Seoul, Korea's Global City

A New Urbanism for Upward Mobility

Kyoung-Ho Shin, Michael Timberlake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351347457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

Seoul, as one of Asia's rising global cities, has been a place where enormous changes in politics, industry, and culture have taken place over the last five decades. This book explores the new urbanism in Seoul from the perspective of global political economy, focusing on the contexts in which the city has witnessed the transformation of its population structure, such as the rise of the global urban middle class and the city's increased nodal function in commodity chains. The burgeoning signs of Seoul's status as a global city are discussed in terms of transnational tourism and the frequency of study abroad, the immigrant community, and cross-border cultural flows. Examining the labour structures within the city, economic growth policy, the role of advanced information technology, and neoliberal urban development, the authors also examine the local response in the city to its emerging status. A study of the development of the Korean capital and its deep embeddedness in the world economy, Seoul, Korea's Global City will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and economics with interests in political economy, urban studies and Asian studies.

1 Seoul in the global economy

(Re)conceptualizing a political economy of urban development

Introduction

As is the case with large cities in nations of economic strength, it is instructive to understand Seoul with regard to its embeddedness in the global economy and impacts of it on people’s lives within the city. Large cities including global cities today have emerged as the strategic centers displaying political, cultural, and economic operations (Sassen 2010a). In particular, large (global) cities are the fulcrum points of global shift, such as declining manufacturing cities of the global North and the recent rise of industrializing cities of the global South. Such global shifts affect the city’s social fabric, for example, in terms of employment structure and income inequality, gender relations, residential patterns, and so on. In studying Seoul as an Asian global city, it is reasonable to focus on how changes in its social fabric correspond to the city’s participation in processes of economic globalization. Indeed, Seoul has been tremendously influential to the country as a whole as the site of greater opportunity for jobs, capital mobilization, political influence, and education in national and global contexts.¹ However, despite the accumulation of studies on the urbanization process of Seoul in relation to globalization for the past decades, it is undeniable that only a few studies analyze it in a global city² frame of reference, drawing on the world/global city literature. Little scholarly attention has been paid to how specifically and in what ways urban issues are connected to the global economy through the regional dynamics of Asia. To compensate, we begin by positing a theoretical framework which encompasses urban issues that are interrelated to each other domestically and globally.

We will approach this task using the new global political economy approach ³ focusing on how the city has developed in terms of labor structure, uneven urban development, global city-ness, the role of state in the process of integration into the global economy, people’s everyday lives in the city and its impacts, and nodal functions of Seoul in the region of East Asia within the world city network. First, we will review research on urbanization from the political economy perspective, global/world city, and the state’s role in urban development for the study of Seoul. Guided by hypotheses and assumptions of such urban scholars as Smith and Timberlake (1992), Sassen (2010b), and Friedmann (1995), we consider the importance of Seoul’s rising status as a new node in the global flow of travelers and cultural products. We conclude by briefly discussing how the conceptual framework we deploy is relevant to the Asian contexts of global economic restructuring.

Urbanization in the global/world economy

In the 1970s, a new perspective in urban sociology, what we now call the political economy perspective, emerged, which departed from urban ecology, which had itself been a dominant conceptual framework for urban change in earlier decades. Walton (1976:302–303) described the theoretical perspective under the Marxian influence as justifying the analysis of the city as a “focus” rather than a “locus” and moving the analytic focus toward urban socio-spatial organization, urban politics and social movements. One of the significant theoretical approaches was established from Wallerstein’s (1979) world system perspective⁴ during this time period, which has contributed to broadening our understanding of global dimensions of local changes. Urban theorists applying the world system perspective argue that continuing globalization of economic activities creates an international division of labor among global cities and local ones. The pattern of urban development within a country is an important part of social change, which is greatly shaped by global economic processes. Important features of a particular city reflect the national economy’s structure but are also closely related to the city’s peculiar embeddedness in the world economic system, as shown in Figure 1.1.

As one of the other systematic attempts to understand the patterns of urbanization from the political economy of world system perspective, Timberlake’s edited collection, Urbanization in the World-Economy (1985), examined labor force structure (Chapters 4 and 15), urban primacy (Chapter 8), and systems of world cities (Chase-Dunn in Chapter 12). Sassen (1991), in her seminal work, The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo, explained that the global cities⁵ play the key roles of command and control, such as the services of banking, accounting, and law, for the global economy. Global cities develop a unique feature of employment structure – the widening gap within the city between top managerial elites and large numbers of marginalized low-skilled workers, which results in a growing income gap within cities. It is also pointed out that global cities are more integrated with the world economy than with their own national economy, which bears the consequence of the growth of regional inequality. Friedmann (1995) argued that the wealth and power of the global capitalist class are well represented through their huge wealth and the income gap within global cities where large numbers of immigrants from rural areas and abroad are found. Global cities are the small number of cities where “the organizations exerting pre-eminent control over the most important functions in the global political economy” (Timberlake and Ma 2007:259). The restructuring of the global economy demands the creation of new types of cities that coordinate a decentralized production and the centralized controlling functions simultaneously (Sassen 2001).

Figure 1.1 Map of urbanization in the world economic system

Source: Adapted from Smith and Timberlake (1992).

