• Korean Association of Arts Management
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• no.56
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• pp.243-274
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• 2020

Maker culture in Korea began to receive public attention after the 2012 Maker Fair Seoul. Central and local governments took note of this trend and subsumed makers' culture into its policy domains such as Creative Industry, Creative Cities, 4th Industrial Revolution, and the all-encompassing Creative Economy. Creative Economy was a public policy discourse formed in the public sector for the purpose of overcoming economic depression and revitalizing the economy. Under Creative Industry and Creative Economy, creativity and culture/arts are deemed indispensable but at the same time objectified and alienated as their ultimate value are recognized only as the basis for economic production. In this article, makers' culture itself goes through the same process of objectification and alienation that creativity and culture/arts suffered as the relevant policies were pursued under Creative Economy. The authors attempted to corroborate this through the case of Makercity Sewoon, and found that the Seoul City's urban development plan surrounding Sewoon Plaza proceeded in a direction destructive to the local technological ecosystem and therefore conflicts with the pronounced goal of leading 4th Industrial Revolution by encouraging and nurturing makers' culture. Makercity Sewoon, although packaged in a discourse of Creative Economy and Creative City, betrayed the same problem of alienating arts/culture and labor that the previous discourse showed.