillside areas along Sanbokdoro. These policy-driven resettlement zones were often built quickly and with minimal investment, intended more to remove “unsuitable” housing from city centers than to support long-term residential quality. Infrastructure was sparse, access was difficult, and the neighborhoods carried the stigma of poverty.

Many of these areas remain some of the most underdeveloped in Busan today. The legacy of their formation—geographic isolation, poor connectivity, and weak commercial ecosystems—continues to hinder revitalization. Despite recent rounds of redevelopment, the core problem persists: residents are often displaced, and the renewed housing tends to serve new populations rather than the original communities.

Sanbokdoro’s informal housing zones followed a different but equally exclusionary path. Built by necessity rather than policy, these steep hillside neighborhoods emerged without urban planning or infrastructure. Over time, they became home to dense, aging populations with limited mobility and few public services. Due to their topographical constraints and fragmented land ownership, these areas remain notoriously difficult to regenerate.

Together, these past policies embedded a logic of spatial sorting into Busan’s urban DNA. Residents were housed not based on integration, but on removal—moved from the core to the margins in the name of order and development.

Today’s new towns may be more polished and planned, but some dynamics are strikingly familiar. Populations are still being sorted—this time by age and income, not just by status. Uniform housing is again being built far from the urban center, with few links to the city’s older districts. And once more, the city risks creating spaces that serve a specific demographic at a specific life stage, but cannot adapt beyond it.

The patterns of the past were shaped by scarcity and emergency. The repetition of those patterns in an era of greater resources raises a deeper question: is Busan planning forward—or simply expanding a legacy of fragmentation?

A Planning Model Built for Efficiency, Not Flexibility

Busan’s new town development strategy reflects a deeply institutionalized logic: prioritize speed, scale, and demographic targeting. At its core is a model focused on the mass delivery of housing units through standardized urban forms—high-rise apartment blocks, wide arterial roads, and segregated zones for residential, commercial, and educational functions.

This approach, while administratively efficient, leaves little room for flexibility or long-term adaptability.

Most new towns in Busan—including Myeongji, Eco Delta City, and Jeonggwan—were designed around a specific demographic: middle-income families with children. Public support mechanisms, including pre-sale public housing, educational investments, and infrastructure grants, have largely reinforced this profile. As a result, new towns often host homogenous communities, demographically and socially synchronized, with limited capacity to accommodate other life stages or socioeconomic groups.

Housing diversity is particularly lacking. Rental housing is minimal, senior-accessible design is rare, and alternative housing models—such as cooperative housing, co-living, or multigenerational units—are virtually absent. This uniformity turns entire neighborhoods into single-use, life-cycle-specific environments: ideal for raising children, but poorly suited for aging in place or attracting younger or more diverse populations later on.

What’s more, the planning framework tends to treat each development zone in isolation. Urban policy is segmented across agencies and departments, with new town planning often occurring independently of broader citywide strategies. As a result, integration between old and new areas is weak—physically, institutionally, and socially.

Investment priorities also reflect this segmentation. While periphery developments benefit from coordinated state support and developer interest, older neighborhoods face fragmented redevelopment processes, unclear incentives, and political inertia. Renewal efforts are further constrained by ownership complexity, infrastructure decay, and resident resistance born of past displacement.

Critically, success in this system is often measured by supply-side indicators: number of units built, occupancy rates, and transport connectivity. Less measurable—but equally vital—factors such as social mixing, generational overlap, neighborhood cohesion, or long-term demographic flexibility are rarely part of official evaluations.

As Busan repeats this planning formula at the edge of the city, it risks reinforcing a pattern long embedded in its urban history: build efficiently, move people outward, and struggle later with the consequences of spatial rigidity.

Toward an Inclusive and Flexible City

As Busan looks ahead to a future shaped by demographic shifts, economic transitions, and environmental uncertainty, the city faces a critical moment in its urban development trajectory. The current model, driven by rapid land conversion and standardized residential design, has succeeded in expanding housing supply and relocating population growth to the periphery. But this has come at a cost: spatial fragmentation, demographic uniformity, and a weakening of the city’s core.

A new approach is needed—one that prioritizes integration over expansion, diversity over efficiency, and long-term adaptability over short-term output. Instead of continuing to replicate single-use residential zones on the city’s fringes, urban policy must shift toward creating neighborhoods that support mixed generations, variable life stages, and a plurality of housing forms. Cities are not static systems; their social and demographic compositions evolve continuously. Housing, infrastructure, and public services must reflect this dynamism.

Such a shift requires a rebalancing of investment priorities. While the outer districts will continue to need strategic support, Busan must also re-engage with its historical center—not only through aesthetic renewal or tourist-focused revitalization, but by restoring its role as a living, multi-functional urban core. Targeted regeneration, small-scale housing adaptation, and support for existing communities can help reanimate these areas in ways that promote retention rather than displacement.

Urban planning itself must also become more flexible. Rather than designing neighborhoods around fixed household types or economic projections, planning institutions must adopt models that allow for organic change: zoning codes that permit mixed uses, land tools that support cooperative ownership, and design standards that accommodate aging-in-place and intergenerational living. Flexibility should not be seen as a loss of control, but as an investment in long-term resilience.

Crucially, the metrics by which urban success is measured must evolve. Rather than focusing solely on units delivered or roads paved, the city must begin to evaluate outcomes based on cohesion, diversity, and social continuity. The question is no longer how many people a neighborhood can house, but whether it can continue to serve them—across decades, across life stages, and across changing social landscapes.

Busan is not alone in facing these challenges. Cities across East Asia—facing low birth rates, aging populations, and development fatigue—are beginning to grapple with the limits of the 20th-century growth model. What sets cities apart is not whether they face these problems, but how they respond. For Busan, the task ahead is not to stop growing, but to grow differently.

To do so requires courage—not only to plan, but to unlearn. The legacy of spatial separation, deeply embedded in the city’s history, cannot be undone overnight. But by acknowledging the limits of the current trajectory and embracing more inclusive forms of urbanism, Busan can begin to move toward a future that is not only more efficient—but more livable, more just, and more complete.