Rethinking Prerequisites to Land Readjustment: A Review of South Korean Experiences

Abstract Land readjustment (LR) is an urban development technique that reshapes irregular land parcels to regular ones and provides infrastructure. The primary benefit of LR lies in its economic advantages of enabling self-funded public infrastructure installation. Despite such advantages, limited academic attention has been paid to the preconditions necessary for implementing LR. Hence, the objective of this research is to investigate prerequisites within sociopolitical and macroeconomic contexts. This research employed archival research methodology by analyzing the profile of LR projects. South Korean LR is employed as a case study to illustrate the prerequisites because it has gone through a full cycle including introduction, prevalence, and cessation. The results showed that the implementation of LR was driven by its embedded economic rationale, but it was enabled by the following three prerequisites: (1) land institutions, (2) urban policy, and (3) favorable land markets. This research contributes to urban planning and development literature by identifying the key prerequisites for implementing LR as a self-financing urban development instrument.