Spatial Analysis of Urban Structure Changes in Korean Mega-Cities

This study aimed to analyze spatial changes and structural transformations in five Korean mega-cities using populations and the number of tertiary industrial workers as variables. The authors grouped together and chose to study five mega-cities, Seoul, Busan, Gwangju, Daegu, and Daejeon, in Korea. Previous studies only focused on one city or region, thus offering a limited analysis. This study used the data from the Population and Housing Census, performed in Korea in 1995, 2000, and 2005. The authors also used the number of tertiary industrial workers from the Census on Basic Characteristics of Establishments in Korea for the years 1995, 2000 and 2004. Three methodologies were used to analyze spatial structural changes in the five mega-cities: 1) induction transit density analysis to separate city centers from sub-centers, 2) spatial statistics using the Gini coefficient and the standard distance to measure concentrations and dispersions of populations, and 3) spatial analysis to identify the effectiveness of spatial changes using the inverse distance weighting (IDW) method in GIS. The features of the five mega-cities can be summarized as follows. First, there was suburbanization and concentration of the populations, and second a spatial de-correlation between the population and the establishments.