'Smoke-Free Apartments' in Seoul: 145 Complexes Launch Resident-Led Smoking Cessation Campaign

Campaign to Create a Smoke-Free Culture with Participation from Residents of 145 Apartments in 25 Districts, Expanding to All Multi-Family Housing
Operation of 'Smoke-Free Promotion Autonomous Committees' by Apartment, Involving Residents and Management Office Committee Members

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] The Seoul Metropolitan Government is expanding the ‘Campaign to Create a Smoke-Free Culture in Multi-Family Housing’?which encourages residents and management offices to voluntarily create a smoke-free environment?to all multi-family housing complexes, starting with 145 complexes. This campaign aims to resolve smoking complaints within apartments and ease conflicts between smokers and non-smokers.

On the 3rd, Seoul announced that among the 3,779 apartment and mixed-use residential complexes in the city, it will first promote a resident-led smoke-free culture campaign targeting 145 multi-family housing complexes that expressed interest in participating. The plan is to expand this campaign to all multi-family housing complexes in the future.

Currently, ‘smoke-free zones in multi-family housing’ have been designated since the 2016 revision of the National Health Promotion Act, requiring consent from more than half of the households. However, when an apartment is designated as smoke-free, only hallways, staircases, elevators, and underground parking lots are managed as smoke-free zones, making it difficult to resolve smoking complaints inside individual units or other areas.

Seoul determined that to resolve ongoing conflicts and complaints caused by smoking, it is necessary to foster a voluntary smoke-free culture based on understanding and empathy through resident participation beyond legal regulations. Accordingly, Seoul planned the resident-participation smoke-free culture campaign in collaboration with local community organizations such as the Seoul Smoking Cessation Support Center.

Notably, this campaign features the operation of a ‘Resident Autonomous Smoke-Free Committee’ for each multi-family housing complex to ensure continuous promotion. Both management offices and residents participate as committee members to devise resident-participation campaign methods tailored to the characteristics of each complex, with Seoul and related organizations supporting their activities.

Additionally, quarterly meetings will be held among the smoke-free promotion committees of the 145 participating complexes to share activity details and provide education on the latest smoking cessation information. The effectiveness of these activities will be evaluated, and exemplary cases of voluntary smoke-free culture creation within multi-family housing will be shared with each autonomous district and all multi-family housing complexes across Seoul.

Smoking prevention education will also be supported for daycare centers, kindergartens, and schools within the complexes. To create a smoke-free environment protecting children and adolescents in multi-family housing, the campaign will be expanded to include participation from children and youth. Through connections with families, it is expected to also encourage smoking cessation among smokers at home.

Starting with this campaign, Seoul plans to continuously promote efforts aimed at protecting vulnerable groups such as infants, pregnant women, and the elderly within multi-family housing, as well as non-smoking residents, from exposure to secondhand smoke.

Park Yu-mi, Director of the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Citizen Health Bureau, said, “As COVID-19 continues, more citizens are deciding to quit smoking for their own and their families’ health. We will actively promote this campaign in cooperation with related organizations to block secondhand smoke exposure to children and others in residential areas and to create a healthy living environment without conflicts through resident understanding and agreement.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.