The governance of Korea has been transformed during the process of urban redevelopment actions. Before the 1980s, the urban redevelopment actions were learned from the Saemaul Undong (new village movement) starting from the rural areas. In this stage, the redevelopment projects were led by the government with ineffective inter-governmental cooperation and inactive residents’ cooperation. Therefore, there is little success in improving housing conditions in low-income residential areas. Instead, it changed the way of thinking, encouraging self-support and voluntary participation in the movement without focusing on slum upgrading. 

To realize urban redevelopment more effectively, South Korea has turned to market forces to carry out profit-oriented urban redevelopment projects since the early 1980s. Taking the Joint Redevelopment Project in Seoul, for example, it adopted a homeowner-construction partnership based on voluntary agreement homeowners and a construction company that is chosen by representatives of homeowners to build high-rise flats and share profits. However, this cooperative governance approach in the actual operation also revealed some problems. On the one hand, the government and the developer took some radical measures to evict the tenants, whose rights and interests were not well protected by law, leading to some fierce conflicts. On the other hand, the symbiotic community relationship between landlord and tenant in the poor community was destroyed, and they became hostile. At the same time, community owners are not guaranteed to benefit from the project. Some investors will buy properties from the original owners before the project starts, and the final benefits of the renovation will flow to professional investors instead of the original owners. 

The poor remains to be poor and are driven to remoter areas, exacerbating urban sprawl and gentrification. Therefore, the Korean government transformed the redevelopment model into an enabling approach encouraging democratic participation. The role of the government has changed ‘from controlling to facilitating, from providing to enabling and from giving to empowering’. Instead of direct intervention in the redevelopment process, the government focuses more on managing legal, regulatory, and economic frameworks so that people, NGOs, CBOs and private sectors could produce housing and related services more effectively. Under the guidance and supervision of the government, there is more active participation of public, private and non-governmental partners at all levels.