Which of the world’s large cities warrant examination in light of such a global political economy approach? The scholarship on comparative urbanization is not in complete agreement, but most scholars would say that the study of nearly all large cities justifies such emphasis. In The Rise of the Network Society (2000), Castells conceptualizes “the global space of flows” as the spatial architecture of the world system based on the connectivity of commodities, media communication and information, and strategic decision-making. The metropolitan areas of global cities play crucial roles for the management of global economic dispersal and integration in the decentralized network of the informational economy. David Smith (1995) characterized rapid urban growth of developing countries as uneven growth, urban primacy, and economic inequality and social stagnation, and he links these conditions to the subordinate positions of these regions in the global political economy. With respect to global cities beyond the core, Gugler (2004) offers a comparative political economy approach in a volume with 12 cases of world cities in a second tier. The cities in the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are: Shanghai, Seoul, Bangkok, Cairo, Mexico City, Moscow, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, Bombay, and Johannesburg. He makes three important points: 1) world cities in developing countries are extraordinarily diverse in their histories and in present political and economic circumstances; 2) the living standards of a significant proportion of the population in the cities has dramatically improved, and simultaneously the inequalities have been exacerbated within the cities; and 3) the role of government and civil society needs to be brought into the analysis of world cities. On the global cities in developing societies, he remarked:

Cities beyond the core are important. In demographic terms, most of the world’s largest cities are found outside of the core. According to the most recent estimates, twelve out of the world’s sixteen largest cities, each with more than 10 million inhabitants, were outside the core in the year of 2000. […] In terms of “new global dimensions” emphasized by the discussion of world cities, most of these cities concentrate command functions and are key locations for finance and specialized services for firms. They “function as regional or global nodes in the world economy,” they are “global cities” as defined by Sassen.

(Gugler 2004:3)

As a counter to the global school, theorists influenced by Weber (1958), such as Hill and Kim (2000), Saito and Thornley (2003), and Jacobs (2006), view that national and political-economic contexts or simply (embedded) locality, rather than global capitalism, are more decisive in determining spatial and urban development. Like others deploying the new urban political economy approach, we acknowledge the significance of the state’s role in uniquely shaping urban patterns within countries, but we assume also that global forces need to be analyzed equally (see Shin and Timberlake 2006). As the large cities in the developing world move into the orbits of the global city development trajectory, there emerges a tendency to transform cities to share common economic features, residential patterns in terms of class, and land use patterns. Globalization is transforming the large metropolitan region into a strategic site and space where the major macro-social trends are locally manifested and multiple dimensions of globalization processes are materialized in concrete and localized forms. At the same time, we are aware and sensitive to the important critique in the literature that the global approach may lead to an exaggerated tendency to see global cities in the South as converging, leading to a blurring of important differences among them (Davis 2010).

Examining conceptual issues with the case of Seoul

Following Smith and Timberlake (1992), Sassen (2010b), and Friedmann (1995:22–26), we propose several hypotheses around which to organize our discussion of Seoul in relation to globalization and, therefore, its role in the global system of cities. Those hypotheses provide a foundation for interpreting the shifting employment structure of global cities, the role of state and city, the global city system, and citizens’ roles. We modify their original assumptions in the global political economy model in order to explore the case of urban development in Seoul since the 1990s, paying more attention to its regional context, growing influences of civil society, and we suggest a new approach to cities as nodes in global city networks. With the list of hypothetical assumptions, this study of Seoul discusses major conceptual issues and urban policy concerns that are interrelated: the integration into the global economy resulting in the change of employment structure within the city, uneven urban development from capital investment/de-investment and overall rising level of inequality within the city, the role of the state in urban development, the increase of city connections through the flows of commodities and tourists, and the struggle of ordinary Koreans to forge a supportive civic culture in this unfolding global political economy.

Employment structure within the city

Cities and urban life throughout the world are shaped, to a significant degree, by their specific location and involvement in the global capitalist economy. The patterns of urbanization have much to do with how a city fits into the international division of labor and in conjunction with local systems of class, racial/ethnic, and gender relations. Seoul’s urban development has engendered its unique characteristics in employment structure that resemble those in the postindustrial global city.

In order to survive in the harsh competition of the world capitalist economy, the Korean economy has constantly adopted a strategic restructuring of industries from the light industries of the 1960s, to the heavy and chemical industries of the 1970s and electronics and information technology of the 1990s (Song 2003). Over the past decades, the city of Seoul has witnessed an employment structure characterized by a rising proportion of managerial and high-tech professionals, a shrinking sector of manufacturing jobs, and an emerging and increasing sector of ir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Seoul in the global economy: (Re)conceptualizing a political economy of urban development
• 2. Government’s economic growth policy and labor structure in Seoul
• 3. A new global urban middle class? Gangnam area
• 4. Transnational communities in the Seoul metropolitan area
• 5. New Town projects in Seoul: The neoliberal urban policy at a crossroad?
• 6. Hallyu in global culture flow: Moving cultural products between cities
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Global city hypothesis
• Appendix B: Development of New Town projects over the decade
• Appendix C: List of cultural organizations contributing to the Korean Wave
• Index