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Urban Movements and the Genealogy of Urban Rights
Discourses: The Case of Urban Protesters against
Redevelopment and Displacement in Seoul, South Korea*
Hyun Bang Shin
London School of Economics and Political Science, U.K.
For citation:
To cite this article: Shin, Hyun Bang (2018): Urban Movements and the
Genealogy of Urban Rights Discourses: The Case of Urban Protesters against
Redevelopment and Displacement in Seoul, South Korea, Annals of the
American Association of Geographers 108(2): 356-369
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1392844
Author information:
HYUN BANG SHIN is Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at
the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. E-mail:
H.B.SHIN@LSE.AC.UK. He is also Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University,
Seoul, South Korea. His!research centres on the critical analysis of the political
economic dynamics of urbanisation, the politics of redevelopment and
displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city, and mega-events as
urban spectacles, with particular attention to Asian cities. He has recently co-
edited Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and
Displacement!(Poli c y Press , 2015) an d c o-aut h o red Planetary
Gentrification!(Polity Press, 2016)."
Page " of "137
Abstracts
Despite significant contributions made to progressive urban politics,
contemporary debates on cities and social justice are in need of adequately
capturing the local historical and socio-political processes of how people have
come to perceive the concept of rights in their struggles against the hegemonic
establishments. These limitations act as constraints on overcoming hegemony
imposed by the ruling class on subordinate classes, and restrict a contextual
understanding of such concepts as the right to the city in non-Western
contexts, undermining the potential to produce locally tuned alternative
strategies to build progressive and just cities. In this regard, this article
discusses the evolving nature of urban rights discourses that were produced
by urban protesters fighting redevelopment and displacement, paying
particular attention to the experiences in Seoul that epitomised speculative
urban accumulation under the (neoliberalizing) developmental state. Method-
wise, the article makes use of archival records (protesters’ pamphlets and
newsletters), photographs, and field research archives. The data are
supplemented by the author’s in-depth interviews with former and current
housing activists. The article argues that the urban poor have the capacity to
challenge the state repression and hegemony of the ruling class ideology; that
the urban movements such as the evictees’ struggles against redevelopment
are to be placed in the broader contexts of social movements; that concepts
such as the right to the city are to be understood against the rich history of
place-specific evolution of urban rights discourses; that cross-class alliance is
key to sustaining urban movements.
Keywords: urban movements, rights discourses, urban protests,
Seoul, displacement
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Introduction
Urban built environment and social realities reflect the class interests of those
that have economic and political power to produce cities in their own
imagination (Lefebvre 1996; Mitchell 2003). Our highly unequal cities can
therefore be regarded as the ‘socially just’ manifestation in the eyes of the
ruling class. This calls for the urgency of conferring greater power to the
marginalized and disenfranchized (Marcuse 2009). All too often, however, we
hear less about the voices of those who bear the brunt of profit-seeking
activities of the rich and powerful. Despite significant contributions to
progressive urban politics, contemporary debates on social justice are in need
of adequately capturing the local historical and socio-political processes of
how people voice out and produce their own alternative discourses against the
hegemonic establishments (Glassman 2013; Gramsci 1971). These limitations
undermine the production of locally tuned alternative strategies to build
progressive and just cities. This is where my focus on the voices of the urban
protesters against displacement comes from.
This article is on the extension of on-going efforts among critical scholars to
perceive social movements and grassroots activism as “knowledge-producers
in their own right” rather than objects of study (Chesters 2012: 145). By
adopting a strategic-relational perspective, I examine the evolving nature of
rights claims that were put forward by protesters against urban
redevelopment and displacement, placing this in the context of condensed and
speculative urbanization of South Korea (hereafter Korea). What the history of
the evolution of rights discourses in Korea demonstrates is, I argue, how the
urban poor as part of subordinate classes challenge the hegemony of private
property rights, and how this is made possible through the solidarity among
subordinate classes and the establishment of cross-class alliance. The focus on
Korea in this article is helpful for advancing the scholarship, as the emergence
of urban rights discourses or Korea’s ‘urban question’ was in a political
economic context that differed from the post-industrial economies of the
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West. Urban movements in the West calling for strengthening urban rights
and the protection of collective consumption was in the context of eroding
Keynesian welfare state, economic crisis, austerity, and neoliberalization of
urban services provision (c.f. Mayer 2009). Korea’s experience of urban
movements and the call for urban rights has been in the context of the strong
authoritarian statism (in the 1960s-1980s in particular) that retained a close
nexus with the capital (large businesses in particular), which refrained from
the provision of universal welfare and emphasized individual/family
responsibility for access to collective consumption including housing. Korea’s
experience also differs from the rest of Southeast/East Asian economies,
because of its rich history of democracy movements that successfully
challenged the state in the 1980s and 1990s, producing state-society relations
that are markedly different from the era of the authoritarian state (Castells
1992; Park 1998; Shin, Lees and López-Morales 2016). Such changes to the
state-society relations in Korea produce a space of resistance and counter-
hegemony, which in turn provides opportunities to collectively advance the
urban rights discourses through active formation of alliance among classes
and various sectors of (urban) social movements.
The study reconstructs the past trajectory of rights claims by urban protesters,
focusing on the period between the 1980s and present. Given the limitations
of longitudinal qualitative research that requires real-time and recurrent
engagement with events and participants (Saldaña 2003), the analysis in this
article makes use of both historical data and in-depth interviews. The main
historical data include: (a) an archival collection of protesters’ pamphlets and
newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s (amounting to 143 pages); (b)
photography collections (500+ images) in the Korea Democracy Foundation
archive; (c) documented materials gathered from my previous field research
in the early 2000s. These data are supplemented by in-depth interviews with
former and current housing activists, conducted during my field visits to Seoul
between 2011 and 2015. Before presenting the key findings, the subsequent
two sections present this article’s theoretical framework, and then the political
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economy of Korea’s urbanization, discussing the changing state-society
relations as well as socio-economic contexts within which urban social
movements by evictees and the housing poor have been embedded.
