Omnidirectional connectivity of urban open spaces provides context for local government redevelopment plans

Governance of large cities requires local planning and administration, and most cities contain nested levels of government. There are challenges for coordinating urban planning and development among these local governments, which lead to the need to assess regional or city-wide contexts that can be used by smaller administrative units. Urban metabolism treats a city as a system within which the movement of resources can be estimated. In this study, we employed an urban metabolism approach to estimate the permeability of open space within an entire megacity, Seoul, the capital of South Korea. We provide district-level relative permeability scores for the 25 district governments to use in assessments and incentivize cooperation to improve the city’s overall open space connectivity. We analyzed the relative level of open space of 69 classes using Seoul’s land use map, and used Omniscape, a modeling tool that charts the level of suitability and resistance of every grid cell to every other grid cell using a moving window. This is an omnidirectional continuous approach that does not require open space “cores” or least-cost “paths”. We modeled two scenarios, one where open water is a barrier and contributes little to open space, and the other where open water is considered an attractive element to open space. We used the modeled outputs to define five levels of permeability and then compared the relative permeability scores for the 25 districts. Five districts had over 30% of their area in the lowest level, and eight of the 10 largest impermeable areas spanned across districts under water suitable scenario. The comparable metrics permit intra-district assessments to improve open space access, but also expect creative approaches to overcome issues including limited availability for open spaces.