5 - Hack the Modern: A Story of Urban Commons for Collective Production in a Modern City

Presentation Abstract
This paper exemplifies a mode of urban commons that performs co-production with historically sustained urban manufacturing in Seoul’s inner city. Theoretical interpretations and perspectives on urban manufacturing districts, which can be found in most Asian metropolises, that focus on modern mass production systems that consider wage labor and large factories as the norm, fail to explain their persistence and the nature of the production in a historical context. Urban manufacturers in those cities have invented and maintained rules and practices that allow their independent labor to co-exist alongside the labor of their peers who participate in co-production. These principles of communal production have been a source of flexibility for these manufacturers to overcome the pressures of formalization (e.g., displacement) by the modern state, to adapt to changes in technological paradigms, and to reproduce themselves by expanding their production into areas where industrial society has not been able to reach. Over the history of industrialization, their technological labor has supported the formation of mass production systems, and they have reclaimed opportunities for labor and production in those modern production systems by hacking the technological mainstream and reconfiguring them. Through this case, I want to emphasize that in most cities in Asia, the myriads of self-employed workers engaged in any type of production perform their labor in a way that reproduces their lives alongside the lives of their colleagues, which is an urban commons practice, and thus they are the multitude that supports and reproduces the urban economy while remaining politically invisible.