Abstract
To achieve sustainability suitable to a certain nation's environmental uniqueness in urban planning process, spatial planners nowadays tend to develope the eco-city model applicable to their own country and put it into practice based on the peoples' notion with a long history. Regarding that point this study, as a fundamental approach for building up the Korean eco-city model, aims at reinterpreting the traditional urban planning principles and then drawing out the planning elements from Korean tradition cities from a ecological point of view. To do this, the study adopted the rhetoric analysis method for historic literature including documents and drawings published during $Chos{\breve{o}}n$ dynasty. The results of this study are summarized as follows; First, the planning process in traditional cities can be divided into 3 stages in consistency with the modern urban development procedure such as location, urban infrastructure planning and site construction, so that the ecological planning concept that had been applied to each step got into shape. Second, with modem eco-city view-point 81 components referring to eco-city plan can be extracted from the traditional cities and regrouped by each phase. Third, the planning elements appeared in previous step were set to the eco-composition principles through transforming those elements into 7 basic eco-components consisting of water, plant, energy, earth, resources, sunlight landscape and wind on the basis of the five primary substance philosophy as a Korean traditional cosmic ontology.