[The Hwankyung Ilbo] "Man is not an element of nature, but a member who lives with it together. That's why people and nature should coexist. However, the coexistence is not just about creating environmentally friendly areas next to apartments and increasing the installation of renewable energy."

Goyang Mayor Lee Jae-joon attended the "2021 Goyang City Forum" held in KINTEX, Ilsan on the 29th and stressed this while saying "the regeneration of the city and the regeneration of thoughts."

Goyang City will design a new building, which will enter the joint housing district under the banner of coexistence of people and nature, as an environmentally friendly structure that reduces carbon emissions as much as possible by applying solar energy construction.

It also boasts a nature-friendly composition that creates forests alongside six rivers to form wind paths, allowing cool air from rivers to flow into the center of the city and remove fine dust inside. It is also a strategy to draw the coexistence that has preserved the Janghang Wetland as much as possible, which is a carbon storage in the city. Mayor Lee presented specific directions on the same day.

"We exist only bystanders who are not responsible for the environment," he said. Regarding such a background, he said, "The climate problem is still just accepted as a distant future event, and the perpetrator cannot be identified as only one person."

"Now is the time for us to find answers to environmental problems in the underlying structure of the city," he said. It is necessary to separate "city" and "nature" into dichotomies and break away from the current urban design, in which the supplier judges even the appropriate ratio such as a few trees.

The start was seen as choosing "to leave the city to the supplier and remain a consumer of goods" or "to become a citizen for urban reorganization." He stressed that he should not be a passive consumer of the city, but an independent producer who can create the city, and that he has a duty to not only use the city but also to care and cherish it like his own home.

On the concept of "urban regeneration," he/she also expressed his/her view that "it should not be seen as just maintaining old buildings, but as a process of saying goodbye to someone's planned city and reorganizing it with the residents' agreement."

Goyang City Forum, which took its first step in 2019, is a global platform where citizens and experts discuss various problems of the city and find solutions. This year, the theme is ▷ Environment ▷ Urban regeneration ▷ Lifelong learning. It was hosted by Goyang City, co-hosted by Goyang City Management Corporation, and Goyang Jeong Research Institute, and was held for two days (6/29~6/30) both online and offline. 

Regarding the forum, Mayor Lee said, "The three heterogeneous elements of environment, urban regeneration, and education eventually merge into one, the future," adding, "We want to set a new milestone in uncertainty while discussing how to design the future."