Beyond the Compact City Paradigm: Environmental Performance and Socio-Economic Vitality in a Shrinking Non-Metropolitan City

This study serves as an exploratory inquiry into the validity of the Compact City paradigm, a legacy of the high-growth era, as a universal standard for non-metropolitan cities confronting the dual pressures of depopulation and climate change. Building upon environmental scenario configurations established in prior research, this study makes an original contribution by introducing a coupled socio-economic simulation using CommunityViz, thereby enabling a quantitative assessment of the trade-off between environmental performance and urban carrying capacity that has not previously been attempted for this study area. Gangneung, a non-metropolitan city in South Korea exhibiting sustained demographic decline, serves as the study site. Three land-use scenarios (Business as Usual, Distributed Urban Development, and Compact City) were simulated and compared using environmental outputs from the InVEST Urban Cooling Model alongside socio-economic metrics generated through CommunityViz. The analysis revealed a potential trade-off between environmental performance and socio-economic vitality. The Compact City scenario excelled in heat mitigation but supported a comparatively lower population and employment capacity. Conversely, the Distributed Urban Development scenario, despite having an identical urbanization footprint, accommodated the highest population and number of commercial jobs through its polycentric spatial structure, suggesting that spatial distribution, rather than density concentration, may better serve urban carrying capacity in a depopulation context. Despite its single-case scope and the absence of statistically definitive evidence, this study provides a conceptual basis for rethinking non-metropolitan urban forms and suggests the possibility that strategic spatial flexibility may offer a more adaptive approach than forced compaction for cities in the post-growth era.