People work, study and meet across administrative boundaries. Companies move to where talent is, and talent moves to where opportunity is. Economic zones are already expanding beyond the boundaries of metropolitan local governments. National spatial strategy must also be redrawn around living zones and economic zones as its units. I propose a multi-hub mega-economic zone strategy that builds economic zones by connecting living-zone cities.
A country's spatial competitiveness comes from both the quality of its cities and the connections between them. The faster self-sufficient living-zone cities with high quality of life and innovative capacity are connected, the greater the gains of a metropolitan economic zone and the more widely its costs are shared.
In the Seoul metropolitan area, a core hub that draws in talent and jobs is already in place, centered on Seoul. The task within the metropolitan area is to relieve Seoul's extreme overconcentration and reorganize the region into a multi-hub metropolitan economic zone. The solution lies in building new hubs to ease the spatial hierarchy between them and Seoul's core hub. I believe an effective approach would be to create a large new urban space, equipped with both jobs and daily-life functions, at a location 15 minutes from Gangnam by express metropolitan rail. The grandparents' generation had Gangnam, and the parents' generation had the first-generation new towns such as Bundang and Ilsan. Now we must provide a new urban space where the young generation can enjoy ample opportunity, pursue their dreams, start families and plan their futures. When resources concentrated in Seoul are dispersed starting within the metropolitan area, Seoul's extreme overconcentration will ease and a solution to the housing problem will open up.
The Seoul metropolitan area and the Chungcheong region are rapidly merging into a single economic zone. In the Chungcheong region, completing the administrative capital in full matters more than anything. Sejong must be connected with Daejeon and Cheongju to build a knowledge network and a talent ecosystem, drawing in a greater concentration of innovative talent so that an innovation ecosystem can function. Linking a multi-hub Seoul metropolitan area with the Chungcheong region as one would create the first mega-economic zone with global competitiveness.
The Yeongnam and Honam regions call for a far bolder approach. The regions that led industrialization are now at the heart of regional decline. The global knowledge hub for Yeongnam and Honam — a super hub — that I proposed in an earlier column should be built on the scale of living-zone cities so that talented people can meet often, gathering 300,000 innovative workers so it can serve as a global hub across multiple fields. A city where multiple fields grow together stands firm even when one industry falters, and it also provides the jobs for spouses that families need to settle down. The goal is the world's most innovative and most livable city. Core urban functions — housing and transport, education and talent development, industry and jobs, finance and investment, culture and the arts, consumption and daily-life services, health care and caregiving — must all operate at a world-class level.
Above all, success or failure rests on the talent ecosystem. To attract talent from around the world, cities must be granted special authority to allow new experiments at the city level, and a bold institutional environment differentiated from that of the Seoul metropolitan area must be created. If a super hub built this way is connected to existing cities by express metropolitan rail and high-speed rail, Yeongnam and Honam can be reborn as a global knowledge-industry center as the second mega-economic zone, and this can be the way to give substance to the southeastern, Daegu-Gyeongbuk and Honam megacities within the government's five-metropolitan-hub balanced-development strategy.
Creating multiple hubs in the Seoul metropolitan area solves the housing problem, while building core hubs outside the capital region halts the tide of regional decline. When the two strategies advance together, the entire country develops in balance. The land is finite, but the spatial possibilities open to us remain vast. Let us move beyond administrative boundaries, build world-class knowledge hubs across the country around living zones and economic zones, and tightly connect existing cities. Innovation will then occur simultaneously in many places, one area compensating when another weakens, and cities with their own strengths will grow stronger together through cooperation and competition. A shift to a networked nation is the future of the new national spatial strategy Korea should pursue.