Oxen in the backstreet: Tracing an old rural route within the modern city

This paper presents a research on the urban transformation process in Suwon, South Korea. We focus on Wooman town to analyse the conflict between the old and new street patterns, by using the segment angular choice analysis. The street pattern of the old village retained its organic shape which appeared through a long period of time, but a city scale intervention pushed the mechanism of this original network to an unexpected direction. In the modern block of Wooman, two spatial structures co-exist. On the outer band are high-rise modern buildings along the linear network and on the inner band are low-rise irregular type of buildings and streets. Thus, the old organic network is completely enclosed by the straight urban grids which appeared at later stages. The conflict between the irregularity and regularity caused malfunction and fracture inside the urban block. The syntactic analysis revealed how an excessive number of roads, caused by superimposing two heterogeneous systems, could weaken the efficiency of land use and pedestrian flow in a new setting. For the comprehensive understanding, we collected data from historical documents to trace the periodic change of the area. Then, we observed the current pattern of pedestrian movement and synthesised it with the segment angular choice analysis. At the end, this research illuminated the consequences of imposing a new urban grid on an old irregular street pattern, and suggested how we could reconcile the conflict to humanize the urban environment for the sustainable growth.