Smart, Sustainable and Citizen Centered: A Network Analysis of Urban R&D Trends in Seoul, South Korea

Abstract

Although it is now recognized that place matters for urban development policy, most case studies focusing on particular cities tend to adopt a high-level perspective that imperfectly captures the full spectrum of context-relevant urban development issues. This study applies semantic network analysis to a corpus of 13,852 accepted R&D project proposals on issues related to the urban development of Seoul, South Korea. Through our analysis, we highlight important research trends and also make connections between these trends and the policy orientation and priorities of successive mayoral administrations over a period of 16 years. Although the results suggest that there is significant overlap between policy orientation and scientific research activity, the interests of research scientists cannot be reduced entirely to political priorities. The study contributes to the literature by fusing the place-based approach to urban development studies with the computational content analysis methodology. We raise several questions for future research, including questions about the relationship between policy priorities, scientific research, and academic research.

Does the Medium Matter? Linking Citizens’ Use of Communication Platform for Information about Urban Policies to Decision to Trust in Local Government

“…However, it should be noted that all of the information sources used in this study, which together constitute the online medium all incorporate various tools intending to bolster their interactivity, ranging from comment boards to chatrooms to cyber town hall meetings. The city of Seoul has made considerable attempts to enhance the degree of interactivity of its websites, particularly about their urban sustainability initiatives [93,94].…”

Smart ‘Tourist Cities’ Revisited: Culture-Led Urban Sustainability and the Global Real Estate Market

“…Another example of the transformation of cities into a more 'smart' configuration is Seoul [101]. In Seoul, there is a whole new city-the Songdo International Business District-which was based entirely on the principles of smart cities [102].…”

“…The first phase or sub-level of services implements information and communication technologies to improve sub-functions of cities, e.g., transport, security, environment, and culture [103]. The second phase, or the vertical level of services, integrates the relevant processes and services from smart technologies in large areas of a city, allowing the provision of more advanced services [101]. In the field of transport, for example, citizens are provided with information on public transport about their activities in real-time (Figure 7), as well as on road conditions, road repairs, etc.…”

Policy Discourse Among the Chinese Public on Initiatives for Cultural and Creative Industries: Text Mining Analysis

“…Semantic network analysis, which is useful for discourse analysis, is a research technique that brings words to a network node and determines whether specific words coexist (Jung & Park, 2015). Additionally, among semantic network analysis, CONCOR analysis provides information that can be structurally understood to explain how certain words are arranged in a specific policy discourse (Park et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2020). Network analysis through CONCOR analysis can visualize the semantics and patterns of the policy discourse process by extracting structured information from unstructured data, which analyzes correlation metrics of words mainly derived from text mining, network type, density, and hub node and information about cluster groups.…”

“…This is beneficial for investigating policy discourse because it can characterize words in a derived cluster unit (Zhang et al, 2019). The equations that constitute the correlation matrix used in this analysis are combined in the following formula (Kwahk, 2014; Wang et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2019):…”