STATE REPRESSION, HEGEMONY AND URBAN SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS
Antonio Gramsci (1971) in his analysis of the state-society relations contends
that a ruling class’s overpowering of its subordinate classes is achieved
through state domination in the political society and the construction of
hegemony in civil society. In his words, ‘[a] social group dominates
antagonistic groups, which it tends to “liquidate”, or to subjugate perhaps
even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups’ (Gramsci 1971: 57).
State domination largely rests on violence and coercion by mobilizing police,
military and other law enforcements. By contrast, hegemony is exercised
through “the consent and passive compliance of subordinate classes” (Scott
1985: 316). This is where, according to James Scott, Gramsci’s major
contribution lies. Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony construction is a fine
elaboration on Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels’s 'ruling ideas of the epoch’
held by the ruling class in possession of the means of material production, an
important point they raised in The German Ideology:
“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal,
has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so
that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means
of mental production are subject to it” (Marx and Engels 1965: 61 cited
in Scott 1985: 315)
Hegemony can be considered as the ruling class’s imposition on subordinate
classes who may internalize the ideologies of the ruling class (Gramsci 1971).
The ideological hegemony of the ruling class, aided by the use of coercive state
apparatuses, condition the behavior of the subordinate classes who may be co-
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opted, persuaded and oppressed. If the ruling class manages to remain in
power through the state domination and the construction of hegemony, the
question is how the subordinate classes overthrow the ruling class.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is often misread as to explain the failure of
revolutionary movements (e.g., Scott 1985; also see the critique by Hart 1991),
but it would be erroneous to conclude that hegemony works to keep the
subordinate classes docile and submissive to the ruling class. Rather, as Jim
Glassman (2013: 254) asserts, Gramsci’s “conception of hegemony contains a
sense of the internal dynamics that can lead to hegemony’s collapse”. In other
words, the dialectical reading of hegemony, rooted in the political economy of
capitalist accumulation and uneven development, allows room for the erosion
of the very conditions that have given rise to the establishment of time- and
place-bounded hegemony. Such understanding of hegemony calls for
attention to the accumulation of latent anti-establishment movements that
challenge the state domination and the dominant ideology of the ruling class
on the one hand, and on the other, changing state-society relations.
Firstly, while studies on (urban) social movements may often focus on major
societal disruptions (e.g., Tahrir Square in 2011, Tian’anmen Square in 1989,
Seoul Spring in 1980 and 1987), it would be equally crucial to understand how
such major disruptions are founded upon a series of quotidian and organized
resistance in response to state repression and cooptation. As Paul Chang
(2015: 7) ascertains, social movements evolve under both endogenous and
exogenous pressures, and therefore, the study of social movements “need a
diachronic view of movement evolution that accounts for the dynamic nature
of contention over time”. In this regard, Chang (2015) examines the build-up
of anti-governmental oppositional movements by students, intellectuals and
workers during the 1970s in South Korea in order to understand how the
major burst of democracy and labor movements in the 1980s was possible.
Large-scale mass popular movements are therefore preceded by various
practices of coalition building, ideological diversification and struggles, and
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the framing of each contesting group’s resistance during the state of latency
(Johnston, 2015). Such struggles involve the subordinate classes in the
production of their own set of vision and political will for just city,
demonstrating a degree of organizational capacity in order to sustain long-
term durability of their resistance to state repression (Routledge 2015a).
James Scott (1985) goes further to argue that the subordinate classes (poor
peasants in Scott’s case study) have the ability to understand the structural
conditions and reject the ideological imposition of the ruling class. The
presence of authoritarian repressive states such as the South Korean state
between the 1960s and 1980s does not necessarily equate with the absence of
(urban) movements: Subordinate classes would still engage with the
production of what Johnston (2015: 628) conceptualizes as “repressive
repertoires”, a series of “small acts of protest and opposition…creatively
carved out of situations where social control breaks down and islands of
freedom are creatively and agentically claimed by dissident actors”. Such
capacity for subordinate classes to be able to engage with resistance and
ideological struggles has been picked up by many critics (see for example
Parsa 2000 and Schock 2005). The key to contesting the dominant hegemony
and successful class struggles would eventually involve the establishment of “a
series of consensual alliances with other classes and groups" (Haugaard 2006:
5), thus the need of situating individual movement in a broader schema of
social movements.
Secondly, the study of the evolutionary trajectories of urban social movements
(e.g., struggles against forced eviction) requires the analysis of such struggles
against the backdrop of changing state-society and socio-political relations,
which are in turn embedded in broader socio-economic contexts. In the
context of uneven development of capitalist accumulation, “geographical
variations in the relationship between states and civil society actors are
important in understanding the context from which social movements
emerge” (Routledge 2015b: 386). The dialectical reading of Gramsci’s
hegemony (Glassman 2013: 249) suggests that “economic developments are
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not…foundations on which politics are relatively built but rather a particularly
crucial element of the entire context in which political outcomes like
hegemony are generated”. The geographies of (urban) social movements
reflect the state-society relations of a particular time and space. In other
words, the repressive capacity of the state, and by extension the hegemonic
construction of ruling class ideology, enters into a contentious but constitutive
relationship with movements, forming what Chang (2013) refers to as “protest
dialectics”.
