Transformation of Consumption Space (1998.7)

The Transformation of Consumption Space
in the Planning of Ilsan New Town in South Korea
8th International Planning History Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Proceedings, pp.482-487. 1998.7

Sung Hong KIM
The University of Seoul

The Emergence of a New Retail Architecture

The year of 1996 witnessed a new form of retail architecture in Korea when the foreign retail chain stores appeared in the new towns outside Seoul. This new type of retail architecture is not a shopping center, nor is it a super market of the type that would be familiar to most Americans. It is the "hypermarket" where one can buy everything from food and clothes to cameras, appliances, and stationery. In November of 1996, France’s Carrefour Group, the sixth largest retail chain in the world, opened its country’s second store in the Ilsan new town, located halfway between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone, the world’s most heavily armed area (Fig. 1; Fig. 2). It was reported one month after the new store’s opening that Carrefour dominated the existing domestic competitors in this town. In December, Dutch-based Makro opened its second hyper-market at the fringe of Ilsan new town. This European type of shopping facility was grafted onto the new town and adapted for physical constraints and local zoning climate. Given the vertical spread profile of the building, the need for large built-in parking area and the necessarily low budget, the stores have many spatial and visual features distinct from the existing domestic discount stores as well as the conventional department stores. This retail design experiment represents not only the changes in shopping patterns of the middle-class, but also their aspirations for a new style of domesticity with the potential to merge with the urban workplace and the suburban home. The financial success of Carrefour makes the hyper-market to be considered the most promising retail format. This paper is a brief summary of the critical examination of the planning and design of the large-scale retail architecture in the context of the South Korean urban landscape. The intent of the paper is three-fold: first, to examine the visual and spatial features of the European hyper-market in comparison with the competing domestic discount stores and department stores, in Ilsan new town; second, to discuss a fundamental shift in the planning and design principles employed in these stores; and finally, to conjecture on the impact of these stores on the present and probable future form of the city.

Two European Hypermarkets Compared

From the highway that stretches from Seoul to the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea, the first glimpse of Carrefour is an undistinguished appearance with the background setting of high-rise apartment complexes and large-scale commercial buildings. Exiting off the highway and entering the road leading to the center of the new town, the second view from a local interaction changes to a box-like dull building with undeveloped parcels of land around it. The store’s exterior is composed of the vertical slits on the facade of the lower levels and a piling up of layers on the upper levels giving an impression of little character to the first-time visitor (Fig. 3). It is only from the sign on the top that the visitor gets any indication of a retail facility. It is however apparent from such the isolated location that the building is intended to be a destination itself rather than something in-between. At the edge of the property, the visitor is a little perplexed, first, because there is no conspicuous frontal element and, second, the building does not allow space between the street and itself to serve as a walkway space. The visitor then must drive along the building’s perimeter roads and discover the sign for the automobile entrance and exit, and finally the pedestrian entrance; if he approaches from the opposite direction, this sequence is reversed. Once inside the store by car, the visitor is forced to drive all the way up to the fifth, sixth or seventh floor of built-in parking along a single ramp curving around the corner of the building. The building’s overall spatial arrangements are still unintelligible to the visitor from the parking lot, and only the visual signs of the entrance halls announce arrival at the store.

