Exploring Collaborative Governance in Public Spaces: Successes and Setbacks in the Seoul Housing Lab Case

The prolonged underutilisation of publicly-owned urban spaces represents a widespread global challenge, reflecting inefficiencies in resource allocation while contributing to the erosion of community vitality and escalating social expenditure. This study explores the institutional efforts and structural limitations of collaborative governance in managing unused public buildings through the Seoul Housing Lab, a pilot project in South Korea discontinued in 2023. Drawing on a collaborative governance framework, the analysis examines four dimensions: starting conditions, institutional design, facilitative leadership and collaborative processes. Although the project initially adopted a collaborative approach through joint planning between public and private actors, it ultimately failed owing to asymmetrical authority, short-term contracts, financial dependency and shifting political priorities. Reframing the case as a failed experiment, this study reveals how the Lab regressed from a network-oriented model to managerial- and market-based forms of governance. This regression was not a contingent operational failure but a structural outcome rooted in the asymmetric distribution of authority typical of developmental-state contexts, in which collaborative governance is grafted onto a public-sector institutional default. The findings underscore the need for long-term institutional commitment, equitable authority distribution, and sustained political support for collaborative urban space management.