7 - Re-emerging Civic Urbanism: The EvolvingState–Civil Society Relations in Community Buildingin Seoul

Summary

Abstract

State and markets drove urban development inSouth Korea for decades, giving little voice tocitizens. Recently, citizens have becomeincreasingly engaged in shaping their livingenvironment. While the enabling role of the statein expanding citizen participation is wellacknowledged, the importance of communitymovements has been overlooked. The chapterexplores community movements in Seoul and theirrelations with the state to better understandtheir contribution to the recent surge of civicurbanism in the city. Comparison of neighbourhoodcommunity building in Seoul shows that civicurbanism, while marginalized in the past, hasre-emerged as an integral part of urbangovernance. The chapter also suggests that thegrowing institutionalization of civic urbanism canweaken its transformative potential to buildinclusive and resilient neighbourhoods andcities.

Keywords: Citizen participation,civic urbanism, community building, communitymovements, state involvement

Introduction

State and markets drove urban development in SouthKorea (hereafter Korea) for decades, giving littlevoice to the citizens. Recently, citizens havebecome increasingly engaged in shaping their livingenvironment. Growing citizen participation could beattributed to evolving state–civil societyrelations, which have gradually shifted fromconflictive and excluding towards more inclusive. Onthe one hand, ‘[a]voiding violence and engaging thestate is becoming a new rule’ for the civil societyin Korea (Kim, 2011: 154). On the other hand, thestate is trying to build a partnership with thecivil society and expand citizen participation toaddress diverse social, economic, environmental, andpolitical challenges in Korean cities (Cho andKrižnik, 2017). Examples of citizen participation inshaping the living environment – which this volumeand chapter recognize as civic urbanism – includeenvironmental and heritage conservation, localcooperatives, collaborative placemaking, communitybuilding in neighbourhoods, village art, urbangardening, or temporary street markets andneighbourhood festivals (Cho, Križnik, and Hou, thisvolume).

Civic urbanism arises from makeshift, as well as fromorganized grassroots collective action, which inWestern cities dates to the nineteenth century(Castells, 1983). In contrast, comparable collectiveaction in Korean cities emerged relatively late,mostly as a sporadic response to rapid urbanizationand its adverse consequences on the livingenvironment, and evolved under a long arm of thestate, which used to hold a strong grip over thegrassroots (Kim, 2017b; Kim and Cho, 2019; Križnik,2021).