The core policy goal of the Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee of the 12th Seoul Metropolitan Council is to stop treating culture, tourism and sports as separate policy areas and instead link them into a single source of urban competitiveness.
That means widening everyday access to culture and sports for residents, building a fair ecosystem in which artists and athletes can grow, and making Seoul a tourist city that visitors want to return to. To that end, the committee plans to push the Seoul Metropolitan Government beyond simply running individual programs well, coordinating them to move together under one vision.
Hwang Cheol-gyu, chair of the council's Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee (People Power Party, Seongdong 4), pledged in an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily on the 1st: "We will not create culture, sports and tourism policies that spend more money, but policies that spend it properly."
Across culture, sports and tourism programs, the committee is pursuing changes to city policy centered on several tasks: reforming support structures that repeatedly favor particular organizations and individuals, strengthening transparency and performance management in subsidy programs, discovering new talent in culture and sports, improving the fairness of open competitions and review committees, conducting substantive performance evaluations after programs end, and evaluating based on residents' perceived benefit and policy impact rather than quantitative output.
Hwang believes Seoul's greatest cultural strength lies in a "diversity" that cannot be defined by any single color. As the nation's capital for centuries, it has drawn people and cultures from across the country, and tradition and modernity, popular culture and fine arts have continuously mixed in the city.
"Now we need to go beyond the achievements of popular culture such as K-pop and drama and also build up the competitiveness of the basic arts that underpin them," Hwang said. "Policies that broaden residents' opportunities to enjoy culture, such as the Seoul Youth Culture Pass and Performance Spring Day, are producing meaningful results."
Going a step further, he said the city needs a system that supports the entire process through which artists create, present and distribute work, and then create the next one. As Hwang defines it, Seoul's cultural competitiveness begins not with a handful of famous content properties but with building a city where new art and new artists can continue to emerge and grow.
For revitalizing the arts ecosystem, he considers "sustainability" the most important factor. In supporting the performing arts, funding production costs each year and then making groups wait for the next open call does little to build self-sufficiency, he said. For the long-term growth of arts organizations, the plan is for public support to lay a foundation for growth by also weighing multiyear funding, audience development and distribution, links to corporate sponsorship and private financing, and stronger management capacity.
He also wants to reduce imbalances between fields within the performing arts, because market viability and revenue structures differ widely by genre even within the same discipline. "The public sector needs to play a more active role, especially for the basic and fine arts, experimental work and emerging artists, which struggle to win sufficient opportunities through market choice alone," Hwang stressed.
Finally, he wants to build a healthy labor market in the performing arts. The sector relies heavily on non-standard work such as freelance and project-based contracts, and income and employment often stop each time a production ends, leaving the livelihoods of creators and on-site staff unstable.
For that reason, he plans to go beyond simply increasing the size of creative grants and examine whether adequate labor costs and creative fees are actually reflected in program budgets, whether standard contracts are being properly observed, and whether creators and their collaborators are all receiving fair compensation.
Hwang also gave his views on the night-time economy drive the city is pursuing.
Seoul is a city where past, present and future coexist. Cultural heritage sites are within 30 minutes of almost anywhere in the city, there are culture streets where content pours out in step with trends, and it is also a city that showcases forward-looking architecture and industry-leading technology.
For that reason, Hwang wants Seoul-style night content designed to make active use of the city's outstanding cultural resources — its proud historical heritage, municipal museums and art galleries, and the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts among them — while incorporating the latest technology.
To that end, the city is preparing to create "culture-hub night economy towns" linking major cultural facilities with neighborhood commercial districts, and to expand night-time cultural programs along with late-night transit and safety infrastructure, building a 24-hour global tourist city where visitors stay longer and culture and local commerce grow together.
About 15 million foreign tourists visit Seoul each year, and their monthly card spending reaches 1.15 trillion won ($780 million). "It is time for Seoul to shift its paradigm to a city where visitors stay longer, experience more and come back," Hwang said.
He wants to break away from a structure in which tourists cluster only at established destinations such as Myeong-dong, Hongdae and Gangnam, and instead uncover distinctive content in areas such as Seongsu, Yongsan, Seochon and Mangwon so that visitors travel to multiple neighborhoods, stay overnight and spend there. Rather than sorting tourists only by nationality or age, he is confident that using AI and digital technology to offer varied roadmaps by visitor taste — K-pop, dining, history and traditional culture, sports and night culture — would raise Seoul's repeat-visit rate.
Ultimately, he wants to turn all of Seoul into a single cultural space overflowing with things to see and do. The aim is to make every corner of the city a stage for artists so that residents and tourists can experience culture anywhere in Seoul — concert halls and art museums, the Han River and public squares, palaces and back alleys — and to provide more opportunities for creation, performance and exhibition.
He also offered advice on the city's sports policy. In 2016, the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee and the Korea Council of Sport for All were merged in order to grow grassroots and elite sports together rather than keep them separate. A decade later, however, it is hard to say that the merger has gone beyond a physical combination to a genuine chemical fusion.
"Rather than dividing grassroots and elite sports into a dichotomy, we should move toward a virtuous-cycle, win-win strategy in which the entire sports sector can grow together," Hwang argued.
The strategy is to first broaden the base of resident participation in sports through grassroots programs, and on that foundation expand opportunities for elite sports professionals to apply their expertise in areas such as coaching, operations and program development.
The effort aims to create a virtuous cycle in which residents' health and the growth of grassroots sports lead to new jobs and activity for sports professionals, which in turn delivers better sports services to residents.
"The city's Tourism and Sports Bureau and the Seoul Sports Council should build a close, strategic policy partnership that designs the future of sports in Seoul together, not just a relationship of executing programs," Hwang added.
He also wants to keep expanding grassroots sports facilities so that anyone can enjoy sports comfortably close to home, and to push more actively for the opening of public sports facilities, including school sports facilities.
Hwang also laid out ideas for developing the cultural resources of his district, Seongdong, into flagship cultural tourism content for Seoul.
He cited Seongsu-dong's strengths as the coexistence within one area of Seoul Forest's natural setting, old factories and red-brick architecture, cafes and shops, exhibition spaces and cultural content companies. "The city is in fact strategically nurturing culture and content industries in response to rising cultural and tourism demand in Seongsu-dong," he said, "and it is also improving the pedestrian environment connecting Seoul Forest and Seongsu-dong."
"Going forward, I want to develop Seongsu from simply a place with many pop-up stores for famous brands into a place where people discover Seoul's new artists and works."
Hwang noted that Seoul Art Week has expanded to the point that 135 visual arts venues across the city took part this year, but said it needs to grow beyond a set period into a permanent platform for distributing and promoting art in Seoul itself.
If the city introduces artists, works, galleries, performance venues and creative spaces based in Seoul to domestic and foreign visitors in multiple languages, and links that to a "Seoul-style art belt" connecting Seoul Forest, the Seongsu culture street and local commercial districts, he said, it could become a model in which arts and culture grow tourism and the local economy together.
