Ministry of the Interior and Safety to Establish New 'Regional Hub Communication and Cooperation Spaces' in Cheongdo, Gyeongbuk and Miryang, Gyeongnam

New Communication and Cooperation Space 'Cheongdo-gun Health Center'

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] Health centers in regions struggling with population decline and closed university buildings are being reborn as hubs of community innovation symbolizing communication and cooperation among local residents.

On the 13th, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety announced that Cheongdo-gun in Gyeongsangbuk-do and Miryang-si in Gyeongsangnam-do were finally selected in the 'Creation and Operation of Communication and Cooperation Spaces by Regional Hub' contest. The 'Communication and Cooperation Spaces by Regional Hub' is a project promoted by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety since 2018, transforming idle local spaces into community innovation hubs where ordinary residents, public-private sectors, industry, and academia collaboratively identify and seek solutions to local issues in daily life.

The communication and cooperation spaces in Cheongdo-gun, Gyeongbuk, and Miryang-si, Gyeongnam, will be created with an investment of 18 billion KRW over three years, including metropolitan and basic local government funds. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety's national budget will be used for projects expanding resident participation in solving local problems, while local governments' own budgets will be used for space creation.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety plans to work with the respective local governments to enact ordinances, create spaces, and recruit operators, and will first promote resident participation projects in a preliminary operation mode from the first half of the year, with official openings scheduled for the first half of 2024. Cheongdo-gun in Gyeongbuk will repurpose the Cheongdo-gun Health Center, which served as the first cohort isolation building during COVID-19 and has long played a central role in local public health, as a symbolic place for overcoming infectious disease crises. Miryang-si in Gyeongnam plans to renovate part of the former Miryang University, which closed in 2005 and has been abandoned in the old downtown area for 16 years, into a hub space for communication and cooperation among local residents.

Choi Hoon, Director of the Local Autonomy and Decentralization Office, stated, “Regional decline due to population decrease is a national task that the central government and local governments must solve together, and the core of the response lies in the practical participation of local communities and the activation of cooperation across various fields.” He added, “Taking this first selection of population-declining areas as an opportunity, we will actively support the emergence of new types of community innovation communication and cooperation spaces, such as suburban rural types and idle university building types.”

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