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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (43)
This research examines why and how Singapore faced a sudden spike in COVID-19 cases among migrant workers and how it managed them through the lens of historical institutionalism. Singapore has been appraised for its economic achievements under the developmental state, which also pursued social harmony among different ethnic groups to achieve social...
Governments and companies across the globe are promoting smart cities, and their developments usually reflect both globally shared ideas and locally specific agendas and implementations. This paper examines the smart cities of Singapore and Seoul – two key global cities in Asia with legacies of state-led developmentalism. It discusses the two citie...
Digital Media City (DMC) is an ambitious urban development project on a previous waste disposal site of Seoul. While it had been promoted as the world’s first high-tech complex in the early 2000s, it has now developed into the hub of the Korean Wave, concentrating South Korea’s key media and entertainment industries. This chapter explains how the r...
Governance-beyond-the-state has been widely adopted in urban politics in recent decades of global neoliberalism. However, how the governance change actually takes place in the planning system needs careful substantiation and contextualisation. By applying the ‘levels of governance’ concept, this paper examines diverse factors of governance innovati...
Seoul has systematically pushed different stages of digitalisation and smart city agenda over the years. Its latest plan—Global Digital Seoul 2020—highlights social values and developmental goals, and envisions co-creation of urban solutions with citizens, promotion of local small and medium-sized enterprises and global collaboration. There are glo...
Amid a globally increasing trend of urban segregation, this article asks why a particular urban place, the Gangnam area in the city of Seoul, has come to symbolize the rich and the powerful, consolidating both socioeconomic segregation and political conservatism in a short span of time. While different approaches exist that partially explain Gangna...
The concept of growth has dominated the political economy of urban development, whether in the west or east, in the last half-century. The growth agenda, however, is being increasingly questioned, amid rising citizens’ discontent with their governance and urban outcomes that are often biased toward favoring corporate interests. Likewise, many South...
Asia is undergoing contemporary urbanization at the scale and speed that far exceeds those of old industrial core of the West. Today, 17 out of 31 megacities are located in Asia, and the number is expected to increase to 24 by 2030. The rapid and concentrated urbanization of Asia is not only a result of increasing economic growth in the region, but...
After more than a half-century of fast and massive physical development under the strong state regimes and the subsequent growth-centric neoliberal agendas after the Asian financial crisis, megaprojects began to lose their steam. Amid the new challenges of slowing down of the economy, rising inequality, and low birth rate, Seoul’s governance and de...
This chapter sets the stage for the emergence of Seoul as the key post-industrial city, by examining the Korean developmental state’s spatial policies that produced a selective urbanization, aligning with its state-led export-oriented industrialization (EOI). The economic development of Korea has been well examined under the developmental state fra...
In parallel with Chapter Two, this chapter explains how the Korean developmental state also acted as a “property state,” attracting and guiding the private sector to solve one of the most challenging urban and housing problems of rapidly growing Seoul. Given Seoul’s seriously backward housing situation at the time, the state was keen on steering th...
The newly democratized government in the late 1980s launched an ambitious Two Million Housing Construction Plan to be accomplished within five years, when the total national housing stock at the time was a little over six million. Included in the plan were Korea’s first symbolic residential new town projects – Bundang and Ilsan – on the outskirts o...
This book revisits the development of South Korea by looking at its urban dimension and exploring the city of Seoul as a developmental megaproject. Offering an alternative to the focus on economic policies when it comes to explaining South Korea’s development successes, Joo explains the urbanization that took place under the guidance of the strong...
The concluding chapter addresses the relations between urbanization and development, as it discusses the development of the megacity Seoul and the concept of the property state, along with the implications for urbanizing Asia. The chapter first recapitulates how Seoul was able to transform from a relatively small and underdeveloped city into one of...
Korea went through dramatic changes after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which triggered extensive neoliberalization. The implication for cities has been the dismantling of the national urban network, with cities given free rein in the inter-city competition, forcing them to find their own ways to attract and retain globally mobile capital. Ur...
Digitally enabled cities expose their residents to the possibility of a large-scale and damaging cyber attack.
This paper discusses the reorganization of the roles of the national and local governments in public housing policy alongside decentralization, with particular reference to South Korea. Focusing on policy changes over the past decade, it reveals that rather than retrenchment amid a push towards greater local autonomy, the national government has di...
