Teaching
I served as a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Seoul National University, teaching graduate-level courses. The courses focused mainly on urban design methodology and urban data analysis, and were run as lectures and seminars for graduate students in the Architecture major and the Interdisciplinary Program in Urban Design.
Courses
도시설계연구(도시보행): Urban Design Research — Urban Walking
Graduate course, Architecture major · Seoul National University · 2020–2021
An introductory course designed for graduate students in Architecture entering the urban design field for the first time. It introduces the purpose of urban design, how design processes unfold, and current issues in the field, and shows how design, research, spatial programming, and urban planning interlock.
Across the semester, all discussion is organized around a single perspective: the relationship between people’s behavior and the built environment. To make that perspective tangible, the course concentrates on one theme — urban walking — covering how pedestrian researchers observe walking behavior, how they develop indicators to assess pedestrian environments, and how urban design methods, institutions, and policies in turn reshape that behavior.
The main textbook is Hass-Klau, The Pedestrian and the City (Routledge, 2014).
Format
Each week combined a theory lecture, a case presentation, and discussion. Students completed two assignments during the semester.
- Case presentation — Each student selects a representative pedestrian-policy case in Seoul, visits the site in person, and then gives a critical presentation on the policy’s background and their own on-site experience. The assignment is designed so that students directly feel the gap between “policy as written” and “space as experienced.”
- Project — Each student picks one street in Seoul, identifies the urban issues there, and proposes a design response. Evidence is built from site visits, interviews, and public datasets, and physical-space changes are explained through concept drawings or plans. Final presentations are run as a public hearing-style discussion in which students explain their proposals to citizens, so that the proposals are examined from the perspectives of local economy, transportation, public health, culture and tourism, ecology, and social welfare.
Weekly topics and case studies
The table below pairs the theoretical topic of each week with the corresponding field-visit case.
| Week | Topic and content | Case study |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Course introduction — What is urban design? | — |
| 2 | Exploring urban problems and pedestrian issues | — |
| 3 | What do we aim for — the pedestrian-rights movement and the Pedestrian Master Plan | Seoullo 7017, Cheonggyecheon-ro |
| 4 | Who designs — public and private sectors, and the role of urban design | Road diets: Itaewon Antique Furniture Street, Guilro 10-gil in Guro-gu |
| 5 | How to design — policies and design for improving the pedestrian environment | Buildings: Sewoon Sangga, Insa Central Museum, Seoullo Terrace |
| 6 | Pedestrian behavior and environmental analysis (1) — floating population, point observation, survey-based methods | Plazas: Seoul Plaza, Gwanghwamun Plaza |
| 7 | Pedestrian behavior and environmental analysis (2) — de facto population, location data, spatial pedestrian metrics | IoT: Seodaemun Smart Dulle-gil, Smart Hanam Wirye-gil |
| 9 | Urban design and walking (1) — street networks and safety: Neighborhood Unit, Fused Grid System | Crime prevention: Safe-Living Design in Geumho 4-ga, Safe Alleys in Gwanak-gu |
| 10 | Urban design and walking (2) — the car-free city: Woonerf, pedestrian-only streets, Ciclovía | Car-free streets: Insa-dong, Myeong-dong-gil, Gwancheol-dong-gil |
| 11 | Urban design and walking (3) — health promotion / commercial vitalization | Heritage preservation: Hanyang City Wall Naksan section, Pimatgol building guidelines |
| 12 | Urban design and walking (4) — technological change: last-mile and smart mobility | Green transport: Jongno bike lane, Sinchon Public Transit Promotion Zone |
| 15 | Final lecture — what we should do and what we can do | — |
도시설계론: Theories of Urban Design — Traditional and Contemporary
Graduate course, Interdisciplinary Program in Urban Design · Seoul National University · 2020–2021
A course covering the theoretical foundations and research process that students of urban design need in order to grow into researchers in their own right. The underlying premise is that research is a two-way process that continually crosses between phenomena and theory — starting from real urban phenomena to develop theoretical frameworks, and conversely, applying established theory to interpret complex situations. The key mediator of this movement is data, and the principal object of study is the case.