As Boudreau (2004) sums up, the actions of the state shape the ways in which
social movements are mobilized, and how they develop over time. However,
the relationship between state repression and social movements may not
entirely be linear. In an authoritarian state context such as the one found in
the late 20th century South Korea, it is possible for the repressive state to
effectively suppress, if not annihilate, dissidents or co-opt them by
monopolizing violence and utilizing resources for its own legitimacy gains.
The opposite scenario is also possible, that is, the social movements being
fueled by the atrocity of the state violence. In summarizing the complicated
non-linear relationship between state repression and social movements,
Chang (2013: 7-9; original emphasis) suggests the disentanglement of the
movement, “shift[ing] our focus away from the total quantity of protest events
to the substantive quality of movement characteristics” including ideological
development and protester’s discourses as well as the forms and strategies of
protest.
This article emphasizes the significance of acknowledging on-going ideological
struggles for hegemony between ruling and subordinate classes, especially the
urban poor who have produced a series of urban rights discourses as tactical
strategies to contest the state-led urban redevelopment and displacement in
the midst of the state pursuit of condensed urbanization. In this artic, urban
protests against urban redevelopment and displacement are situated as a sub-
component of broader social movements that characterized the South Korean
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politics since the 1980s. While taking into consideration the changing state-
society relations, the examination of the changing urban rights discourses also
acknowledge the significance of historical conjunctures that influence the
direction of urban movements: This is in recognition of the fact that the non-
linear relationship between state repression and social movements is further
influenced by historic junctures or what Slater (2010) refers to as “critical
antecedents”. Such junctures often precipitate the disintegration of the
political elite’s leadership and the formation of a broader coalition of social
movements (Johnston 2015: 623). The next section examines Korea’s political
economy of urbanization to provide the geographical contexts within which
the intensification of urban redevelopment projects came to emerge from the
1980s onward.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF URBANIZATION IN KOREA
Korea’s urbanization can be described as condensed urbanization coupled
with industrialization, a characteristic that the country shares with mainland
China and other East Asian ‘tiger’ economies such as Taiwan and Singapore
(Shin 2014). Dunford and Yeung (2011) report that East Asian economies took
less than 30 years to reach a five-fold increase of their initial real GDP per
capita from the time of economic take-off. Conversely, other ‘advanced’
economies such as the United Kingdom and the United States turned out to
have taken more than 160 and 100 years respectively. Among the East Asian
economies, Korea’s pace was the fastest, having taken only about 22 years to
achieve the above rate of development.
Nationally, the rapid economic development was achieved by the
establishment of industrial estates for export-oriented manufacturing,
subsidizing the costs of production for industrialists by the developmental
states whose legitimacy was garnered by their ability to achieve economic
developmental goals without changing the social order (Castells 1992). These
industrial complexes were further supported by the construction of various
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infrastructure and service facilities, hence the accumulation of fixed capital in
the built environment (Harvey 1978). These sites of production accompanied
urbanization to accommodate workers and their families as well as other
service industries. Major cities in Korea such as Ulsan and Changwon came to
develop in this way. As shown in Figure 1, the 1960s and 1970s were the
period of urbanization subordinated to industrialization, guided by the
authoritarian and developmental state that channeled available resources
(e.g., national savings, foreign loans) to subsidize the expansion of large
businesses rather than expanding national welfare provision (Mobrand 2008;
Park 1998; Woo-Cumings 1999). Social welfare including housing was largely
in the hands of individuals, hence the heavy dependence on families and social
network of individuals under the productivist welfare system (Halliday 2000).
From the mid-1980s onward, Korea entered a new era, characterized by
decreasing rates of profit in the manufacturing sector, increasing costs of
production, and relocation of those factories in search for low cost of labor in
other countries (e.g., textile industry relocating to mainland China in the
1990s). The average net profit rate in the manufacturing industry turned out
to be 16.9% between 1981 and 1990, while the figures for 1963-1971 and
1972-1980 were 39.7% and 27.7% respectively (Jung, 1995). The mid-1980s
also saw the net surplus in Korea’s international trade, a turning point indeed
for a country that depended heavily on export-oriented industry for its
economic development. The resulting over-accumulation and surplus capital
as well as the accumulation of wealth by the emerging middle classes in the
country were met by the surge of real estate investment and speculative
urbanization (Shin and Kim 2016) on the one hand, and by the labor
movements calling for fairer share of surpluses as well as the social
movements demanding democracy after more than two decades of
authoritarian statism on the other (Koo 2001).
The absolute amount of real estate investments also grew rapidly from the late
1980s: in comparison with the 1987 figure, the size of real estate investments
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in 1993 essentially quadrupled (ibid.). Accordingly, whereas the share of real
estate investment in gross fixed capital formation in 1987 was estimated to be
18.7%, this jumped to reach 30.8% in 1991, and 36.1% in 1993 (The Bank of
Korea, 2004). Throughout the 1990s, the figure remained at around 30% or
above. Rampant speculation ensued due to price spikes in real estate. The
average price of land in Korea increased by 2,976 times between 1964 and
2013, while the price of daily necessities (e.g., rice) grew by 50-60 times only.
As of 2013, real estate assets accounted for about 89% of national assets (Ha,
2015). In this context, with the industrial restructuring, it can be said that the
post-1980s has seen the reversal of the relationship between urbanization and
industrialization (see Figure 1), whereby highly speculative nature of
urbanization (real estate investment in particular) becomes more important
for asset accumulation. That is, the investment in the built environment has
come to focus more on expanding speculative real estate assets than the
expansion of productive investments.
