Synthesizing two empirical studies, this talk highlights digitally-driven re-urbanization of manufacturing and calls for new impact assessment perspectives on this overlooked shift.
Manufacturing has long been spatially segregated from cities due to pollution, noise, and traffic congestion, underlying conventional zoning and environmental impact assessment frameworks that separate industrial from residential and commercial land. Recent evidence from South Korea suggests this segregation is changing. This presentation synthesizes two studies (Park, 2023, Cities; Park, 2024, Technology in Society) on the re-urbanization of manufacturing and its digital drivers. Urban manufacturing shows distinct locational characteristics adapted to dense, mixed-use environments, forming a clear re-urbanization trend (Park, 2023). This return is driven by digitalization, which improves firms' productivity and spatial efficiency, enabling production in confined urban spaces and reshaping locational logic once dependent on vast land (Park, 2024). Clean production also predicts urban location, though current digitalization levels show no direct link to it, warranting continued observation. Despite this empirically observed return, impact assessment and urban planning remain focused on excluding industry from cities, lacking tools to assess new cumulative effects in dense settings. This presentation introduces this paradigm shift to the impact assessment community and proposes new perspectives for managing industry within urban sustainability transitions.
Associate Professor, Dept. of Urban Planning, Gachon University, South Korea. Researches sustainable urban industrial space and IA on industrial location.