Presents

Making a ‘New’ ‘Cultural District’ in a World City: Seoul

Speaker

Mihye Cho
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

Abstract

This paper examines the incorporation of cultural policies into world city projects in Seoul. It investigates how social actors take part in and utilise such policy practices based on their own positions and how these practices influence urban spaces. Specifically, it uses the ‘Cultural District’ in Seoul as a case study.

Cultural policies under the world city projects in Asia tend to accentuate cultural authenticity and promote world-standard and cosmopolitan sensitivity in order to sell ‘unique’ cultural products in the ‘global’ market. Such policies affect the way that social actors articulate policy language and present themselves in policy practice in order to foster or restrict certain meanings that could deliver their economic and political interests. In this respect, policy practice is approached here as a concrete occasion in which actors compete for their own self-interests while being affected by social structures and institutions.

In 2003, the Seoul city government announced the possible establishment of a cultural district in the Hong-dae area. As the area is famous for live and dance clubs and street fashion, the issue of what constitutes a ‘cultural’ ‘environment’ generated public debate, in which local cultural workers and artists have been actively involved. The Hong-dae area has thus become a contested space where the definitions of ‘arts’, ‘the cultural’, ‘the commercial’ and ‘local cultures’ have been negotiated. By examining the Hong-dae case, I will focus on the processes of how contested urban landscapes come into shape, rather than analysing urban landscapes as a text to detect hegemonic contestations.

About the Speaker

Mihye Cho is a postdoctoral fellow (Sociology). She obtained her Ph.D. at University of Bielefeld, Germany in 2007. Her dissertation is about the Hong-dae cultural district project in Seoul and the Korean cultural policy. She is now working on issues concerning cultural policies and world city projects in Asia in relation to cultural changes.

Convenors : A/P Vedi R. Hadiz (6516-4399)

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