Abstract
This paper reviews the impacts of urban planning regulations on urban form changes based on a case study of the Donwhamunro area, an old quarter in the city center Seoul, Korea. Examining the Zoning and the District Unit Planning(DUP) regulations, applied to the Donwhamunro area from 1962 to 2002, this paper identifies the site's five zones of different characteristics and the change periods of regulations. Within each zone, the paper delineates its urban form changes by measuring the degrees of transformation in streets, lots, buildings and building uses, and by checking the development frequencies in the change periods of regulations. According to what the paper finds, the following three points could be interpreted; 1) Both the Zoning and DUP regulations themselves largely contributed more to the deterioration of the Donwhamunro area rather to the development of the area; 2) Urban planning regulations tended to serve their intended goals of the area's planned maintenance, only when the development conditions, such as public improvements of the roads, were provided by the public sector; 3) As the current Zoning and DUP regulations were mostly intended for development-focused management of the area, they lacked proper considerations for the conservation of the area's old urban form characteristics