Daegu is a South Korean inland metropolis, which grew rapidly with a booming textile industry during the country's industrialization under the developmental state. Over the past twenty years however, it has been badly hurt by South Korea's overall slowing down of the economy and population growth. Its key challenges are deindustrialization, populat...
We trace the hosting of the 2002 FIFA World Cup
, which played a major role in South Korea’s speedy recovery and national unity after its most challenging economic crisis in modern history. While the opposition criticized hosting the World Cup under dire economic circumstances, the national government
insisted that the mega-event could be successfu...
The introduction chapter provides a brief overview of the four mega-events discussed in this book—the Summer Olympics
(1988), the World Expo (1993), the FIFA World Cup
(2002), and the Winter Olympics
(2018). We highlight that the four mega-events were used as a political tool serving personal, national and international motives that reflect South K...
City branding has been widely adopted by entrepreneurial local governments to strengthen city identities and to attract global attention amid intensified intercity competition. Asian global cities, in particular, have competitively branded themselves to signal that they belong to the group of advanced global cities. This paper illustrates the trans...
This book provides a holistic analysis of South Korea’s strategic use of the mega-events in its modern development. It examines the Summer Olympics (1988), the World Expo (1993), the FIFA World Cup (2002), and the Winter Olympics (2018), all in the past 30 years of the country’s rapid growth, across varying economic and political development stages...
In our globalised and urbanised world, environmental sustainability looms large. Water in particular is a
valuable global and cosmopolitan resource that all megacities need. However, rather than cooperating
to address these shared challenges, urban scholarship on branding thus far has focused on intercity
competition to attract capital flows. This...
The conclusion chapter discusses the four mega-events as mega-ambitious political and developmental tools, highlighting the ultimate national and local legacies the country has been able to reap. We look at the relationship between the four mega-events and South Korea’s modern development and argue that the events have been more state-centric pursu...
We examine the 1988 Olympics that marked the beginning of South Korea’s pursuit of mega-events. Although South Korea had successfully embarked on a course of industrialization
, it was far from being ready to host the Olympic Games. Seoul
was still largely a Third World city, with large slums
and inadequate urban infrastructure
. Nevertheless, the...
We explore the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics
that aims to bring privileged winter sports to South Korea. Although Governor of Gangwon Province had initiated the bid
, the national government
and chaebols
soon played a central role in its bidding and preparation, resulting in local and national tensions. However, they remained aligned on the goal...
We examine the 1993 Daejeon Expo, staged when the South Korean industry had to go through a fundamental restructuring amid the rising labor costs under the new democracy
. Held under the theme of science and technology
, the Expo
sought to support South Korea’s industrial restructuring process and to expand its international trade markets. The loca...
Facing both neoliberalism and the persisting legacies of developmentalism, many South Korean cities continue to subscribe to strong growth-first ideologies, despite their deindustrialization and aging populations. The growth orientation in cities, however, is far from being limited to South Korea. In fact, the recently emerging discourse on urban s...
Decentralized disaster governance has been gaining much attention with the rising global urbanization rate and the complex nature of the disasters occurring in densely urbanized areas today. This paper studies the case of South Korea, a highly urbanized country with relatively recent decentralization reforms, in order to analyze the evolution of it...
Operating in both domestic and international arenas, global cities are not only experiencing various urban problems close-up; they also share the greatest impetus to seek solutions. Intended as a framework for research, this article presents two new concepts to study the behavior of global cities. Drawing from the fields of urban studies, public po...
South Korea is one of many countries now facing the problem of inter-urban inequality. While Seoul and the capital region have nearly 50% of the national population, many other cities, which developed as the country rapidly industrialized during the latter half of the 20th century, are quickly losing their industries to newly emerging economies, su...
New towns deserve renewed attention as today's urban megaprojects in the developing world. They are increasingly built amid governments' attempts to connect their rapidly growing metropolises to the global economy and to promote them as world cities. This chapter revisits Korea's Bundang and Ilsan new town projects on the outskirts of Seoul. Their...
New towns deserve renewed attention as today's urban megaprojects in the developing world. They are increasingly built amid governments’ attempts to connect their rapidly growing metropolises to the global economy and to promote them as world cities. This chapter revisits Korea's Bundang and Ilsan new town projects on the outskirts of Seoul. Their...
This dissertation bridges the fields of international development and urban studies to examine South Korea's city building and urban development processes, arguing that the interaction between urban and industrial policies has both followed and produced the country's astonishing macroeconomic development successes. The study starts by raising the q...