On The Margins Of Urban South Korea

This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of "core location," a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and "Asia as method," a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways in which a place can be studied in an increasingly globalized world. Examining cases set in the Jeju English Education City, anti-poverty and community activist sites, rural areas home to large numbers of migrant women, and Korea’s Chinatowns, greenbelts, and textile factories, the collection develops a relational understanding of a place as a constellation of local and global forces and processes that interact and contradict in particular ways. Each chapter also explores multiple modes of urban marginality and discusses how understanding them shapes the methods of academic praxis for social justice causes and decolonialized scholarship. This book is the outcome of several years of interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogues among scholars based in geography, architecture, anthropology, and urban politics.

This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of "core location," a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and "Asia as method," a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways in which a place can be studied in anthe increasingly globalizeding world. Examining cases set in Chinatown, the Jeju English Eeducation Ccity, rural areas of migrant wives, greenbelts, anti-poverty and community activist sites, places of community activism, rural areas home to large numbers of migrant women, and Korea's Chinatowns, greenbelts, and textile factories in Korea, each chapterthe collection develops a relational understanding of a place, in which a place is analyzed as a constellation of local and global forces and processes that interact and contradict in particular ways. Each chapter also explores multiple modes of urban marginality, and discusses how understanding them shapes the methods of academic praxis for social justice causes and decolonialized scholarship. This book is the outcome of several years of interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogues among scholars based in geography, architecture, anthropology, and urban politics.

"On the Margins of Urban South Korea, seeks to provide rich and illuminating accounts of key sites of urban, national, and transnational development in contemporary South Korea. It is an outcome of long-term collaboration and dialogue among interdisciplinary Korean Studies scholars from architecture, anthropology, and geography. The seven key sites are the Education City Project in Jeju; the Chinatown Project in Incheon; Saemaul Undong(New Village Movement)in Pohang; Alternative Korean Wave in Bongcheon-dong, Seoul; Pine Tree Hill Neighbourhood Activism in a southern port city; sites of struggles against greenbelt deregulation in the Seoul Metropolitan Region; and the garment worker movement in Changshin-Dong, Seoul. The volume offers an original focus on key sites or, what the editors and contributors call core locations, and aims to articulate the significance of knowledge based in a particular location. It is inspired by two inter-connected notions: "core location (haeksim hyunjang)," a place with the lived experience of multiple layers of marginality in colonial history with an emphasis on the reseacher's praxis and rootedness in the location; and "Asia is Method," a means of thinking about an area, especially the non-western, not simply as an object of western interest but as a tool to generate frameworks that enable decolonization of epistemological hegemony. This volume aims to further develop the relevance of core location and Asia as Method in social science, targeting both an Anglophone readership and an audience in East Asia."--

Global Urbanism is an experimental examination of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘urban’. What does it mean to say that we live in a global-urban moment, and what are its implications? Refusing all-encompassing answers, the book grounds this question, exploring the plurality of understandings, definitions, and ways of researching global urbanism through the lenses of varied contributors from different parts of the world. The contributors explore what global urbanism means to them, in their context, from the ground and the struggles upon which they are working and living. The book argues for an incremental, fragile and in-the-making emancipatory urban thinking. The contributions provide the resources to help make sense of what global urbanism is in its varieties, what’s at stake in it, how to research it, and what needs to change for more progressive urban futures. It provides a heterodox set of approaches and theorisations to probe and provoke rather than aiming to draw a line under a complex, changing and profoundly contested set of global-urban processes. Global Urbanism is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students in geography, sociology, planning, anthropology and the field of urban studies, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines and practices which converge in the study of urbanism. Chapter 36 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429259593

In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea’s contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status. Lett shows that Koreans have adapted traditional ways of asserting high status to modern life, and analyzes strategies for claiming high status in terms of occupation, family, lifestyle, education, and marriage.

The inter-disciplinary contributors to Developmentalist Cities offer a richly nuanced and critical account of how the urban has been integral to East Asian developmentalism, and, vice versa, how developmentalism has profoundly shaped the nature of the urban in East Asia.

Seoul, as one of Asia’s rising global cities, has been a place where enormous changes in politics, industry, and culture have taken place over the last five decades. This book explores the new urbanism in Seoul from the perspective of global political economy, focusing on the contexts in which the city has witnessed the transformation of its population structure, such as the rise of the global urban middle class and the city’s increased nodal function in commodity chains. The burgeoning signs of Seoul’s status as a global city are discussed in terms of transnational tourism and the frequency of study abroad, the immigrant community, and cross-border cultural flows. Examining the labour structures within the city, economic growth policy, the role of advanced information technology, and neoliberal urban development, the authors also examine the local response in the city to its emerging status. A study of the development of the Korean capital and its deep embeddedness in the world economy, Seoul, Korea’s Global City will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and economics with interests in political economy, urban studies and Asian studies.

This wide-ranging and state-of-the-art new edition reviews the classic contributions to understanding modern and post-modern cities, and is comprehensively updated to take account of the issues and concepts at stake in 21st century urban theory.