"We just want to live well together": the makings of alternative urbanism in a developmentalist city Seoul, South Korea

Thesis

This thesis explores the makings of alternative urbanism in a developmentalist city Seoul, South Korea. Sitting at the intersection of East Asian urban developmentalism and post-politics, it argues for taking seriously generative ontologies of the urban as a site of ethical interdependencies. In so doing, this thesis puts forward a modest theorisation of alternative urbanism as the ethical coming together of strangers that leads to alternative modes of collective city life, suggesting more generative ways of thinking about the urban political in the wake of depoliticising urban politics. Urban East Asia serves as a generative springboard in this respect, both conceptually and empirically, considering its rather circumscribed state-society relations where urban developmentalism across the region not only reinforces the rise of post-politics but also shapes different modes of urban resistance in and through the everyday.

Central here is to grapple with the grounded notion of living well together which recognises mutual interdependencies as an underlying condition of urban living—a grassroots account that becomes prominent in my ethnographic fieldwork in a local community called Seongmi-san Maeul in Seoul. Adopting social infrastructure, care-full city, and community economies as useful conceptual optics to explore particular facets of alternative urbanism in the making, this thesis critically examines situated ways in which people encounter, get connected to one another, and explore and negotiate their mutual interdependencies, facilitating different ways of urban living especially in the face of various forms of urban injustice that they encounter and experience as a collective. Social infrastructures of and for alternative urbanism, counter-normative practices of care, and community economies found in Seongmi-san Maeul, taken together, suggests a hopeful, performative rethinking of the city which broadens the horizon of different possibilities. The ethnographic thick descriptions of how local activists and residents enact and imagine a radically different kind of city call for more open-ended, enabling epistemologies of the urban that are attentive to how people simultaneously live through, resist, and rework dominant neoliberal urbanism. It is with this reparative stance which holds onto the generative potentialities of the urban that this research seeks to carve out a fertile intellectual ground upon which more progressive urbanisms could be imagined and theorised, one that is concerned with the ways to organise the city in the existence of others.

Authors: Chae, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-pz0v1epgn
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Seongmi-san Maeul; ethics of interdependency; Alternative urbanism; urban care; social infrastructure; South Korea; Seoul; East Asian urban developmentalism; post-politics; urban resistance; community economy
• Subjects: Urban geography