Carrefour is a retail store designed, developed, operated and controlled by a single ownership. These characteristics distinguish it from the domestic discount store and department store, which are miscellaneous collections of individual tenants. It is a 7-story, 47,297 square-meter building on the 8,140 square-meter block. It has three levels of sales area on the second, third and fourth floor. A 12,562 square-meter gross sales area (GSA) is 27% of the total floor area. Other than the sales area, the store has only a few fast food bars within the sales areas and a banking machine on the first floor. The store offers 556 on-site customer parking spaces on the fifth, six, and seventh floors; access for trucks and employees is provided on the first and underground floors. In commercial buildings in most Korean cities, it is conventional that parking space occupies underground levels whereas leasing space occupies the floors above the ground. In this way, owners or developers maximize leasing space above the ground, and minimize parking provision below the ground. Thus the spans of upper levels are governed by the module of underground parking; for example, 10 by 8 meter module is commonly used by commercial buildings. Carrefour also adopts this module, but its vertical arrangement is revolutionary. For the first time, acceptable walking distances from the parked car to the store is considered to be a key to success. This leads to a radical shift from the development of maximum floor areas within the limits of zoning regulations to that of the optimal size based on market evaluation and feasibility analysis. In fact, 256% of Carrefour’s ratio of total floor area to site is far below than that the allowance of the local building ordinance, but its 12,562 square-meter GSA is larger than that of any of its competitors in the same town, for example, the 4,958 square-meter E-mart discount store and the 6,612 square-meter Kim’s discount store. If when Carrefour’s construction cost per square meter is compared to its competitors, its development strategy becomes clearer. Carrefour’s alleged construction cost per square meter is about $400 (1 US$ = 900 Korean Won), which is lower than that of its competitors and far below than the average construction costs of shopping and retail facilities in Korea.

Carrefour is neither a place to expect fine materials and details nor a cheap cliche of the quality of Disney’s buildings as the shopper can find in other retail architecture. However, because of the convenience of shopping - the ample sales space, quantities and varieties of merchandise, the numbers of cashiers, but most of all its advanced marketing - Carrefour attracts more shoppers and captures more sales moneys than its competitors do. A sales turnover in Carrefour’s stores in Korea ranks the third among the 14 countries in the world where Carrefour Group operates 279 outlets. It is interesting that its competitors provide various service facilities but they are considered to be less pleasant places to shop. This means that shopping itself becomes a part of leisure activity. On weekends, the shoppers crowd into this store not only from this town but from Seoul, which is thirty miles away from it. The shopper attains a high degree of mobility and geographic freedom and access to a wide choice of consumer goods, services, and pseudo-suburban amenities. In this automobile setting, architectural treatments also refer to the scale of the highway. A dull facade is a mere cladding of the precisely calculated internal arrangement. This unified architectural treatment, however, is rather distinguishable in the context of the undeveloped parcels around it and the background of commercial buildings, whose facades are full of signs. Carrefour seems successful in creating a strong image of a new retail environment. Including the Ilsan outlet, the Carrefour Group currently operates 6 outlets in Korea and plans to open more than 20 by 2000.

Makro has similar features; the store is a 3 story building with 11,812 square-meter of sales areas on the underground and first floors. The second and third floors are assigned to 664 built-in parking spaces similar to the vertical layout of Carrefour. Its construction costs of $570 per square meter, are also lower than the average. The ratio of total floor area to the site of 65%, is even lower than that of Carrefour. However, there is a crucial distinction. Makro is not located on a grid-plan parcel; it only faces the street in one direction, therefore, it negotiates between vehicular and foot traffic and allows the front as pedestrian space. As a result, the building has clear frontal and rear distinction visually and spatially, in contrast to the Carrefour’s identical treatment of all four sides (Fig. 4). Although the Dutch group SHV Holdings plans to open more than 10 outlets in Korea by 1999, its financial success is uncertain so far. The reasons may be due to the amount of capital and the company’s management and operation strategies. Yet, its site selection in the current location is inherently problematic. It has been reported that Makro creates constant traffic jams and the city plans to build a detour between the old and the new town. Ironically, Makro’s sympathetic attitude towards the existing urban fabric appears problematic whereas Carrefour’s rather anti-urban attitude so far evades criticism from the publics.