(Figure 1 about here)
The result was the surge of urban redevelopment projects from the mid-1980s
especially in Seoul, which has been the economic, political and cultural center
of the country. Real estate speculation to maximize profits by closing rent gaps
in redevelopment neighborhoods (López-Morales 2011; Shin 2009) has
become a major means for families to build up their family assets, thus
consolidating the hegemony of private property rights (Shin and Kim 2016).
Here, I am thinking of Ley and Teo’s (2014) discussion of the rise of the
‘cultural hegemony of property’ in Hong Kong and Hsu and Hsu’s (2013)
proposition of ‘the political culture of property’ in Taiwan, all of which
privileged private ownership of property supported the ascendancy of
speculative real estate markets and profit-led urban redevelopment. Coupled
with the aspiration of the authoritarian state to sanitize and modernize the
urban landscape especially at the time of preparing for the 1988 Seoul
Olympic Games (Greene, 2003), the developmental state embarked on a
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massive scale of displacement of the urban poor. For tenants in
redevelopment project sites, there was initially little compensation during the
early years of the program in the 1980s (Ha, 2001). An evictees’ movement
emerged eventually, further fueled by the democratization movement
(KOCER 1998). More detailed pictures of changing state-society relations will
be visited during the discussions of changing urban rights discourses in the
ensuing section.
URBAN PROTESTS AND THE GENEALOGY OF URBAN
RIGHTS DISCOURSES
1980s: Saengjon’gwon or the Right to Subsistence
In order to understand the urban protests from the 1980s, it would be
necessary to understand the experience of Korean democracy movements
throughout the 1970s when the country was under the dictatorship of the then
President Park Chung-Hee (1961-1979). Through the use of police force,
military, Korean Central Intelligence Agency and emergency decrees, the
authoritarian state endeavored to undermine and suppress the civil society
and oppositional movements, while pursuing economic development by
forming a developmental alliance with large business conglomerates known as
Chaebols in Korean. In this context, the focus of oppositional movements was
on achieving democracy, led by university students, religious groups
(especially, progressive Christians) and intellectuals (lawyers, journalists)
(Chang 2015). Labor movements were yet to be organized despite landmark,
yet tragic, events such as the death of labor activist Chun Tae-il whose self-
immolation was a wake-up call for Korean intellectuals, students and nascent
labor activism. As for the protests by evictees, until the end of the 1970s, they
remained isolated and sporadic, because of the high prevalence of
substandard settlements and the government focus on their containment
rather than unrealistic targets of complete eradication (Kim 2011). As the
alliance between the state and Chaebols had been at the center of economic
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development, the prevalence of substandard settlements was an effective
means of minimizing the cost of labor reproduction for businesses (Mobrand
2008).
It was from the early 1980s that urban protests against forced eviction began
to be more organized, having faced an entirely hostile set of socio-economic
and political conditions (Shim, 1994; Kim, 1999). Politically, the state-
business alliance was still remaining intact despite the sudden collapse of the
Park Chung-Hee dictatorship, as the military coup in December 1979 led by
General Chun Doo-Hwan kept the country more or less in the old order. The
Fifth Republic headed by the then President Chun Doo-Hwan (1981-1987)
continued the practices of the previous Park Chung-Hee dictatorship that
resorted to the use of coercive state power to bring the society under their
control. Socio-economically, the country witnessed the continued growth of
middle class populace, whose asset basis expanded substantially, thanks
partly to the speculative price increases in real estate. Construction
subsidiaries of Chaebols or large conglomerates also began to show an interest
in participating in urban redevelopment projects with commercial and
corporate orientation (Ha 2001). Seoul as the national capital came to be the
epicenter of commodification of space through redevelopment targeting both
residential and business districts. The transformation of Seoul to host the
1986 Summer Asian Games and the 1988 Summer Olympic Games also added
fuel to the proliferation of urban redevelopment (ACHR 1989).
From 1983, urban redevelopment projects targeting substandard
neighborhoods in Seoul intensified with the introduction of new government
policy to implement what was known as Hapdong Jaegaebal or joint
redevelopment program, which was estimated to have affected about 10% of
the total municipal population since implementation (Shin and Kim 2016).
Facing harsh conditions of displacement and relocation, tenants’ protests
grew in both size and intensity. Upon the introduction of the joint
redevelopment program, tenants were initially offered neither compensation
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nor any other alternative housing provision. Under the circumstances, as a
former leader of a tenants’ group against forced eviction in the Hawang 2-1
redevelopment district in central Seoul states, saengjon’gwon “came first”
before any other expressions, as “resistance was to fight the exploitation of
people’s life spaces and the destruction of life” (Mr Y interviewed on 20
August 2013). In other words, for poor tenants subject to eviction with no
compensation, saengjon’gwon or the right to subsistence occupied the center
stage of their protests to survive. Such sentiment was frequently pronounced
in various pamphlets and slogans throughout the 1980s (see Figure 2).
Protesters’ demand centered on the governmental provision of alternative
relocation housing, especially in the form of public rental housing as part of
addressing their immediate shelter needs. For instance, in a protest pamphlet
dated 23 July 1987, tenants from Dohwa 3-district claim, “Stop the forced
demolition immediately. Guarantee the saengjon’gwon for the urban
poor” (see KOCER 1998: 332).
