• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.521-539
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• 2010

Recently many local governments have carried out dong merger and abolition process to cope with rapidly changing administrative demand and environment. This administrative effort impacts substantially the locational characteristics of the existing dong offices which directly involve in the quality of local community life. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the location pattern of current dong community service centers (formerly, 'dong office') and suggest the optimal locations maximizing spatial accessibility. As an application, we examine the location pattern of the existing dong community service centers in Mapo-gu, Seoul. Moreover, we compare current spatial configurations with the optimally selected locations such as, a Median maximizing spatial efficiency, a Center maximizing spatial equity, and a Centdian exploring compromising solutions regarding the tradeoff between efficiency and equity. The analytical results present that each of dong community service centers was systematically evaluated in terms of spatial efficiency and equity and in general the community service center locations are not spatially optimized with respect to efficiency and equity, compared with the optimal locations.