Seoul to display urban planning facilities in 3D, starting with Mia-dong's tiered park

Seoul residents will soon be able to check the exact above- and below-ground positions of urban planning facilities through three-dimensional displays. Overlapping relationships between facilities and spatial boundaries that were difficult to grasp from flat maps and official notices alone will also be viewable in three dimensions.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced Monday it has become the first local government in South Korea to introduce three-dimensional "spatial diagrams" for urban planning facilities, linking them to the Seoul Urban Space Portal and the digital twin platform S-Map (Open Lab) for public access.

Users can search for a target site on the Seoul Urban Space Portal's map service, select urban planning facility information and view the connected 3D diagram through S-Map. The service also lets users toggle on and off the layers showing the actual surface where a park will be built and the boundary designated as an urban planning facility, enabling direct comparison.

In recent years, urban planning facilities such as public offices, sports facilities, parks, roads and railways have increasingly been developed as mixed-use structures sharing above-ground, below-ground and aerial space. Legally required drawings, however, are prepared on a flat, two-dimensional basis, making it difficult to grasp at a glance the height and depth of facilities and how they overlap with one another.

The first site to receive the 3D spatial diagram treatment is Cheungcheung Park — a tiered park — within a redevelopment project in the area of 130 Mia-dong, Gangbuk-gu. Cheungcheung Park is the name given to a three-dimensionally designated urban planning park under the city's urban management plan; it connects the green corridors around Opaesan and Mia Station. Because the park's elevation varies with the terrain and surrounding buildings, the height and boundaries at each location were difficult to determine from conventional flat drawings alone.

The park operates by establishing a superficies right — a right to use a defined space above or below land — over the portions used as parkland while private land ownership remains intact. Through the 3D spatial diagram, users can view on a single screen the spatial division between the land and the park, the varying elevations of the park surface and the boundaries of the urban planning facility designation.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government revised its standards for overlapping and three-dimensional urban planning facility designations in December last year, then drew up guidelines last month for preparing the related records and drawings. It has also standardized the criteria for drafting cross-sections, floor plans and three-dimensional perspective drawings across six categories of mixed-use facility configurations.

The city plans to operate the 3D spatial diagrams initially as supplementary reference materials alongside legally required drawings, then gradually expand their application to facilities — both already designated and to be designated in the future — that are closely tied to residents' daily lives and most in need of three-dimensional verification. The diagrams are also expected to help identify conflicts or hazards between facilities during construction and to reduce boundary disputes between land and facilities after completion.

"We will continuously expand the facilities covered and the information provided so that residents can easily and transparently see how the spaces in their neighborhoods are changing," said Kim Chang-gyu, head of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's Urban Space Bureau.