Korea's First Merged City Needs Citizens to Design Its $14B Future

South Jeolla Province and Gwangju are launching as a single city—the first unified special city in South Korea's history.

This marks a significant experiment in local governance. As concentration in the Seoul metropolitan area intensifies, it represents a new model where regions seek their own survival strategies. The challenge of competing with the capital region while revitalizing local communities and industries is now taking shape as a unified special city.

This experiment comes with another crucial premise: the government has promised approximately 20 trillion won ($14.3 billion) in special support over four years. That's 5 trillion won annually—an unprecedented scale of policy funding for local government.

Until now, local government heads have had limited fiscal discretion. Most budgets are tied to legally mandated expenditures and existing programs. The reality of local administration has been insufficient financial room to attempt new policies.

But 20 trillion won is different. This funding is strategic capital that can design the unified special city's future in new and collaborative ways.

This raises a critical question: Who will design how this 20 trillion won is spent?

Following conventional approaches, bureaucratic organizations and a small group of experts would likely lead policy design. But a new experiment like the unified special city demands a different approach from the start.

I therefore propose a "20 Trillion Citizens' Community Forum"—a policy participation platform where citizens directly discuss and design the unified special city's core funding. This is not merely a procedure for gathering opinions. It is a proposal to create a policy design structure that begins from residents' lived experiences.

The difficulties of raising children in the city, the decline of neighborhood commercial districts, the reasons young people leave their regions—these problems cannot be fully explained through statistics and reports alone. More answers exist within the experiences of citizens living in these communities.

Citizens, more than experts, are the stakeholders of these issues. Local governance can take on new meaning only when citizens' experiences and collective intelligence participate in policy design. The moment citizens become designers rather than subjects of policy, local autonomy can mature further.

The unified special city can become a space to experiment with new social models beyond mere administrative consolidation. It offers an opportunity to simultaneously test balanced development strategies that overcome regional decline, regional economic innovation that nurtures businesses and industrial ecosystems, and social systems centered on people's lives.

The possibility of a "basic society" recently discussed in Korean society could also be tested first at the regional level. A basic society means not simply expanded welfare, but a social structure where everyone is guaranteed a minimum standard of living and fair opportunities.

The unified special city can serve as an important space to test such models as real policy.

Twenty trillion won is not merely a budget. It is a political asset that can simultaneously transform a region's future and the practice of democracy.

If this massive funding is decided behind closed doors, the unified special city experiment will be limited from the start. Conversely, if designed through citizen participation, the unified special city can become a new model for Korean local governance.

South Korea's first unified special city.

This experiment must begin not with administrative boundaries, but with innovation in democratic practice.

A city where citizens become the designers of 20 trillion won—that may be the most revolutionary future the unified special city can demonstrate.