(Figure 2 about here)
To some extent, the rise of the saengjon’gwon slogan could be attributed to
the increasing degree of awareness of human rights concerns, emerged in the
late 1970s as tactical evolution of democracy movements during the times of
repressive state domination that incurred harsh physical suppression of
dissidents and protesters. As Chang (2015: 159) succinctly summarizes,
“human rights became part of South Korean civil society for the first time
when antigovernment dissidents made it an integral part of the larger
democracy movement in the 1970s”. Korea’s democracy movements in the
1980s culminated in 1987 June Democratic Uprising that resulted in the
authoritarian state’s concession to introduce direct presidential election. Such
movements were possible by the formation of political alliances not only
among dissident communities but also among university students, progressive
intellectuals, trade unions, farmers, the urban poor (e.g., informal street
vendors, poor tenants in substandard settlements) and eventually white collar
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workers. Each of the groups had their own movement agenda, but came
together under democratization as a shared frame for collective actions. Poor
evictees took a part in it too, with an understanding that a more democratic
state would protect their saengjon’gwon, as exemplified by a statement in a
pamphlet from Dohwa 3-district dated on 21 July 1987: “[w]e longed and
fought for democratization, because democratization would allow a fair
treatment of us who work strenuously to make the ends meet…[Furthermore]
there is no democratization without guaranteeing our
saengjon’gwon” (KOCER 1998: 330).
1990s: Jugeo’gwon or the Right to Housing
The prevalence of commercialized redevelopment in the 1980s resulted in a
humongous scale of brutal and forced eviction in Seoul. The Asian Coalition
for Housing Rights reported that about 48,000 dwellings housing 720,000
urban poor people were subject to eviction between 1983 and 1988 (ACHR
1989; Greene 2003). As tenants’ frustration escalated, their protests became
more organized: A city-wide organization called the Seoul Council of Evictees
(Seoul Cheolgeomin Hyeob’euihui) was formed in Seoul in 1987 at the height
of the democracy movements in the 1980s, providing support for individual
sites of struggle. Although the state-chaebols alliance was still in place after
1987 June Democratic Uprising as the ruling right-wing party narrowly
escaped its demise by winning the 1987 December presidential (which was
largely due to the schism between opposition parties), it was under pressure to
devise compensation measures to appease tenants and maintain their
legitimacy. After piloting a series of incremental measures, a new policy was
introduced in 1989, which included the provision of cash (living costs for three
months) or in-kind (tenancy in public rental housing) compensation (Kim et
al., 1996: 109-110). This arrangement subsequently remained unchanged for
more than a decade. The state concession could be considered as the fruits of
the evictees’ strenuous fights against the alliance of the state, developers and
landlords-cum-speculators, supported by other sectors of social movements.
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As the new compensation measures settled in, a new language of jugeo’gwon
or the right to housing began to emerge from the early 1990s. Rather than
confining tenants’ protests to the obtention of saengjon’gwon, housing is to be
seen as part of basic human rights and constitutional rights (Mr Y, 20 August
2013) (see Figure 3). A former student activist, who is now a district mayor in
Seoul, recalls that “in the early to mid-1980s, the slogan was by and large to
attain minjung saengjon’gwon [people’s right to subsistence], and then
evictees’ saengjon’gwon. Jugeo’gwon came afterwards. Regardless of house
ownership, having a home to live was to be seen as a right” (interview with Mr
K, 21 August 2013). Protest materials also reflected the changing slogan. For
instance, in their pamphlet dated 18 October 1990, tenants in Nolyangjin 2-2
district argued that “we will be fighting all the way for saengjon’gwon as our
minimal right…[People of similar circumstances from] development areas
should unite to be guaranteed of their jugeo’gwon”.
(Figure 3 about here)
The provision of public rental housing as in-kind compensation was
considered by many as having met the saengjon’gwon of tenants experiencing
forced eviction. Protests continued to emerge from a number of
redevelopment project sites in order to address unresolved issues such as
support for temporary relocation, and more violent fights broke out
sporadically involving groups of ineligible tenants against displacement.
However, the attention of activists and progressive intellectuals began to steer
towards improving the legal system for general housing welfare of the poor,
thus the right to housing (KOCER 1998; Lee 2012). A major development was
the establishment of the National Coalition for Housing Rights (hereafter
NCHR) in 1990 as an umbrella organization by a number of social movement
organizations including those of evictees and housing activists and progressive
religious groups: as the declaration for the NCHR establishment states, the
organization aimed at the acquisition of the right to housing as its major goal,
proclaiming it as people’s basic right.
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The shift towards improving the legal system and housing welfare provision
throughout the 1990s can be seen as an extension to the institutionalization of
social movements that constitute what Prujit and Roggerband (2014) refers to
as a “dual movement structure”. Autonomous and institutionalized social
movements in a dual movement structure benefit from each other in the
context of a more open political environment, as the former creates disruptive
actions to add pressure on the state while the latter provides institutionalized
support and legitimacy for social movements. The series of political changes
in the first half of the 1990s in Korea enabled the transition from autonomous
social movements to institutionalized social movements. The developmental
state, having its legitimacy challenged by the democracy movements, made
efforts to distance away from the authoritarianism of the 1970s and 1980s.
The political reform in the early 1990s also included the establishment of local
assemblies from 1991 and the implementation of the direct election of mayors
and provincial governors from 1995. Like many other sectors that took part in
the earlier democracy movements, housing activists and supporting networks
pursued the establishment of institutional arrangements so as to integrate
housing rights and access to affordable housing as part of governmental
frames. For instance, a number of Korean civil society delegates who
participated in the 1996 Habitat II conference joined hands to establish action
plans to legislate the Basic Housing Rights Act as part of advancing the right
to housing (see Park and Kim 1998; Seo 1999).
