Counterfactual Planning What if there had been No Greenbelt in Seoul?

This article uses a specific and long-established planning policy, Seoulʹs greenbelt, to explore the concept of counterfactual planning. Suppose the greenbelt had never existed. How would the spatial structure of the metropolitan region have been different? Under both monocentric and polycentric assumptions, both population and employment (in terms of densities and numbers) would have been much lower in the core city and the periphery. The effects would have been more dramatic in the core city, suggesting that the greenbelt contributed significantly to densification and congestion. Still, its consequences for leapfrog development were far from negligible. In addition, because the greenbelt policy was reinforced by a strong government strategy to build very large new towns beyond the greenbelt, a significant jobs-housing imbalance resulted because people decentralized much faster than jobs. Whether these effects are offset by the recreational and other environmental benefits of the greenbelt is unclear.