Institutionalizing publicness in urban green infrastructure: A practice-grounded Delphi study of governance and evaluation in the Seoul International Garden Expo

초록

As large-scale garden expositions increasingly function as components of permanent urban green infrastructure, questions about what makes these spaces genuinely public have become pressing yet institutionally unresolved. This study investigates how publicness can be operationalized and institutionalized as a governance framework for public garden expositions, using the Seoul International Garden Expo as a case study. Rather than deriving an evaluation framework deductively from theory, this study employs a practice-grounded, inductive approach: the initial evaluation criteria were developed from the first author's systematic field observation of all 111 gardens, which revealed three structural deficiencies in publicness - (1) physical inaccessibility for mobility-impaired visitors (corresponding to the accessibility dimension of publicness), (2) spatially closed and self-referential garden configurations that impeded relational use (corresponding to control and social interaction), and (3) excessive corporate brand visibility that undermined the visual character of public space (corresponding to image and representational publicness). Field observations were conducted using a structured observation protocol focusing on physical accessibility, spatial configuration, and visual publicness, ensuring consistency and comparability across all 111 sites. These field-derived criteria were subsequently refined through a three-round expert Delphi process. The three-round Delphi process involved nine experts representing public administration, landscape planning, landscape architecture, and garden design. The study analyzes: (1) the structural evolution of the evaluation framework across rounds, (2) patterns of consensus formation on core publicness indicators, and (3) the structural meaning of persistent non-consensus. Findings show that consensus was reached on technical and institutional dimensions - including accessibility standards, information transparency, corporate brand restrictions, and master planning - while persistent disagreement emerged around citizen participation governance and the uniform application of publicness criteria to non-competition gardens. Critically, the divergence over garden type (competition vs. non-competition) was not a methodological anomaly but a structural revelation: it exposed competing interpretations of publicness held by designers, who prioritized creative autonomy, and administrators, who emphasized inclusive governance. This disagreement constitutes a policy decision point - not a failure of consensus - and reflects unresolved tensions in the institutional identity of the expo. This study contributes a practice-grounded, exploratory governance framework for examining publicness in event-based urban green infrastructure. By positioning the Delphi method as an analytical device that not only builds consensus but also reveals where value-based conflict is structurally embedded, the study advances urban green space governance scholarship. The findings offer practical guidance for cities seeking to align short-term cultural programming with long-term public accessibility and inclusiveness in permanent garden landscapes. The Seoul case provides a preliminary methodological reference point for rapidly urbanizing cities in Asia and beyond, where garden expositions are increasingly deployed as instruments of urban greening policy, though further comparative validation across contexts is needed.

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