Person: Lee, Hyunji
Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice
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Lee, Hyunji
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URBAN DEVELOPMENT
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Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice
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Last updated:October 6, 2025
Biography
Hyunji Lee is an Urban Specialist at the World Bank based in Washington, DC. She works on various urban development projects across regions and leads global analytical works focusing on pressing urban policy issues, such as public space and asset management, healthy cities, result-based financing, among others. Before joining the World Bank, she worked at the United Nations in New York to research sustainable development topics and contributed to the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goal indicators. At the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, she contributed to policy reports on national urban policies and urban green growth strategies, as well as to the OECD regional indicator development. She holds a master’s degree in public administration from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a master’s degree in civil engineering and urban planning from Seoul National University.
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Publication Targeted, Integrated, and Prepared Policy Packages to Address the Urban Heat in Korea: Policy Brief(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-24) Lee, Hyunji; Park, Hogeun; Hasoloan, Jonathan; Chapman, Terri B.; Siri, JoseGlobal warming has dramatically increased the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme heat events, or heatwaves. Exposure to extreme heat presents a wide range of challenges for public health, labor productivity, and economic growth, among other areas, which are often amplified in cities. Globally, recent deadly heatwaves attest to the urgency of the urban heat problem, which is growing with the ongoing expansion of urban populations and the progression of climate change. This policy brief examines the responses of the Republic of Korea to urban heat problems at national and city levels. Korea formally recognized heat as a natural disaster in 2018, which represented a significant milestone in institutionalizing urban heat interventions across various ministries and agencies. Guided by national frameworks, Korean cities, including Busan and Daegu, the two cities presented as cases in this brief, developed and implemented a package of complementary actions, consisting of legislation and planning, small-scale capital investments, and social programs. This comprehensive effort to address the urban heat agenda in Korea contributed to lowering local temperatures, reducing heat-related health costs by US173.22 million dollars, and reducing the heat related mortality rate by 72 percent compared to the counterfactual. The Korean experience can inform World Bank task teams and client cities and countries as they explore feasible entry points for refining and scaling up urban heat interventions in the coming years.Publication Combating Heat in Cities: Operationalizing the Urban Heat Agenda at the World Bank(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-25) Lee, Hyunji; Hasoloan, Jonathan; Park, Hogeun; Chapman, Terri B.; Siri, JoséThis report stems from growing concern about the threat of extreme heat in urban settings and its adverse impacts on health. The team made use of the TIP—that is, the targeted, integrated, and prepared—framework, introduced in the recent "Healthy Cities" report (Lee et al. 2023), to help World Bank task teams explore pathways toward urban heat investments. This study gathered city responses and investigated existing World Bank initiatives to gain an understanding of what had already been done and the potential for future action. The main part of this report reviews the GPURL portfolio from 2012 to 2022, illustrating a spectrum of relevant heat interventions. Recommendations built on these findings highlight opportunities to operationalize urban heat in World Bank investments.Publication Healthy Cities: Revisiting the Role of Cities in Promoting Health(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-18) Siri, José; Lee, Hyunji; Hasoloan, Jonathan; Chapman, Terri B.; Das, Maitreyi BordiaWith most people already living in cities and the global urban population estimated to double by 2050, cities are central to human well-being and sustainable development. Whereas cities reap the economic and social benefits of agglomeration, proximity to services, and innovation, they also face significant health and environmental issues. The presence of urban poverty, complexity of urban systems, rapidity of often-unplanned urbanization, and certainty of unanticipated shocks complicate urban strategies for health and well-being. Indeed, COVID-19 revealed the significant vulnerability of global and urban systems to pandemics and the imminent climate-related impacts. Cities can confront these threats and support communities by integrating healthy city action with other urban development agendas and prioritizing human and ecosystem health in the design and management of urban environments. The Healthy Cities Report aims to provide high-level guidance to practitioners in green, inclusive, and resilient urban development while asserting the essential role of cities in improving human and ecosystem health. It introduces an action-oriented ‘TIP’ Framework for achieving healthy cities with three components: Targeted support, Integrated action, and Preparation for future challenges. It explores three pivotal modern issues—equity, climate change, and COVID-19—as they define the context for urban health policy and practice. The report suggests eight action areas for healthy cities, including adequate housing, public spaces, transportation systems, access to healthcare, water and sanitation systems, food systems, effective institutions, and sustainable funding.Publication The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-02-11) Kaw, Jon Kher; Lee, Hyunji; Wahba, SamehIn every city, the urban spaces that form the public realm—ranging from city streets, neighborhood squares, and parks to public facilities such as libraries and markets—account for about one-third of the city’s total land area, on average. Despite this significance, the potential for these public-space assets—typically owned and managed by local governments—to transform urban life and city functioning is often overlooked for many reasons: other pressing city priorities arising from rapid urbanization, poor urban planning, and financial constraints. The resulting degradation of public spaces into congested, vehicle-centric, and polluted places often becomes a liability, creating a downward spiral that leads to a continuous drain on public resources and exacerbating various city problems. In contrast, the cities that invest in the creation of human-centered, environmentally sustainable, economically vibrant, and socially inclusive places—in partnership with government entities, communities, and other private stakeholders—perform better. They implement smart and sustainable strategies across their public space asset life cycles to yield returns on investment far exceeding monetary costs, ultimately enhancing city livability, resilience, and competitiveness. The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces discusses the complexities that surround the creation and management of successful public spaces and draws on the analyses and experiences from city case studies from around the globe. This book identifies—through the lens of asset management—a rich palette of creative and innovative strategies that every city can undertake to plan, finance, and manage both government-owned and privately owned public spaces.Publication Performance-Based Fiscal Transfers for Urban Local Governments: Results and Lessons from Two Decades of World Bank Financing(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022) Lee, Hyunji; Athar, Sohaib; Steffensen, Jesper; White, Roland; Mahgoub, AyahThe ability of cities and municipalities to effectively deliver infrastructure and services and productively manage built environments and local economies depends on their institutional capabilities, quality of local governance, and financial resources at their disposal. Therefore, a core priority of governments is to strengthen the financial and institutional systems for cities and municipalities to enable them to perform these functions. One tool the World Bank has used to address this challenge over the past two decades is performance-based fiscal transfers to urban local governments - a type of financing mechanism designed to improve institutional and service delivery performance of these local governments. Generally known as ‘Urban Performance Grants’, these are fiscal transfers from a higher level of government conditioned on achieving performance in predetermined areas. The Bank’s Global Practice for Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land has implemented a large financing portfolio of such programs across several countries. This report takes stock of the results and implementation experience of these programs and identifies key lessons and good practices for the design of the next generation of such programs. Based on a review of nine financing programs across seven countries, it shows that they have generally been effective in delivering results in line with their development objectives and have improved the delivery of urban infrastructure and service delivery in their targeted areas. The report concludes by providing guidance on improving the sustainability of these programs within country systems and promoting local action for climate change mitigation and adaptation.