Issue Concentrating second-wave agencies in regional hubs under the five-pole, three-special strategy

Summary

The first wave's even distribution across ten innovation cities and Sejong was persuasive in terms of fairness but left no location with the critical mass needed for agglomeration effects. The analysis suggests that an innovation city's pull depends less on the number of agencies than on the quality of its existing infrastructure and industrial ecosystem. The report therefore proposes linking the second wave to the government's five-pole, three-special strategy, concentrating agencies in five metropolitan hub cities and three special self-governing units and connecting them with surrounding small cities and rural areas. Concentration and dispersion are treated not as opposites but as a hierarchical structure in which capacities formed in hubs spread across each region. Spreading agencies further into small cities without self-sustaining growth bases could lower their functional efficiency and waste resources, whereas non-capital metropolitan cities still retain universities, transport links and living infrastructure worth exploiting.