Urban change and local culture: responses to urban renewal in Wangsimni

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Journal of Seoul Studies, 37, pp. 117-153
Institute of Seoul Studies | Seoul | 2009 | ISSN 1225-746x

Urban renewal is a process, which improves quality of life in cities and addresses disparities caused by past urban development at the local level. Yet cities have also become increasingly integrated at the global level. The competition between them influences the way a particular city reacts to pressures and opportunities of globalization. Urban renewal is therefore often instrumentalized by political elites and private investors for improvement of global status of a particular city, which may in turn result in undesired social, economic, environmental or political outcomes at the local level. Seoul is no exception in this regard. This paper deals with the urban renewal in Wangsimni, an old neighbourhood east of the downtown Seoul, in order to study how globalization affects the urban renewal, how urban renewal constrains everyday life in cities, and how the citizens respond to challenges caused by it. In the conclusion the article argues that local culture has been a major source of responses to urban renewal in Wangsimni, although in this particular case the actual outcomes of those responses were far from desired. Urban renewal in Wangsimni namely seems closer to developmentalism, characteristic for Seoul in the past, than to anticipated sustainable development of Seoul in the future.

Source: earticle.net/article/A113855

Cheonggyecheon restoration: bridging old, building new divides in global Seoul

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Urban regeneration in New York, London and Seoul, pp. 216-229
Urban Regeneration Network (eds.)
Pixelhouse | Seoul | 2009 | ISBN 978-89-958897-5-6

The article shows that it is the discourses and policies of globalization that have become not only the motor of urban regeneration, but also the main source of growing social and spatial divides in cities. These divides are even more obvious in globalizing cities such as Seoul. In conclusion the article argue that exclusion of marginalised social groups, which emerges as a consequence of urban regeneration, leads towards declined participation of citizens in the process of urban governance and towards alienation of cities as shared political institutions. Such undesired outcomes of urban regeneration may at the end prevail over its benefits, as the case of the Cheonggyecheon restoration illustrates.

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Poljane reinvented: social cohesion and collective space

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Poljane: extended city centre, pp. 129-137
Ilka Čerpes, Blaž Križnik, Luka Mladenovič, Marko Studen (eds.)
Municipality of Ljubljana | Ljubljana | 2008 | ISBN 978-961-6449-17-5

Sustainable city and new public spaces are the main topics of the latest edition of Europan. The paper argues, however, that the debate about sustainable city and new public space needs to be translated into more operational concepts such as social cohesion, collective space or identity politics in order to become relevant for the future development of the Poljane area, the Europan site in Slovenia, and for the everyday experience of Ljubljana in general.

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Restoration of the Cheonggye Stream in Seoul: global cities and collective space

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Družboslovne razprave, 55, pp. 115-134
Faculty of Social Sciences and Sociological Association of Slovenia | Ljubljana | 2007 | ISSN 0352-3608

The paper explores the broader social background of transformations that public space is undergoing amidst the conditions of transnational co-operation and growing competition among cities. The character of public space in global cities is becoming more homogenous and excluding due to its increasingly instrumental role in urban development. The importance of public space for the formation of a democratic and heterogeneous civil society is thereby being eroded. The paper tries to show how the recent restoration of the Cheonggye stream in Seoul in South Korea has influenced its social role and thus verify the assumption of the excluding nature of public space in global cities. The reasons why Cheonggyecheon is losing its past role of a place where civic society and local cultures were reproduced are summed up in the conclusion.

Source: dlib.si/details/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-MLDLRD3B