4 - Urban Commons and Enabling Cities: Social Housing as an Enabling Infrastructure in South Korea

Facing the unprecedented challenges, such as climate change and socio-economic crisis, there has been growing recognition of the necessity to create a new system for communal support and cooperation. With the rise of urban society, however, the existing state-centered and territorialized system of publicness would not be able to properly respond to the current crises. An alternative system of publicness can be found at the urban scale. Following recent suggestions made by commons literature, this paper argues that the 'enabling city', which empowers people as active citizens to autonomously engage in urban governance and the processes of collectively co-producing goods and services for their needs, can provide a new opportunity to create an alternative system for communal support and cooperation. In particular, it discusses how enabling cities can be developed by the commons-based creation and provision of urban infrastructures that enable people to reproduce their lives autonomously. More specifically, it will examine the ways in which the community-based social housing system has been developed as an enabling infrastructure in South Korea.

Co-Author 1
Bae-Gyoon Park, Seoul National University (SNU)