Transformation of Consumption Space and Its Background

From the experience of Carrefour and Makro in Ilsan new town, it seems evident that the replication of these models in other cities may accelerate the tension between the existing old urban fabric and motor transportation. This problem would be more critical in the cities, which do not have total urban planning ideology and policies in place. In fact, most of the Korean cities have strict zoning regulations, but they do not have appropriate architectural and urban agendas. Under this situation, the large-scale retail industry makes continuous and aggressive appeals to the government to loosen zoning restrictions. In 1995, the government changed the zoning regulations to allow the construction of the large-scale discount stores in "natural green zones." After the "economic crisis" in 1997, these requests come more from foreign retailers than from domestic competitors. A recent report from the management consulting firm McKenzie Consulting said that the government must loosen zoning restrictions and approval processes to allow the construction of discount stores, specifically addressing Carrefour. Furthermore, it was reported that a US-based Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retail chain, is preparing to set up its stores in Korea.

While the competition of the large-scale foreign retail chains against the domestic retail groups has been seen as an issue by economists and marketing analysts; yet their impact on the urban landscape has not been a rigorous subject for architects and planners. Whether the hypermarket or discount store is an appropriate model for retail type may be an outdated question in the culture of consumption. Architecture for retail is perhaps the only building type that gets voted on by the marketplace daily. Yet, to examine the way in which these new forms of retail building play in the creation of future city form is still valid and critical question. The hypermarket in Korea began as a new-town operation. The large-scale retailers opt for the fringe of big cities rather than the heat of downtown; they avoid the existing commercial corridors and prefer isolated and one-piece sites surrounded by streets. The primacy of vehicular accessibility and convenience is a more important factor than spatial proximity. The hypermarket can be seen as a fusion of a European retail type with the American suburb. It attempts to create a consumption space that offers middle-class a paradoxical experience, suburban life within urbanity: the virtually unreachable exotic climes. In this respect, Carrefour and Makro in the new towns at the outskirts of Seoul will not be a model for other cities. They will remain an extreme interpretation of the ideas that the emergence of the new town, the rise of automobiles and a new form of retail building are part of a single phenomenon. The new town in Korea is inherently different from the American suburb. Ilsan new town is one of the satellite towns developed by the Korean government after 1989 as an attempt to solve the housing shortage of the metropolitan Seoul. The town serves the 276,000 inhabitants that live within 1,573 hectares. Its gross density is 175/ha and residential density is 530/ha. These figures can be compared to Milton Keynes in England that covers 8,800 ha with a population of 250,000. Yet, the density of Ilsan is the lowest among those of all the new towns developed outside Seoul; the residential density of other new towns goes up to 640/ha. Further, The densities of new towns are substantially lower than those of the redeveloped residential areas within Seoul; the residential density ranges between 1,300/ha and 1,900/ha. In contrast, a study reported that the residential density of the typical American suburb does not reach 40/ha (Park, 1995). The experience of new towns in Korea has shown that the idea of the suburb - the integration of living and nature - is an unattainable dream.

Whereas the American suburban shopping center compensates for the lack of urbanity, the hypermarket in Korea challenges urbanity. Yet, neither the new towns nor the existing cities are prepared for the spatial and cultural transformation of consumption space. It seems that this issue will get the attentions of the public only when the idea of a fast-moving and mobile society begins to conflict with the idea of convenience in the Korean urban landscape. But, by that time, entrepreneurs will find a new retail format to ensure constant turnover, and the experience of the old consumption space will serve as a lesson for retailers, but it will be remembered just as an ephemeral building type by architects and planners.

References
Baek, I.K. (1998). A Study on the Development of Indexes to Evaluate Livability of Open Space in Multi-Family Housing. Master Thesis. University of Seoul. Seoul.
Korea Land Corporation (1990). The Development of Ilsan New Town: Preliminary Studies. Seoul: Korea Land Corporation.
Korea Land Corporation (1997). The History of the Development of Ilsan New Town. Seoul: Korea Land Corporation.
McConville, J.G. (1996). The 1996 International Construction Costs and Reference Data Yearbook. New York: A Wiley-Interscience Publication.
Park, K.J. (1995). A Study on the Spatial Planning in New Towns. Ph.D. Thesis, Hongik University. Seoul.