The Cultural Politics of Urban Development in South Korea

The Cultural Politics of Urban Development in South Korea
Author: HaeRan Shin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-03-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0429516134

This book analyses the cultural politics of urban development in Gwangju, South Korea, and illustrates the implementation of state-led arts-based urban boosterism efforts in the context of political trauma and the desire for economic growth. The book explores urban development that is complicated by the recent history of democratic uprising in Gwangju, and it examines the dichotomy between cities as growth machines and progressive metropolises. Actor-oriented qualitative research methods are used to show how culture and economies can evolve from territorial conflicts. The author argues that the quest for both growth and social justice can coexist in intertwined ways and create urban development. Moreover, recent events in Gwangju, such as the May 18 Democratic Uprising and massacre, are shown to act as a backdrop for state-led urban boosterism and desire for economic growth at the same time as depicting a resistance to state-corporate marketing plans, which culminates in the eventual emergence of relatively coherent places-of-memory. These convergences and divergences are comparable to the urban boosterism characteristic of Western cities. The book contributes to the dialogue surrounding geography, urban studies, and postcolonial urban development, and will be of interest to academics working in these fields as well as human geography, planning, urban politics and East Asian studies.

The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy

The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy
Author: Carl Grodach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-12-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136201785

The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy brings together a range of international experts to critically analyze the ways that governmental actors and non-governmental entities attempt to influence the production and implementation of urban policies directed at the arts, culture, and creative activity. Presenting a global set of case studies that span five continents and 22 cities, the essays in this book advance our understanding of how the dynamic interplay between economic and political context, institutional arrangements, and social networks affect urban cultural policy-making and the ways that these policies impact urban development and influence urban governance. The volume comparatively studies urban cultural policy-making in a diverse set of contexts, analyzes the positive and negative outcomes of policy for different constituencies, and identifies the most effective policy directions, emerging political challenges, and most promising opportunities for building effective cultural policy coalitions. The volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth engagement with the political process of urban cultural policy and urban development studies around the world. It will be of interest to students and researchers interested in urban planning, urban studies and cultural studies.

On the Margins of Urban South Korea

On the Margins of Urban South Korea
Author: Jesook Song
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-11-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1487517777

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.

Korean Workers

Korean Workers
Author: Hagen Koo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501731777

Forty years of rapid industrialization have transformed millions of South Korean peasants and their sons and daughters into urban factory workers. Hagen Koo explores the experiences of this first generation of industrial workers and describes its struggles to improve working conditions in the factory and to search for justice in society. The working class in South Korea was born in a cultural and political environment extremely hostile to its development, Koo says. Korean workers forged their collective identity much more rapidly, however, than did their counterparts in other newly industrialized countries in East Asia. This book investigates how South Korea's once-docile and submissive workers reinvented themselves so quickly into a class with a distinct identity and consciousness. Based on sources ranging from workers' personal writings to union reports to in-depth interviews, this book is a penetrating analysis of the South Korean working-class experience. Koo reveals how culture and politics simultaneously suppressed and facilitated class formation in South Korea. With chapters exploring the roles of women, students, and church organizations in the struggle, the book reflects Koo's broader interest in the social and cultural dimensions of industrial transformation.

Making Cultural Cities in Asia

Making Cultural Cities in Asia
Author: June Wang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317535839

This book examines the vast and largely uncharted world of cultural/creative city-making in Asia. It explores the establishment of policy models and practices against the backdrop of a globalizing world, and considers the dynamic relationship between powerful actors and resources that impact Asian cities. Making Cultural Cities in Asia approaches this dynamic process through the lens of assemblage: how the policy models of cultural/creative cities have been extracted from the flow of ideas, and how re-invented versions have been assembled, territorialized, and exported. This approach reveals a spectrum between globally circulating ideals on the one hand, and the place-based contexts and contingencies on the other. At one end of the spectrum, this book features chapters on policy mobility, in particular the political construction of the "web" of communication and the restructuring or rescaling of the state. At the other end, chapters examine the increasingly fragmented social forces, their changing roles in the process, and their negotiations, alignments, and resistances. This book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers concerned with cultural and urban studies, creative industries and Asian studies.