Each session ran in three parts: (1) a topic lecture on the historical background and current issues of the week’s theme; (2) critical student presentations on related cases and literature; and (3) a seminar in which we discussed research methods using cases and data drawn from present-day Seoul. A large portion of the semester was devoted to two-person team projects, in which students chose a site in Seoul, collected and analyzed their own data, and wrote up the work as a magazine-style research report.
Three questions were kept in view throughout the semester:
- What are the core topics urban design has traditionally engaged with?
- How are those topics transformed in the present era?
- And what will the next change be?
This structure is realized in the week-by-week curriculum below, which pairs each lecture topic with a historical case and its present-day counterpart.
| Week | Lecture topic | Topic in urban design | Contemporary change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Classical and contemporary urban design — Baek Jong-won’s Alley Restaurant (TV show) | Realm/Range of Urban Design | Profession |
| 2 | The emergence of urban problems and responses — the 1854 cholera outbreak and the 2020 coronavirus | Defining Problem | Scientific Approach |
| 3 | People on the move — observation, traffic CCTV, the mobility industry | People’s Behavior | Observation Technology |
| 4 | Actors in urban design — public and private, participatory design, DIY, DIT | Actors & Sectors | Governance |
| 5 | Changes in media and in modes of consumption — social media, the sharing economy, platform business | Citizen Participation | Social Media |
| 6 | Public data and personal data — the Household Travel Survey and GPS pedestrian trajectories | Data | Big-data and Research Ethics |
| 7 | Neighborhoods — resident population and de facto population, the compact city | Area | Mid-scale City Plan |
| 8 | What are we planning? — from Radburn and Perry to Seoul and Singapore | Design Feature | Urbanization |
| 10 | The flow of time — the Seoul Museum of History and urban records | Time | Archiving |
| 11 | Urban planning and operation — the sharing city, local content, gentrification | Contents | Urban Business |
| 12 | Contemporary urban design and what comes next — technological innovation, community, nomadic life | Future | Modeling and Simulation |
Selected readings
Representative readings tied to each week’s topic. We read the canonical texts of traditional urban design and continually discussed how they connect to present-day urban challenges.
- Jason Corburn (2009), Toward the Healthy City
- Richard Sennett (2018), Building and Dwelling
- Jan Gehl et al. (2010), Cities for People
- Charles Montgomery (2013), Happy City
- Jeremy Rifkin (2014), The Zero Marginal Cost Society
- Anthony Townsend (2013), Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
- Park, Sohyun et al. (2015), Neighborhood Walking, Neighborhood Planning
- Cho, Eun (2012), Sadang-dong Plus 25
- Dietmar Offenhuber & Carlo Ratti (2014), Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big Data
Student Collaborations
Joint research and projects with students have consistently been a source of mutual growth through the experience of solving difficult problems together. I have worked with many students in advising, co-authoring, and technical mentoring relationships — experiences that continually remind me of the posture of an educator who studies and grows alongside their students.
Bae, Hyeongchan (KAIST) NLP- and LLM-based urban analysis. Co-author (PAKDD 2024, KCC 2024, AESOP 2024).
Lee, Hongju (KAIST) Airbnb trend prediction; LLM-embedding-based time-series modeling. Co-author (ASONAM 2025).
Sonia Sabir (KAIST) LLM-embedding-based regional real estate appraisal. Co-author (PAKDD 2024).
Jang, Keonhee (KAIST) Spatiotemporal urban microeconomic–microclimate data analysis. Co-author (npj Urban Sustainability 2025, in-review).
Invited Lectures · Seminars
Invited lectures and seminars I have given.
- Seoul National University, Department of Architecture — Urban data analysis and design education
- KAIST School of Computing — Urban computing and smart city research
- KOREATECH (Korea University of Technology and Education), Department of Architectural Engineering — Smart cities and AI
- Chung-Ang University, Department of Architecture — Data science and architectural research