The False Promise of Public Contributions: Who Really Builds the City?

BUSAN, South Korea — In Busan, land developers are required to hand over up to 100% of the increased land value when a site is rezoned. It’s called a “public contribution” — a tool meant to return private windfalls to the public. But walk through many of the spaces that were promised in return — a startup center, a civic plaza, a pedestrian bridge — and you’re more likely to find empty buildings, locked doors, and ghost infrastructure.

“Much of the media frames public contribution as a burden on developers — rarely asking whether the ‘public’ ever actually benefits.”

The idea behind public contributions is simple: when private developers benefit from public decisions, they should give something back. But somewhere between blueprint and construction, the public disappears. What remains are spaces that look good on a brochure, serve little purpose in real life, and quietly enhance property values for a few.

What’s broken is not the intention, but the system itself. Cities are being shaped by closed-door deals, designed for financial efficiency, and built with little regard for who will actually use them. Public contributions — once imagined as a tool for fairness — have become just another step in the profit pipeline.

What Are Public Contributions Supposed to Be?

“Public contribution is treated like a tax on development. But too often, it’s actually a discount on democracy.”

The logic behind public contributions is straightforward: when private developers benefit from public decisions — like rezoning, increased floor-area ratios, or infrastructure upgrades — a portion of that windfall should be returned to society. The mechanism is known globally as land value capture, and in South Korea, it takes the form of “public contribution agreements.”

In theory, these contributions are meant to fund public goods: parks, community centers, transit upgrades, affordable housing. The idea is not to punish development, but to balance private profit with collective benefit — to make sure the city works for more than just those who can build it.

The philosophy has roots in land justice traditions going back over a century. The 19th-century American economist Henry George argued that land’s increasing value is rarely the product of individual effort, but rather of society itself — through public investment, growth, and regulation. More recently, theorists like John Rawls have framed such redistributions as a requirement of fairness: society must be arranged so that any inequalities work to benefit the least advantaged.

But somewhere between that theory and today’s tower cranes, something has been lost. Public contributions have drifted far from their original function. Rather than shaping long-term civic benefit, they have become tactical calculations between city officials and developers, negotiated in private and measured more by square footage than by public need.

From Public Benefit to Public Theater

“Governments measure how many square meters were built. They never ask who those meters belong to.”

Across South Korea’s urban landscape, the promise of public contribution is easy to find — in glossy renderings, planning documents, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. What’s harder to find is the public itself.

In cities like Busan, Seoul, and Incheon, developers often fulfill their contribution obligations by constructing community centers, cultural plazas, or startup hubs. But once the press releases fade, many of these facilities sit empty or underused. The spaces are poorly located, lack operational budgets, or serve no real demand. Doors stay locked. Lights stay off. Occasionally, signs are posted to keep non-residents out — a quiet signal that these so-called public assets were never truly meant for the public.

Rather than advancing equity or civic life, these contributions too often become a form of urban theater — a symbolic gesture that satisfies regulations while enhancing the project’s marketability. Developers highlight these facilities in promotional materials to attract buyers or justify higher prices. Local governments, under pressure to deliver “public benefit,” accept them as proof of civic value — even if they remain functionally irrelevant.

In many cases, the result is a paradox: public infrastructure that is legally public, financially private, and practically useless.

It’s not simply a matter of neglect — it’s design. The system rewards what is built, not what works. There is no mechanism to ask: Will this space be used? Maintained? Needed?

Without that question, public contributions risk becoming just another line item in the cost of doing business — a checkbox on the way to profit, not a platform for shared urban life.

When the Market Designs Public Life

“The sidewalk ends where the renderings stopped.”

The failure of public contributions to serve the public isn’t just about bad design or misjudged demand — it’s about control. In today’s urban development model, it’s not the public that designs public space. It’s private developers, construction firms, and real estate interests — with governments acting more as facilitators than as stewards.

In South Korea, the process typically begins with a developer proposing a project, often on the promise of zoning changes, density bonuses, or tax relief. In exchange, they agree to include a set of “public benefits.” But those benefits are negotiated behind closed doors, shaped by cost-benefit calculations, and executed by the same firms whose bottom line depends on minimizing expense.

It’s a system that outsources not only construction, but vision. Designing the city becomes a financial equation. Community needs, social equity, and long-term maintenance are rarely built into the formula — unless they happen to align with commercial goals.

Government agencies, constrained by limited budgets and driven by project delivery metrics, often accept whatever public contribution is offered — a plaza here, a startup center there — with little regard for whether it will actually work. Meanwhile, once the development is complete, the same agencies typically walk away, leaving operation and ownership in uncertain or private hands.

