3 - The Dynamics of the Urban Commons and the Urban Formation in the South Korean Context

Presentation Abstract
This paper is an academic attempt to analyze the speculative nature of urbanization in South Korea, focusing on the concepts of ‘the urban commons’ and ‘the urban formations’, and to explore the possibility of a transition strategy to an alternative urban model. The concept of the urban commons helps us perceive the speculative nature of the South Korean urbanization promoted in the context of developmentalism and provides conceptual clues for envisioning an alternative vison of a good city to embody the ‘city for all’, ‘enabling city', ’city as oeuvre’, and ‘right to the city’. In addition, the ‘urban formation’, which is  reconceptualizes Antonio Gramsci's idea of ‘a historical bloc’ and Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe’s ‘a hegemonic formation’ at the urban scale, can provide urban studies with an analytical framework that can practically restore the possibility of ‘urban transformation’ that is lacking in the concept of ‘assemblage’, which understands the city as a sum of contingent and complex combinations of disparate elements. Applying these two concepts to the case of the Korean Land and Housing Corporation’s private housing supply policy and the Gyeongui-seon commons movement, this paper seeks to analyze the phenomenon of speculative urbanization in South Korea and explore the possibility of resetting the trajectory of the urbanization through political actions between state, city, and stakeholders at the level of the urban commons.