Suwon City Mandates 3D Landscape Review for Buildings Over 5,000 Square Meters

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Seo Dong-young] Starting this month, buildings with an area of 5,000 square meters or more within Suwon must undergo 3D landscape review as a mandatory process.

Suwon City announced on the 1st that it will implement the '2020 Suwon City Landscape Review Operations Manual' this month, which supplements shortcomings in the Landscape Committee that has been operating for systematic urban landscape management.

As a result of the city's investigation into the operational status of landscape-related committees, the city's Landscape Committee conducted a total of 180 landscape reviews over four years: 33 cases in 2016, 34 in 2017, 62 in 2018, and 51 in 2019.

However, problems were identified including poor preparation of landscape review documents, non-compliance with preliminary consultations, and lack of post-management.

In response, the city prepared a building landscape checklist reflecting major improvements and item-by-item explanations (guidelines), and established a manual that specifically details methods for preparing landscape review documents.

In particular, to overcome the limitation that it is difficult to assess situations based solely on perspective drawings or surrounding photographs presented in landscape review documents, the city decided to implement 3D landscape review for buildings of 5,000 square meters or larger.

By utilizing the three-dimensional spatial information system established by the city, the landscape review process can be conducted more vividly to examine the surrounding conditions caused by buildings on-site.

Additionally, vague language in the existing checklist and landscape review document preparation methods has been made more concrete to prevent poor preparation.

The checklist specifically details matters to be reviewed in fields related to landscape, including building form and appearance, materials, exterior space, road structures, night lighting, color, building arrangement, and outdoor signage.

Through common guidelines in the landscape review guideline, the understanding of landscape among citizens, committee members, and relevant civil servants will be improved, and major review points are presented in an easy-to-understand format to reduce trial and error.

Post-management is also being strengthened. An implementation management system will be introduced to monitor and conduct post-evaluation from the landscape review stage through building permit application, commencement report, and usage approval stages to verify whether improvements have been reflected.

The city expects that with the introduction of the manual, not only review committee members and relevant civil servants but also citizens will be able to enhance their understanding of the landscape review process and content.