Yongsan-gu wins presidential award at 2026 Korea Public Design Awards for resident-led alley safety project

Yongsan-gu in Seoul won the Presidential Award — the highest honor — at the 2026 Korea Public Design Awards ceremony held Friday at Culture Station Seoul 284, recognized for its Hangang-ro-dong Lifestyle Safety Design project.

Hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and organized by the Korea Craft and Design Foundation, the awards jury praised the district for using a resident-participation living lab to identify everyday problems and resolve them through practical designs that residents could directly experience.

Particular attention was paid to the district's first-of-its-kind lifestyle safety design solutions and its problem-solving model that combined resident participation with collaboration among local government, police and private companies — a framework seen as replicable in other communities.

Twenty-one lifestyle safety solutions found with residents in the alleys

The project area covers a mix of residential and commercial zones in the aging, low-rise neighborhood around 40 Hangang-ro 3-ga. The area had long struggled with concerns about crime as well as noise, smoking, litter and pedestrian safety.

Yongsan-gu used its own resident-participation living lab to walk the alleys firsthand and gather input from residents, merchants and visitors. When residents flagged everyday inconveniences, local government officials, police and private-sector partners pooled their expertise to analyze the causes and develop workable solutions.

Through that process, the district carefully observed how residents behaved and used public spaces, reviewed crime data alongside on-site conditions, and developed and applied a total of 21 lifestyle safety designs. The three most notable are national firsts: the Safety Corner, the Owl Manner Notifier and the Rainwater Sharing Tank.

Designs that open sightlines, relay complaints and tidy the living environment

The Safety Corner was conceived to address vehicles, motorcycles and stacked goods that block sightlines at alley intersections. The idea came from recognizing that obstacles at corners make it hard for pedestrians and drivers to spot oncoming vehicles or cyclists in time. The design encourages people to keep corners clear, securing sightlines and prompting drivers to stay alert, thereby improving pedestrian safety.

The Owl Manner Notifier is a device aimed at reducing friction between residents and nearby businesses over noise and smoking. Rather than confronting someone directly, a resident can press a button from a distance, triggering a voice announcement and a change in lighting color to draw attention. Even without the button being pressed, a sensor activates the voice announcement when ambient noise exceeds 45 decibels.

This allows residents to communicate their discomfort without the burden of a face-to-face confrontation, while nudging merchants and visitors to reflect on their behavior and be more considerate of those around them.

The Rainwater Sharing Tank was inspired by residents' habit of collecting rainwater to water potted plants. The containers used to store the water attracted insects, produced odors and left the surrounding area looking untidy — conditions the district determined could foster a negative perception of alley upkeep and pose broader safety concerns if left unaddressed.

The district developed a sharing tank connected to existing downspouts to collect rainwater and filter out leaves and other debris through a mesh screen before reuse. The design preserves the eco-friendly habit of rainwater reuse while improving hygiene and the visual quality of the alley, keeping it a well-maintained living space.

All three designs share a common thread: they pack the functions residents need into small spaces and installations. Through precise interventions — clearing corner sightlines, relaying noise complaints without direct contact and improving rainwater use — the project works to reduce everyday hazards and conflict.

Beyond installing physical fixtures, the district also tackled the problem of vehicles crowding narrow alleys by asking major navigation service providers to apply detour routes, which were subsequently reflected in actual routing. The solution went beyond improving the physical environment to address how drivers move through the area.

The project's significance lies in its participatory structure — listening to residents on the ground and resolving issues together with relevant agencies — its practical designs grounded in real behavioral patterns, and its scalability for adaptation to local conditions elsewhere. Because the problem-solving process itself, through the resident-participation living lab, can be shared alongside the individual installations, the project holds value as a standard public design model that can spread nationwide.

The Safety Corner and the Owl Manner Notifier have in fact already been adopted in other parts of the country. Solutions developed in Hangang-ro-dong are now being put to use in communities facing similar everyday problems.

Yongsan-gu plans to systematize the rationale and application methods behind each design and share its experience of resident participation and inter-agency collaboration, laying the groundwork for other communities to adapt the model to their own living environments.

"The greatest achievement of this project is that small voices from residents led to real change, and that residents and local government worked together to solve neighborhood problems," Yongsan-gu District Mayor Kim Kyung-dae said. "It is all the more meaningful that we have developed this into a public design model that other communities can draw on."

"Going forward, we will continue to listen to residents and work to ensure that public design plays a genuine role in resolving everyday inconveniences and improving quality of life," Kim added. "From large-scale urban change to small daily discomforts, we will miss nothing as we build Yongsan into an 'attractive future city' where everyone can live safely and comfortably."