1 - The Dream of Exporting Smart Cities: Understanding the State-led Urban Exportism in South Korea

This paper examines the South Korean government’s various initiatives to export its urban development experiences outside Korea to analyse the limitations of state-led urban development. To do so, this paper first reviews various state-led initiatives to export Korean urban models abroad to understand the reality of the Korean urban model. This paper then investigates a large-scale housing development project in Kuwait that was promoted jointly by the Korean and Kuwaiti governments. Since the official agreement for the new city was made in 2016, the two parties faced various challenges in implementing the project. Such challenges pose the question of whether importing and exporting urban development models abroad is actually feasible. In this regard, this paper further challenges the question of the state-led idea of exporting an urban development model to other countries where their historical and geographical contexts are different and will show geographically and historically specific urbanisation processes in East Asia and beyond.

Co-Author 1
Hyun Bang Shin, London School of Economics and Political Science