Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province announced Thursday they are moving forward with a joint regional growth strategy — the "Daegyeong Five-Pole Three-Special Development Strategy" — aimed at positioning the Daegu-North Gyeongsang area as a national growth axis to rival Greater Seoul.
The initiative translates the central government's "Five-Pole Three-Special National Balanced Growth Blueprint," announced last year, into a concrete regional action plan.
The two local governments aim to submit the completed strategy to the Presidential Commission on Local Era by November.
While the government blueprint sets the broad national policy direction and support framework, the development strategy serves as the operational plan the region itself fills in — identifying its own growth engines and joint cooperation priorities.
The plan covers a five-year period from 2027 to 2031 across three areas — economic zones, lifestyle zones, and fiscal and administrative systems — with the goal of attracting private investment, creating jobs, drawing in population and improving living conditions across Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province.
The central government has been refining the Five-Pole Three-Special framework not merely as a regional resource-distribution policy but as a "locally led growth" strategy in which regions design their own development paths and contribute to national growth.
In anticipation of that shift, the two governments formed a joint Daegu-North Gyeongsang Cooperation Task Force in August 2025, before the policy was fully launched, to identify shared priorities as a single economic and lifestyle zone. The task force identified 18 joint cooperation projects across three broad fields.
The two governments also plan to seek consulting from the Presidential Commission on Local Era, the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology and field experts to strengthen alignment with central government policy and improve implementation.
Lee Sang-su, director general of North Gyeongsang Province's Local Era Policy Bureau, said the province would carefully review the joint projects and flagship inter-regional initiatives identified so far and refine them into actionable strategies aligned with the government's growth-engine and fiscal and institutional support frameworks.
Oh Jun-hyeok, head of Daegu's planning and coordination office, said the city would work to develop a practical and systematic strategy with the next 100 years of Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province in mind, ensuring it translates into tangible results for regional development.
kbj7653@heraldcorp.com