The shift from saengjon’gwon to jugeo’gwon also reflects the rapidly
diminishing stocks of affordable housing for the urban poor, resulting from
mounting interests in real estate investments. The developmental state still
kept its close nexus with businesses: Having previously faced resistance from
the organized labor movements and with the decreasing rates of profit in the
manufacturing sector, the state-business alliance opted for ‘segyehwa’ or
globalization, involving selective overseas relocation of production bases,
transnational investment, and liberalization of financial industry. The direct
election of local assembly members, mayors and governors laid the foundation
Page " of "17 37
for the rise of local ‘growth machines’, further propelling investments in real
estate properties and infrastructure. Large-scale urban redevelopment
projects ensued especially in Seoul, which witnessed government efforts to
transform the national capital into a world city, and involved active
participation of construction subsidiaries of major chaebols. Rapidly
disappearing affordable housing stocks and the sharp increase in housing
rents due to mega-displacement of poor tenants led to growing awareness of
housing as a basic right. For many activists working in poor neighborhoods,
the major concern in the 1990s was how to ensure the housing right of poor
residents who faced eviction as such neighborhoods became subject to mega-
redevelopment projects (BJUBW 2017). The emphasis on housing rights
continued to exert its presence, albeit with limited success, during the times of
post-crisis Korean welfare statism that involved the establishment of social
safety nets for the victims (including homeless people) of the economic crisis
in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
2000s: Jeongju’gwon or the Right to Settlements
Despite the efforts by the civil society organizations to legislate the Basic
Housing Rights Act, they faced a barrier especially due to the severe downturn
of the national economy following the Asian financial crisis. In order to
stimulate economic recovery, the promotion of real estate development
remained intact (Ha 2010). Reformist policies such as the Basic Housing
Rights Act were seen as hindrance to real estate development, especially by
“those established interests who gained much of developmental profits
through redevelopment. [Private] Property rights were prioritized” (interview
with Mr Y, 20 August 2013).
Investment in fixed assets, especially infrastructure and real estate,
characterized the post-crisis recovery efforts especially at the local scale. In
Seoul, having experienced a brief period of slump after the Asian financial
crisis, urban redevelopment picked up its pace again in the early 2000s, this
time led by the then Seoul mayor Lee Myung-Bak (2002-2006) whose
Page " of "18 37
previous position as the CEO of Korea’s largest construction firm aligned him
with real estate interests (Doucette, 2010). In line with his mayoral election
manifesto that promised boosterish developmental projects, the mayor Lee
Myung-Bak, a member of the conservative Grand National Party, gave birth to
the highly speculative mega-district redevelopment program, euphonically
coined as ‘new town development’. Pilot projects began in northern Seoul,
targeting those urban districts that escaped the fervor of urban redevelopment
in the previous decade and thus witnessed widened rent gaps. Becoming a
new town program site was met by an instantaneous surge of property value,
thus providing opportunities for speculative gains for property-owners and
absentee landlords-cum-speculators (Shin and Kim 2016).
In response to the new town program as an area-wide initiative, housing
activists turned their attention towards promoting jeongju’gwon or the right
to human settlements. This shift was to acknowledge the importance of going
beyond the individual housing unit and placing housing in a wider context of
settlement that encompasses multiple dimensions of habitation.
Jeongju’gwon was recognized as a concept that “encompassed jugeo’gwon, as
well as the concept of local community [jiyeog sahoi in Korean]” (Mr Y, 20
August 2013). In their on-line posting dated 8 April 2003, the National
Council of Center to Victims of Forced Evictions, a non-governmental
advocacy organization for the protection of people’s rights against forced
eviction founded in April 1993, has correspondingly reframed the objective
their activities, explaining that they pursue “jeongju’gwon movement based
on reasons and rationale. Based on jeongju’gwon, we do our best to prevent
quality of life from degrading by redevelopment that endangers residents’
jeongju’gwon” (NCCVFE 2003).
Post-2009: the emergence of Dosi’gwon or the Right to the City
The conceptualization of jeongju’gwon in response to the rise of new town
projects experienced further transformation from 2009. This was precipitated
by the tragic conclusion of small business tenants’ protests in Yongsan, Seoul,
Page " of "19 37
in January 2009 when six people (five protesters and one policeman) died in
the midst of police SWAT team operation carrying out military style
suppression of small business tenant protesters. This tragedy as a key historic
juncture was a wake-up call for housing activists and critical scholars as well
as civil society organizations who painfully admitted that the state violence
against eviction still persisted despite the country’s nominal democratization.
Another major revelation was the limitation of the 1989 compensation regime,
which failed to take into account small business tenants who were left without
adequate compensation. Small business tenants came to be core members of
evictee organizations, as a housing activist notes in an interview (Mr L, 15
December 2011): “From 2000, more than 80% of the members of evictee
organizations such as the National Council of Center to Victims of Forced
Evictions or the Urban Poor Evictees’ Union were business tenants”.
Two successive national governments from 2008 were headed by the
Presidents from the right-wing party that managed to restore its power after
having lost the 1997 and 2002 Presidential elections in a row. The election of
the former Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-Bak as President in 2007 also signaled a
major shift of economic policies towards heavier investment in the built
environment including continued expansion of real estate investments and
urban redevelopment projects. This also meant that the previous efforts to
institutionalize social movements and by extension to institutionalize various
social rights including housing rights also faced retreat, as the state resorted
to the repressive use of its power to subdue social movements and
oppositional voices that were critical of the new right-wing governments. The
Yongsan tragedy was seen to be on the extension of such state violence.
