At the Nakseongdae neighborhood community center in Seoul's Gwanak District on the 13th, one resident told Mayor Park Jun-hee that parking near Nakseongdae Park becomes severely congested every weekend. Opening the parking lot at the Seoul Citizens University campus nearby, the resident said, would be a major help to the neighborhood. Park said the district would discuss the operation of the lot with the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Other everyday concerns followed, from the difficulties faced by residents in areas without city gas service to the management of street trees. Residents raised problems they had encountered in daily life and suggested ways to address them, while Park explained the relevant rules and administrative constraints as the two sides looked for solutions together.
The session was part of "Mobile Gwanak Listening," an outreach program in which the mayor visits neighborhoods in person to discuss local issues with residents and gather ideas for policy. In an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily shortly after the event, Park said local autonomy is fully realized only through direct democracy. "The range of views residents share with us on the ground is a great help in running the district and improving policy," he said.
Park has run the district on the basis of dialogue with residents since taking office in 2018. He set up "Gwanak Listening," the country's first cafe-style mayor's office, on the ground floor of district hall and met residents there every Thursday, later widening the channels with the mobile program, which visits neighborhood community centers, senior centers and schools, and an online version.
Over his two terms, 31,714 residents took part in the Gwanak Listening program and submitted 5,119 proposals. The mobile sessions alone drew 29,862 participants and 3,961 suggestions. This year's round began in the Sillim and Sinsa neighborhoods on Sept. 30 and will cover all 21 neighborhoods of the district over 12 days through Nov. 3. "In the past, people mostly came demanding that complaints be resolved, but as we kept meeting and working through problems together, the grievances eased," Park said. "Sharing where district projects stand and what we plan next has also deepened residents' understanding and support."
Ideas raised at the sessions have turned into actual policy. One example is the Gwanak No. 12 community bus route, which will address long-standing transport difficulties in the Haengun and Cheongnyong neighborhoods. Acting on residents' input, the district continued talks with the Seoul city government and won approval for the new route in June, with service scheduled to begin at the end of the year.
Gwanak's efforts to institutionalize resident participation have also drawn recognition abroad. The online Gwanak Listening platform was selected as a public sector innovation case by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2022. In September, the district's citizen-led pledge management system — in which residents take part in designing campaign pledges as well as monitoring and evaluating how they are carried out — became the first such program by a Korean local government to win a special award in the best practice awards of the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy. "Having residents involved from the moment pledges are designed through implementation and evaluation is a model that has now been recognized overseas as well," Park said.
In his third term, Park plans to strengthen services tied closely to residents' daily lives. A new "Can-Do Home Service Center" will help single-person households with small repairs such as replacing fluorescent lights and window screens, and the district is preparing a way for residents to file everyday service requests through KakaoTalk. "Women living alone can feel uneasy about calling a stranger into their home," Park said. "If the district office sends someone directly, they can use the service with peace of mind."
The district is also pursuing projects to widen resident participation in daily life. It will introduce a garden adoption program under which schools, resident self-governance councils and companies take responsibility for maintaining gardens, and plans to train 3,000 residents as "healing gardeners," or community garden-care specialists.
The goal of his final term is to embed a system in which residents take part as the owners of local government. "Administration can succeed only when residents take part themselves, with the sense that they are the owners," Park said. "Even after I step down as mayor, I will work to make sure Gwanak remains a city of resident sovereignty, a city of innovative economic growth and a healing city that gives residents a sense of happiness."