| Title |
Mapping Topics and Study Areas in Korean Urban Design Research from 1980 to 2025 |
| Authors |
권주헌(Kwon, Juheon) ; 황동은(Hwang, Dongeun) ; 강범준(Kang, Bumjoon) |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5659/JAIK.2026.42.8.249 |
| Keywords |
Urban Design; Case Study; LDA Topic Modeling; Topic Structure; Meta Analysis |
| Abstract |
Urban design knowledge in Korea has accumulated through empirical studies of specific urban spaces, yet its overall structure has rarely been
examined systematically. This study investigates how research themes in Korean urban design have evolved over time and differentiated
across representative case sites since the institutionalization of urban design in 1980. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling is
applied to 179 KCI-indexed journal articles covering ten representative case sites, identifying eight topics grouped into three clusters based on
the Intertopic Distance Map: urban spatial formation and structure, urban design codes and built environment adjustment, and urban spatial
use and activity. Temporal analysis shows that urban spatial formation and structure remains a stable foundation across all periods. Urban
design codes and built environment adjustment peaks in the 2000s and then declines, while urban spatial use and activity becomes
increasingly prominent, indicating cumulative rather than substitutive changes in research focus. Site-level analysis reveals that each case site
exhibits a distinct cluster profile that broadly relates to its construction period but is not fully determined by it. By quantitatively structuring
more than four decades of accumulated literature, this study provides a framework for tracing the temporal evolution and spatial
differentiation of Korean urban design knowledge. |