The Productive Palimpsest: Quasi-Industrial Zoning and Industrial Recomposition in Seongsu-dong, Seoul

Quasi-industrial zoning is often described either as a mechanism for protecting manufacturing or as a flexible platform for mixed-use redevelopment. Seongsu-dong, Seoul, suggests that the two functions can coexist while also pulling in different directions. This study combines a historical and institutional reconstruction with establishment and workplace-employment statistics for 2015–2024, building use-approval data for 2016–2025, and a limited secondary analysis of IRB-approved interviews collected in 2024 for ground-level validation. Because the national establishment survey changed its enumeration framework in 2020, business trends are read through two internally comparable intervals. Manufacturing contracted in both intervals, while information, communications, professional services, design, research, and other knowledge-intensive activities expanded. Knowledge industry centers (KICs) remained a major industrial development type during the same period, and several expanding knowledge-intensive sectors fall within their statutory eligibility categories. These parallel patterns are institutionally compatible, but the business statistics do not identify actual KIC tenants and therefore do not show that sectoral growth occurred within KICs. New-construction approvals also shifted sharply toward office and consumer-oriented development in 2021–2025; this development-flow evidence is interpreted separately from existing building stock and triangulated with recent registry-based research on Seongsu’s physical transformation. A selective re-analysis of four previously collected interviews provides mechanism-level evidence of short lease horizons, relocation pressure, productive-space requirements, KIC operational mismatch, and thinning supplier networks, without treating these cases as representative of the district. Seongsu is therefore better understood neither as a post-industrial district nor as a straightforward case of reindustrialization, but as a productive palimpsest in which successive forms of industry and urban use are layered unevenly. The case suggests that retaining diverse productive capacity within high-value metropolitan districts is one dimension of urban sustainability. Quasi-industrial zoning provides regulatory flexibility that can accommodate successive forms of production, but flexibility alone does not determine which activities remain under redevelopment pressure. Its strategic planning value therefore depends on how redevelopment incentives, productive-space performance, affordability, and long-term monitoring steer industrial recomposition over time.