This structure doesn’t just fail to deliver public value — it redefines what “public” means. It becomes a branding element, an image, a bullet point in a planning document. But it rarely involves the people who will live there, walk past it, or rely on it.

When market logic is allowed to define civic space, the result is predictable:
cities that look public, but feel private. Built to comply, not to connect.

Policy Inertia: Centralized Systems, Fragmented Accountability

Even when urban failures are visible, they rarely provoke reform. In South Korea, the machinery behind public development is highly centralized — but its consequences are scattered across neighborhoods, communities, and everyday lives.

Planning frameworks are written by national agencies. Funding is distributed through competitive project-based grants. Local governments, under-resourced and politically cautious, play a limited role in shaping the vision but a central role in enforcing it.

Meanwhile, no one is ultimately responsible for whether the “public” in public contributions actually works.

Institutions like LH (Korea Land and Housing Corporation) or SH (Seoul Housing Corporation) oversee large-scale development, but their mandates are often split between profitability, land supply, and basic housing delivery. They are tasked with maximizing fiscal efficiency — not nurturing civic space. In practice, this means the very agencies charged with enabling public benefit are also under pressure to sell land, attract private developers, and balance spreadsheets.

There is little room — structurally or culturally — for long-term stewardship. Most public contribution projects are judged by whether they are completed, not whether they are used. Success is measured in square meters, not social outcomes.

As a result, accountability is diluted. A startup hub sits empty? A plaza never opens to the public? A shared kitchen is locked behind a keypad? No single actor is responsible — and no mechanism exists to revise or repurpose what’s been built.

This isn’t just a policy failure. It’s a crisis of ownership — not of land, but of responsibility.

Without a clear public entity tasked with planning, evaluating, and maintaining civic value, even well-intentioned ideas become dead infrastructure.

What Should Change?

“The public role has been reduced to enforcement and exit — not imagination or care.”

If cities are to serve the people who live in them, they must reclaim their authorship. That means shifting away from the current model — one where developers dictate terms and public value is negotiated in the margins — toward a new approach where public institutions set the direction from the outset, grounded in actual community needs.

The process must begin long before the first renderings are drawn. Instead of reacting to private proposals, city governments need to take initiative, defining not only where development should happen but also what forms of public benefit are most urgently needed — and for whom. But this isn’t an argument for more bureaucratic control. Public leadership does not mean rigid centralization; it means thoughtful coordination that leaves space for local diversity and innovation.

In a healthier model, development would be shaped by a coalition: architects who understand the rhythms of a neighborhood; social enterprises and cooperatives who see opportunity beyond profitability; residents who live with the long-term consequences of planning decisions. These voices are not obstacles to efficiency — they are the measure of whether a city is working.

To support this shift, cities will need institutions that don’t just approve buildings but actively curate the urban fabric. Agencies that can interpret land value not only as a revenue source, but as a social responsibility. Offices that are equipped not just to evaluate proposals on paper, but to revisit the space years later and ask: is it being used, is it being cared for, and does it still matter to the people it was built for?

Public contributions should never be treated as line items or trade-offs. They should be treated as civic commitments — promises, not transactions. And promises require stewards.

The goal is not perfection, but participation. A city built by market logic will always drift toward exclusion. A city shaped by collective intent, however imperfect, has a chance to remain open — to change, to respond, to belong.

From Transactional to Transformational Urbanism

Public contributions were meant to answer a simple question: if private actors profit from the city, what do they owe in return? But over time, this idea — grounded in fairness and reciprocity — has been hollowed out by a development model that treats civic benefit as an afterthought, and public space as a branding tool.

The consequences are visible not only in South Korea, but across rapidly urbanizing cities worldwide: sterile plazas that feel ornamental, startup hubs that never welcomed a startup, retail corridors designed for foot traffic that never came. The gap between what cities promise and what they deliver is not just technical — it’s ethical.

To move forward, we need more than better contracts or stricter regulations. We need a different story about what cities are for. Cities are not machines for delivering return on investment. They are living systems — of memory, access, care, contradiction, and community. They thrive when people see themselves in the space around them, and when public infrastructure is shaped not by capital efficiency, but by collective purpose.

This won’t be achieved through developer negotiations or isolated planning meetings. It will take a cultural shift in how we think about ownership, value, and participation. It will require institutions that are accountable not just for what they approve, but for what they sustain. And above all, it will demand a renewed belief that the public in public space must mean more than proximity — it must mean belonging.

If cities are to remain places where people can live with dignity, then the work of shaping them cannot be left to those whose only responsibility is to build. It must be taken up by those who intend to stay.