Pursuing Sustainable Urban Development in North Korea

Pursuing Sustainable Urban Development in North Korea
Author: Pavel P. Em
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2024-07-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1040109489

This volume employs an urban lens to provide a critical analysis of the North Korean style of sustainable urban development in the face of severe sanctions and a scarcity of vital resources. With a focus on five major areas—population, economics, architecture, urban planning, and culture—the authors examine the preconditions that led to the emergence of ideas related to urban sustainability, assess and reassess the trends in sustainable development brought about by market forces, and recommend paths for their further intensification. Since this work covers a variety of topics, ranging from geomancy and social control to economic issues and green architecture (both locally and in comparison with European post-socialist cities and South Korea), it will point to lessons that other countries could learn from. This book will be a valuable reference for scholars, researchers, students, and the general public who have a regional interest in North Korea, Korean unification, and East Asia as a whole; and/or a topical interest in urban studies, urban sustainability, and post-socialist urban transformation.

Displacement, Mobility, and Diversity in Korea

Displacement, Mobility, and Diversity in Korea
Author: Min Wha Han
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2024-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040150403

This book examines the transformation and the dynamic reconfiguration of borders within Korea through inter/trans-disciplinary approaches. The book offers a comprehensive synthesis for the changing geo-political, cultural, and economic dynamics among Korea’s diasporas by applying the theme of “diasporas within homeland” as a theoretical lens. While diaspora remains a central theoretical perspective (often highlighting “out of home” experiences), the volume turns its gaze inward, “within homeland,” to trace internal displacement, mobility, and diversity in Korea. In addition, this volume brings diverse scholarly traditions that bridge the diaspora with a wide range of theoretical lenses and methodological approaches, such as intercultural sensitivity and adaptation, acculturation, ideology critique, alienation, national memory, and postcolonialism. The book further explores the possibilities of coalition-building between/among diverse communities. As a study of the notion of Korean identity and citizenship, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Korean society and culture, Asian diasporas, cultural anthropology, and ethnicity.

Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia

Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia
Author: Tina Burrett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2023-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000859398

This handbook explores trauma in East Asia from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, assessing how victims, perpetrators and societies have responded to such experiences and to what extent the legacies still resonate today. Mapping the trauma-scape of East Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, including anthropologists, historians, film and literary critics, scholars of law, media and education, political scientists and sociologists, this book significantly enhances understandings of the region’s traumatic pasts and how those memories have since been suppressed, exhumed, represented and disputed. In Asia’s contested memory-scape there is much at stake for perpetrators, their victims and heirs to their respective traumas. The scholarly research in this volume examines the silencing and distortion of traumatic pasts and sustained efforts to interrogate denial and impunity in the search for accountability. Addressing collective traumas from across East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam), this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Trauma and Memory Studies, Asian Studies and Contemporary Asian History more broadly.

Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities

Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities
Author: Anne Lorentzen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2012-02-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113663634X

The volume highlights ongoing changes in the political economy of small cities in relation to the field of culture and leisure. Culture and leisure are focal points both to local entrepreneurship and to planning by city governments, which means that these developments are subject to market dynamics as well as to political discourse and action. Public-private partnerships as well as conflicts of interests characterise the field, and a major issue related to the strategic development of culture and leisure is the balance between market and welfare. This field is gaining importance in most cities today in planning, production and consumption, but to the extent that these changes have drawn academic attention it has focused on large, metropolitan areas and on creative clusters and flagship high culture projects. Smaller cities and their often substantively different cultural strategies have been largely ignored, thus leading to a huge gap in our knowledge on contemporary urban change. By bringing together a number of case studies as well as theoretical reflections on the cultural political economy of small cities, this volume contributes to an emerging small cities research agenda and to the development of policy-relevant expertise that is sensitive to place-specific cultural dynamics. In taking this approach, the volume hopes to contribute to emerging research on culture and leisure economies by developing a differentiated spatial dimension to it, without which sustainable urban strategies cannot be developed. This book integrates perspectives of economic development with questions of governance and equity in relation to the fields of culture and leisure planning and development. This book should be of interest to students and researchers of Urban Studies and Planning, Regional Studies and Economics, as well as Sociology and Geography.