Consuming Koreatown in Los Angeles

• In Event: 189 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Immigration and New Diversity

Abstract

A preliminary exploration of a larger multi-year ethnographic project regarding transnational visual urban spaces, in this working paper, I discuss the power of the built environment in the everyday lives of the communities that live and work in it, as well as impacting its shape as it progresses. Using Koreatown in Los Angeles as the site, I collected data through participation observations, interviews, photography, and archival materials. I examined the sites and forms of consumption of and in Koreatown through its production and the connection to the struggle for political visibility. The findings also put forth a challenge to the narrow treatment of “ethnic” urban spaces, showing that the building of the consumable spaces provide more than gaining material and cultural goods for communities beyond its assumed communities. They show how the built environments symbolize the local communities’ struggles for political power as much as the processes involved in constructing built environment itself. After providing a brief description of recent developments in Koreatown, I juxtapose a series of images, which I have photographed or collected from various sources regarding the area, with the recent discourses of the formalization of Koreatown boundaries as well as the redistricting of City Council Districts. The paper is presented in two other sections, mirroring the types and spaces of consumption, prior to examining the effects of these particular shifts.

Author

• Soo Mee Kim, University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign