Job Accessibility as a Lens for Understanding the Urban Structure of Colonial Cities: A Digital Humanities Study of the Colonial Seoul in the 1930s Using GIS

This study examined the urban structure of colonial Seoul in the 1930s, the capital city of Korea under the rule of the Japanese empire, by adopting quantitative geographical methods. We utilized a job accessibility index to operationalize the urban structure. We also used geographic information sci...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ISPRS international journal of geo-information 2022-12, Vol.11 (12), p.614
Main Authors: Kim, Youngjoon, Kim, Junghwan, Ha, Hui Jeong, Nakajima, Naoto, Lee, Jinhyung
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accessibility
Cities
colonial Seoul
colonial urban planning
Digital humanities
digital humanity
Economic opportunities
Geographic information science
Geographical information systems
Geography
Historical structures
job accessibility
Korea
Museums
Neighborhoods
Qualitative research
Research methodology
Segregation
Transit
Urban planning
urban structure
Urban structures
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Summary:This study examined the urban structure of colonial Seoul in the 1930s, the capital city of Korea under the rule of the Japanese empire, by adopting quantitative geographical methods. We utilized a job accessibility index to operationalize the urban structure. We also used geographic information science (GIScience) analysis tools to digitize neighborhood-level sociodemographic and parcel-level business location information from historical materials. The results illustrated several findings that were not revealed by previous studies based on qualitative approaches. First, transit-based job accessibility (13.392) is significantly higher (p < 0.001) than walk-based job accessibility (10.575). Second, there is a Γ-shaped area with higher job accessibility, including the central part of colonial Seoul. Third, Japanese-dominant neighborhoods had significantly (p < 0.001) higher transit-based (27.156) job accessibility than Korean-dominant neighborhoods (9.319). Fourth, transit-based job accessibility is not significantly correlated with the unemployment rate overall. Although colonial Seoul was the seventh-largest city of the Japanese empire, few practical planning actions were taken to resolve urban issues, unlike the other large cities in mainland Japan.
ISSN:2220-9964
2220-9964
DOI:10.3390/ijgi11120614