Since the Yongsan tragedy in 2009, there has been a noticeable degree of
attention to incorporating dosi’gwon or the ‘right to the city’ concept in urban
movements for social justice, influenced in part by the works of critical Korean
geographers (e.g., Kim 2009; Hwang 2010) and human rights activists (Miryu
2010). Kim (2009) for instance reflects upon the tragedy of Yongsan, and
Page " of "20 37
argues that dosi’gwon is to be adopted as the key slogan to fight dispossession
resulting from urban redevelopment. To some extent, the attention to the
‘right to the city’ was to overcome the predominant focus on residential
tenants in the previous housing movements. As housing activist Mr L points
out (interviewed 15 December 2011), “urban researchers or those members of
housing rights movement groups neglected the business tenants’ problems. It
was not easy for them to connect business tenants with a certain concept of
right, and there was hardly any research or consideration for supporting them
[the struggles of small business tenants]”. Another business tenant further
expressed that “to me, the struggle of commercial tenants has only just begun”
(interviewed 20 December 2011).
Against the above backdrop, human rights activists and evictee organizations
have worked together in alliance to launch a campaign to legislate the
Protection from Forced Eviction Act. According to a human rights activist (Ms
M interviewed on 15 December 2011), this was based on an increasing degree
of awareness that forced eviction should be seen as the violation of basic
human rights. The movement to legislate the Protection from Forced Eviction
Act was to draw people’s attention to the human dimension and costs
associated with the demolition of building structures. In collaboration with
academics such as those members of the Korean Association of Space &
Environment Research and legal professions (e.g., Democratic Legal Studies
Association), a draft Act was motioned as a new bill by the supportive
members of the National Assembly (The Kyunghyang Shinmun 2011). As of
January 2017, the bill has not passed and it is not clear how soon it would
come to be fully legislated. The major barrier is thought to be the hegemony of
property rights, as the Act would constrain any attempt to turn properties into
a ‘higher and better’ use for speculative profit gains.
Page " of "21 37
CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY OF PROPERTY
DEVELOPMENT AND FORMING SOLIDARITY
The history of the urban poor’s struggle against eviction in Korea can be
understood as the history of the subordinate classes challenging the legitimacy
of the capitalist accumulation regime that sought to maximize its gains from
socially unjust urban transformation (c.f. Weber 2002). The physical struggle
accompanied an ideological struggle. The review of the archival records of
pamphlets and protest materials makes it evident that there is no lack of
understanding among the protesters with regard to the exploitative nature of
urban redevelopment based on capturing the rent gaps. From the early days,
evictees resisting forced eviction retained acute awareness of unequal power
relations manifested in their neighborhoods, as partly noted in the previous
sections. A newsletter published by the Seoul Council of Evictees (Seoul
Cheolgeomin Hyeob’euihui) on 21 November 1987 states on the cover page
that “the urban poor has the natural obligation to fight till the end
redevelopment and demolition carried out by the monopoly chaebol such as
Hangug Geon’eob, Daelim Saneop, and Hyundai Geonseol under the auspice
of military dictatorship headed by Chun and Rho [presidents]” (see KOCER
1998: 178).
Challenging the state, developers and the hegemony of private property rights
was accompanied and supported by the formation of wide-encompassing
alliance: Evictees reached out to student activists and civil society
organizations, who were integral members of local activism in poor
neighborhoods (BJUBW 2017). Protesters’ discourses revealed their acute
awareness of the importance of positioning the struggle in a broader context
of fighting capitalist exploitation. This was possible, to some extent, because
of the historic legacy of Korea’s democracy movements (also known as
minjung [common people’s] movements) during the times of dictatorship and
military regimes between the 1960s and the 1980s (see Lee 2007 for the
minjung movement). Particularly in the 1980s, after nearly two decades of
Page " of "22 37
military dictatorship, Korea saw the outburst of social movements, led by
intellectuals, students, farmers, the urban poor and workers, demanding not
only real democracy but also redistributive justice. In this regard, Korea was
not lacking efforts to establish cross-class alliances (see also Chang 2015).
This is the environment within which housing activism, and more recently
anti-gentrification movement, in Korea have been embedded. Going back to
the Yongsan tragedy in January 2009, in the evening of the day of the tragedy,
more than 80 civil society and political organizations held a candlelight vigil
with the presence of thousands of citizens, which then led to a more violent
street protest in the late evening (The Seoul Institute 2017: 115). Overnight
discussions among activists resulted in the formation of a committee that saw
the participation of more than 80 civil society organizations including those
working to enhance urban poor’s housing rights: they aimed at bringing
justice to those who were responsible for the forced and brutal oppression of
evictees (The Seoul Institute 2017: 116).
It is interesting to note how such interaction between evictees and other social
groups enabled the evictees to acquire the languages of protest and rights
claims, and that poor tenants’ resistance to redevelopment and displacement
did not emerge out of the blue. Mr Y who was the head of tenants group in the
Hawang 2-1 redevelopment district in central Seoul in 1993 (interviewed 20
August 2013) recalls that the most frequently expressed slogan was the
demand for the right to housing, but this was the result of education, helping
them continue their fight. Kim’s (2017) review of the history of local activism
pre-dating redevelopment in the Hawang 2-1 redevelopment district reveals
how the build-up of local activism throughout the 1980s and early 1990s
enabled the effective organization of tenants’ efforts to resist displacement.
The tenants’ organization was rooted in a children’s study group organized by
local activists for the poor in Hawang and adjacent neighborhoods. Local
activists, who settled down in the neighborhoods from 1987, held various
educational sessions to inform children’s mothers about redevelopment and
Page " of "23 37
displacement, and the mothers brought their husbands to be also involved
when tenants’ organization was to be formed. Mr Y quoted above was also one
of the husbands. Local activists in the neighborhoods also came together to
organize a local council of activists (1989-1994) to coordinate their activities.
