Summary

This study aims to analyze the quantitative and qualitative outcomes from urban regeneration projects pursued in existing project areas and suggest directions for urban regeneration policies to improve those projects’ job-creation performance, sustainability, and quality. To understand job creation from the urban regeneration projects and analyze their attributes, the study selected cases from the Urban Regeneration Flagship, General, and New Deal project areas and conducted in-depth interviews and surveys.

The findings from these analyses suggest that the core objective of job policies in existing urban regeneration projects was to revive lagging regions, and hence focused on quantitative job creation in the short term. In-depth analysis of the four urban regeneration project areas revealed that the quality of jobs created from the urban regeneration projects was below the benchmark employment quality. Given that these jobs were created in areas that were socioeconomically vulnerable, however, these jobs should be considered, to some extent, befitting for the purpose of the urban regeneration projects.

Based on the policy analysis and case studies, the study suggested basic directions for job creation in urban regeneration projects and job-type-specific support measures. The basic directions are as follows: First, to create and sustain quality jobs in urban regeneration projects, the central government should focus on the economic-based model and city center model urban regeneration projects, which local governments are unlikely to handle, and local governments should focus on improving the quality and sustainability of jobs arising from neighborhood regeneration. Second, the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of jobs created from urban regeneration projects differ depending on project stages, ranging from planning to implementation, operation, and management. Thus, job creation policies should be pushed forward in a tailored manner to fit each project stage by understanding how these jobs are created and offered in different stages.

Job-type-specific support measures should include the following: First, governments should continuously support capacity building for urban regeneration center employees and offer them improved treatment. Second, socioeconomically, sustained efforts should be made to identify models to commercialize social economy organizations and support them. For community regeneration corporations (CRCs), methodologies and effective programs should be identified to help them resolve the challenges they may face in the early organization and operation stages later on by, for example, pursuing pilot CRC projects. Third, the urban regeneration projects should be accompanied by measures to attract local industries and private companies. Also needed is to improve the urban regeneration performance management system, including identifying and applying job indicators for urban regeneration and developing a job management system.

While this study involved the review of the job creation structure by understanding the job creation status through in-depth interviews and surveys of stakeholders, it had limitations in obtaining universally valid data on the quality and quantity of jobs in urban regeneration projects. This warrants developing databases on jobs created from urban regeneration projects, which will allow us to understand potential seekers of jobs created therefrom and analyze the characteristics of those involved in urban regeneration, thereby developing measures to foster human resources that fit urban regeneration jobs and analyzing the structure of job creation in the private sector under economic-based-model urban regeneration projects.