• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.512-534
• /
• 2016

This paper is to see what appears to be an economic crisis as urban crisis, to explore its emerging process and its major distinctive figures in the context of S. Korea, and to consider alternatives to overcome such an urban crisis. For this purpose, it first tries to show that the capitalist economic development (i.e. capital accumulation) has been stimulated and driven largely by extending investments into built environments. Then it analyzes how crises of overaccumulation, coupled with other crises such as the IMF crisis in 1997 and the financial crisis in 2008 which have been brought about by serious impacts of foreign financial capitals working on the global level, have led to accumulating of huge surplus reserves within both big companies and the central government on the one hand, increasing tremendously debts of households as well as government and private companies on the other. In particular, the debt crisis seems to be accelerated by fictitious capital generated through government's financial strategies to promote both supplies and demands in housing and property markets. There seem several ways of overcoming the urban crisis spiraled around accumulating surplus capital and increasing financial debt; raising real income, moderating investments into built environment, and increasing inputs into the fields of technology and well-being. In order to open up these ways, it is concluded, recent urban movements in terms of the right to the city are required not only to make the government and capital to do so, but also to realize interest of urban people who have produced such surplus but who are suffering from the debt crisis.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
• /
• v.39 no.1
• /
• pp.70-87
• /
• 2004

This paper is to conceptualize 'new urbanization' on the basis of a certain possibility of 'sustainable urbanization' in the capitalist society, while admitting some criticism on its possibility. For this purpose, first of all, this paper points out some economic and environmental difficulties in the Fordist regime of accumulation and the developmentalist strategies which have promoted the modem urbanization in the industrial society. Then, this paper examines the concept of 'sustainable development' which has been suggested to manage such problems in modem industrial cities, and explores its limitation that the application of this concept has been usually confined to some ex post facto - that is, weak sustainable development - strategies to resolve urban environmental problems. Finally, in order to overcome these problems both of developmentalism and of weak sustainable development, this paper conceptualize strong sustainable development for new urbanization and suggest urban environmental strategies for strong sustainable cities.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
• /
• v.50 no.4
• /
• pp.431-449
• /
• 2015

Philosophical roots and discussion frames of neoliberalism are very heterogeneous and approaches to neoliberalism including anarchism, post-neoliberalism also take diverse stances. Even if neoliberalism is losing legitimacy and stability through the global financial crisis, 2008, spatial perspective is becoming more and more important as neoliberalism constantly evolve with creating immense variations. Especially, urban space has become strategically crucial arenas as spatio-temporal strategies and generative nodes for reproduction of neoliberalism. Urban enclosure plays a key role in the specific process of neoliberal urbanization as a kind of capitalist formal and real subsumption. Contemporary capitalism continuously has been sustaining the accumulation by dispossession based on urban enclosure through reshaping the primitive accumulation mechanism. These enclosures are embodied by the change of public use concept from public ownership to economic benefits and public-private taking for private capital. Urban enclosure promotes reification deepening the separation and alienation of workers from the means of production and survival, and interdiction from free place appropriation, transformation of urban economy to patrimonial forms. Also it is pervasive in a daily life space and everyday experience in the city, and private tangled social rules dominate public space and the publicity of space.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.53
• /
• pp.193-218
• /
• 2018

In this essay, I examine the interactions of chronotopes in the narrative of Gangnam Blues, a film written and directed by Yu Ha and released in 2015. Bakhtin's chronotope, the connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in literary narratives, provides the background for the representability of events and becomes the organizing center for the events. Each chronotope offers a different way of acting, interacting and understanding experience, and chronotopes can interact with each other in a single text or between the reader and the represented world. Gangnam Blues is a gangster movie, first of all, showing an individual's illusion of an unlimited possibility for achieving wealth and power. At the same time, the film describes the government's project to transform Gangam, a rural area in the south of the Han, into a new downtown and residential area for Seoul. As the world in the narrative and the world of the author or the reader are all chronotopic, we can see the interactions of chronotopes between the narrative of an individual and the historical narrative, as well as between the narrative about the beginning of Gangnam and the audience's perception of the present Gangnam. In this film, the main character's ambition is shown as part of the social desire for rapid economic achievements in the 1970s, along with high social mobility. The social desire can be explained as envy, as it is fueled by social comparisons and competitions. The main character's pursuit of money and power through the possession of Gangnam land overlaps with the envious desire for the present Gangnam shared by many. The individual's exceptional ambition and violence are not fully examined in this text. Moreover, the film's dependence on the feelings of envy to represent the individual's choice and violence can be a symptom of the lack of critical distance from social desire and envy.