The key figures among the activists were a married couple, both of whom were
seasoned activists for the poor. They began their activism from the early
1970s, and the husband in particular had experiences of working with tenants
against displacement in the 1970s: such experiences turned out to be
beneficial for the education of local activists in Hawang 2-1 district and
adjacent neighborhoods (see Kim 2017).
The solidarity among evictees, local activists, and other civil society
organizations, as well as their efforts to pursue cross-class alliance is quite
encouraging for achieving social justice through progressive urban
movements, as these initiatives allow them not to be confined to their self-
interest. For a number of more persistent protesters who continue to exercise
activism and engage with long-term social movement, their long-term
commitments seem to develop class consciousness. The chair of the Korea
Evictees Association who has been leading the organization for more than two
decades explains how his struggle for the right to housing has led to his
realization of the importance of cross-class alliance: “Resolving the right to
housing issue does not solve everything. We need to open our eyes to the labor
movement too. Evictee’s movement alone does not resolve capitalist
contradictions. Workers, evictees and farmers all have to work together” (see
Choi et al. 2009: 189)
Nevertheless, as discussed earlier, the fact that the efforts to legislate the
Protection from Forced Eviction Act have been facing barriers suggest that the
property hegemony persists. There has also been a degree of fragmentation
among evictees and their organizations, resulting in the establishment of
several umbrella organizations due to their different views on what would be
the most effective tactics for housing rights struggle (see Park and Lee, 2012:
Page " of "24 37
17-23), although they may still come together to collectively address major
state oppressions like the Yongsan tragedy. Furthermore, the struggle by
evictees has clear limitations of being a highly place-specific rights struggle
that runs the danger of dissolution once a neighborhood disappears (interview
with Mr Y on 20 August 2013). Local activists who worked hard in the 1980s
and 1990s to create neighborhood-based grassroots organizations lamented
that urban redevelopment projects disintegrated residents and that it was
difficult to continue the organizational momentum after redevelopment and
displacement. This testifies the destructive nature of urban redevelopment,
posing serious threats to the growth of place-specific urban movements to
advance the right to the city and achieve social justice.
CONCLUSION
Reflecting upon the Korean history of urban accumulation and injustice, the
production of urban space has been undeniably in the imagination of the
ruling class who imposed their own vision of an ideal city and of “a just social
order” (Scott, 1985: 305) on subordinate classes. However, the voices of the
tenants facing forced eviction and increasingly unaffordable housing costs
have produced their own set of demands and narratives about the socially
unjust nature of urban redevelopment. Their demands called for the
guarantee of their saengjon’gwon (the right to subsistence) and jugeo’gwon
(the right to housing), refusing to be denigrated as barriers to societal
progress. The enactment of the National Basic Housing Rights Act in 2015 can
be regarded as the culmination of the efforts made by the progressive urban
movements. Various evictee organizations established in the early 1990s
continue to operate until present, their longevity possibly helped by the on-
going injustice in the production of the built environment and also by the
experience of eviction as “shared emotional connections” (Bosco 2007) that
bind them together.
Page " of "25 37
With the changing economic climate that questions high rates of economic
development and real estate accumulation, there emerges an opportunity to
think of a new way of imagining and building a new Seoul. It is perhaps about
time to revisit the legalist agenda put forward nearly three decades ago when
the National Coalition of Housing Rights was established in 1990 and efforts
were made to secure the right to housing for the general population. As the
advocates of the right to the city often point out (see Marcuse 2009; Harvey
2003; Mitchell 2003), the legal provision is only one of many necessary
conditions for the realization of a new alternative way of producing just cities.
Facilitated by a broader cross-class alliance, fights for the collective
consumption such as housing have a direct potential to make this possible
(see Harvey 2013; Merrifield, 2014). It is about time to rethink seriously the
ramification of speculative urbanization and gentrification, and embark on
producing “a genuinely humanizing urbanism” (Harvey 1976/2009: 314) that
realizes a vision that places people at the center and not profit (Brenner,
Marcuse and Mayer 2009). In this regard, the emergent discourses of the
right to the city in Korea in recent years can be considered as an assuring
positive shift, as such a move propels progressive Korean urban politics to go
beyond the residential domain of urban social movements, and to be inclusive
of commercial tenants and other forms of inhabiting space.
Funding
The author acknowledges the financial support from the National Research
Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government
(NRF-2014S1A3A2044551).
Acknowledgements
I thank the participants and audience at the following events where various
versions of this article were presented: (1) the Centre of Korean Studies
seminar, SOAS, London, February 2016; (2) The Seoul Institute conference on
Page " of "26 37
Seoul as a Model of Progressive City, Seoul, October 2015; (3) the 2016 annual
conference of the American Association of Geographers, San Francisco. I
would like to express my gratitude to Tim Butler, Paul Waley, Jaeho Kang,
Chai-Kwan Lee, Soo-Hyun Kim, Jesook Song, Nik Heynen, my interviewees
who kindly spared their valuable time with me, and the journal’s anonymous
reviewers for their encouragements, constructive comments and/or helpful
suggestions. However, I take the sole responsibility for any possible errors in
this article.
Page " of "27 37
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List of Figures
Figure 1
The Process of Urbanization in Korea and its Key Events
!!
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Figure 2: Tenants’ Protests in Sadang and Dongjak in January 1988, Seoul
Note: The writing on the placard reads ”Guarantee the Right to Subsistence
and Public Rental Housing with Long-term Loan Conditions”)
Source: The Kyunghyang Shinmun (Park, Yong-Su), provided by the Korea
Democracy Foundation (http://archives.kdemo.or.kr/)
"
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