Making and Remaking Gentrification: The Case of Korea Re-inventing Commercial Tenants as Activists Against Gentrification

• In Event: 031 - Section on Asia and Asian America Paper Session. Social Change and Resistance in Asia and Asian America

Abstract

In this paper, I study the social construction of gentrification. I analyze how certain sites under certain social conditions become recognized as “gentrification problems” that demand state intervention or attention from social activism. Different categorical groups compete to define themselves as worthy of protection against the market’s tendency to uproot lives. How to identify the “gentrification problem” is itself political, contested, and subject to change.
Korea provides an optimal site to investigate this social construction as the delineation of those who signify the gentrifiers and the gentrified has changed over time. Korea’s previous tenants’ movement, in the 1980s, similar to the movements in many Western countries, was a movement resisting eviction by urban poor residential tenants. However, in the 2000s, commercial tenants have been reevaluated as major victims of gentrification. Moreover, the commercial tenants have formed a collective consciousness and organized against the market’s encroachment on their space. While the longstanding organization of the urban poor is dwindling in this organizational power and social influence, the movement against gentrification in Korea seeing its rebound following the lead of commercial tenant. I ask why.
By examining the empirical question, I tackle the broader theoretical question: Under what conditions do we witness the formation of a new class-consciousness against the market from those who were previously fragmented and apolitical? Under what conditions do such new movement actors gain legitimacy, as indicated by their ability to develop alliances with outside actors? To explore this research question, I employ comparative historical and ethnographic methods.

Author

• Yewon Andrea Lee