Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities Hope and reality of new towns under greenbelt regulation: The case of self- containment or transit-oriented metropolises of the first-generation new towns in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, South Korea Thanousorn Vongpraseuth a , Eun Yeong Seong b , Sungho Shin b , Soo Hyun Kim b , Chang Gyu Choi b, ⁎ a National University of Laos, Dongdok, Vientiane, P.O.Box: 7322, Lao People's Democratic Republic b Graduate School of Urban Studies, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, Republic of Korea ARTICLE INFO Keywords: New town Self-containment Greenbelt Transit-oriented development Seoul metropolitan area ABSTRACT A new town's self-containment under greenbelt regulations is a planner's hope modelled after Howard's historical proposal. A planner chooses whether to increase the new town's size to improve its self-containment or to form satellite-city networks. If the hope is an unattainable goal, a planner in reality should consider mass-transit connection with existing urban centres. The first-generation new towns in Korea can provide an important lesson as they can be categorised into large-sized self-containment towns and mid-sized networked towns, both of which followed transit-oriented developments. By reviewing the historical background and using multilevel multinomial logistic analysis of commuting data, this study confirmed the following results. First, the commuting rate to Seoul from the larger two new towns is no better than from the other three mid-sized towns. Second, networked new towns with the surrounding satellite cities promoted commutes to the periphery, but the rate of automobile usage is high. Finally, as the government invested in improvements of the transit connections, all five new towns achieved the goal of being sustainable regarding transit use. In the automobile age, a planner building a new town under urban containment regulations should embrace the difficulties of achieving a metropolis that is both self-contained and transit-oriented. 1. Introduction Rapidly growing metropolitan areas are seeking new developments to meet the quickly increasing housing demand and prices, whilst trying to prevent urban sprawl. In urban planning history, various developments and regulation tools have been proposed in the direction of sustainable devel- opment to capture these two rabbits. Of these tools, greenbelts and new town developments, which arguably originated with Ebenezer Howard's Garden City at the end of the 19th century, are some of the oldest ideas in modern urban planning and are still represented policy instruments that are accepted by many countries (Amati, 2008; Hall, 1969; Yokohari, Takeuchi, Watanabe, & Yokota, 2000). However, when implementing these two policies simultaneously, it is very difficult to prevent long-commuting from new-towns (Hall, 1969, 1974). Planners are encouraged to increase the size of new towns to a certain level in order to achieve self-containment 1 in the new towns (DCLG, 2006) or to connect them with pre-existing or satellite cities (Kahng, 1996). Howard (1902) conceptually presented both alternatives, but there is little empirical research on whether such possibilities are realistic, making it difficult for modern urban planners to decide on a course of action. If the self-containment of the new communities cannot be guaran- teed, commuting by public transportation would be an alternative to private automobile use. Cervero (1995a, 41) referred to this develop- ment as a ‘sustainable new town’. Several European metropolises in the mid-20th century were able to develop new communities in me- tropolitan areas and link them through public transport (Hall, 2002). Cervero (1995b) found that the new communities of the metropolitan areas on the European continent, compared to the United States and the https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102699 Received 8 November 2018; Received in revised form 19 December 2019; Accepted 15 March 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: cgchoi@hanyang.ac.kr (C.G. Choi). 1 The abstract concept of self-containment of the new towns in some cases refers to a high percentage of job-housing balance or internal commuting (Cervero, 1995); in other cases, the number of non-work-related trips was considered important (Lee & Ahn, 2005). This study focussed only on achieving a high level of internal commuting due to the number of residents in the new towns. Having more than 150,000 residents exceeded the number of non-working trip issues that had been anticipated. Cities 102 (2020) 102699 0264-2751/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T