Sinchon is crowded with young collegians in that it is home to several universities and a wide variety of cultural venues. Although students seek comfortable places for group studies or club activities, they are not fully content with what Sinchon has to offer. To resolve this problem, the “Sinchon Sharing Zone Project” was pursued by the Seodaemun-gu Office and SpaceCloud.
SpaceCloud is an online service that compiles information of various areas such as meeting halls or cafés. Through a PC, mobile or application program, users can search for areas that they want to rent which are categorized into groups such as study rooms, conference rooms, party rooms or practice rooms. Registration and payment can also be made through the service. In 2014, SpaceCloud was chosen as a share corporate and in January of this year, it became a social venture funded by Naver.
“Providing areas for youths who desperately need them is the core mission of our service,” said Son Kkop-hin, a member of the local-impact team of SpaceCloud. “‘Sinchon Sharing Zone Project’ was initiated to invigorate the city and resolve the problem of lack of space that the 150 thousand students in Sinchon are facing today.”
After going through the renewal process in April, Sinchon was chosen as the starting point of the project since it is the area that symbolizes the youth and suffers from seriously low empty ratio.
“We hired ‘campus-marketers’ of the universities near Sinchon, whose job is to introduce the service.” Son said. “We persuaded owners of the space near Sinchon, Hongik University and Hapjeong to share and register their spaces in the service.”
At the beginning of the project, SpaceCloud held an event for a month of free service to the students and signed a MOU with the Seodaemun-gu Office to connect public and private sharing areas.
“Finally, about 200 space areas near Sinchon, Hongik University and Hapjeong were registered and owners of other areas also showed interest too,” Son marked. “Through the project of making various areas convenient to rent and use, we wish to vitalize the space that are not being used and help owners create additional revenue through this platform.”
Students who have actually rented space through SpaceCloud have shown positive opinions.
“Although there are several dance clubs in school, there are only two dance practice rooms that we could use,” said Ji Seung-yeon, a freshman of College of Social Sciences who is the member of Ewha's l jazz dance club “viEWHAllo.” “As we often failed to sign up for the usage of the school practice room, we had to find a practice room near school and SpaceCloud was very useful in finding and registering practice rooms.”
She said since all the rooms that are available near Sinchon were presented in a single page with multiple pictures, it was easy to choose the area that she preferred. Also, she liked that the system allowed her to compare the prices of each area and pay easily.
“I personally use SpaceCloud a lot and introduce it to others,” Ji said. “I wish the service is advertised widely and used by a lot of students like me who are seeking for spaces.”
SpaceCloud is trying to reflect feedbacks from the users and owners of space through campus-marketers of each school and also by managing the register directly.
“SpaceCloud wishes to become a platform that collects and connects areas all over Korea and we are preparing various projects that can enable spaces to be used sustainably through consulting,” Son said. “Furthermore, we wish to become a service that is best at making unused spaces into useful ones and supplying them. We consider space as a ‘circulating resource’ that focuses on the structure of sharing the ‘value of the land.’”

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