Re-reading Chuncheon G5 International Design Competition from a Viewpoint of Landscape Urbanism

A city evolves over time. It grows, transforms, and sometimes degrades. Chuncheon is at a turning point from a city souggling with regulations regarding clean water supply and a military encampment to a masterpiece city with a sustainable vision. The city is getting ready to restructure itself to become a world-famous culture and tourism complex expanding its physical boundary across the Camp Page site and absorbing Jungdo as a major tourist attraction. The landscape in the future blueprint of Chuncheon will play a great role in restructuring urban form. The regenerated in will have a new networked open space system as well as re-evaluated landscape resources. The hybrid theoretical practice called 'landscape urbanism' burgeoning in the fields between 'landscape architecture' and 'urbanism' can guide us in considering the terms of the relationship between a city and landscape when we design a future city Landscape urbanism is considered to be an effective framework by which we can diagnose the current status of a landscape in our contemporary urban design practice in Korea. This paper tries to provide a different perspective from the viewpoint of landscape urbanism to decipher the hidden implications of the social agreement on the role of landscape in urban structure by re-reading eight design proposals presented for the ChunCheon G5 international design competition based on the main principles of landscape urbanism. The G5 design competition is a great opportunity to test out new ideas on a city, demonstrating the relative values among various urban-design professional realms. First, this paper provides an overview of the main ideas of landscape urbanism based on the literature review and case studies. Second, framework categories are suggested in order to extract the explicit and implicit ideas on the landscape. Third, eight proposals are reviewed according to the suggested categories to situate the current landscape design of Korea within the mainstream of contemporary practice of landscape urbanism. Based on the review of eight proposals, the following diagnostic conclusions are made; first, the ideas of landscape urbanism have not been actively introduced in large-scaled urban landscape projects in Korea like Chuncheon G5. Second, it remains to be a big task for landscape professions to be able to participate in design consortiums on an equal footing. Third, In order to introduce and reify the ideas of landscape urbanism in Korea, it is inevitable and critical to test the ideas in both academic fields and professional practices to find the appropriately adjusted model of landscape urbanism.