1 - Foodscaping Metropolitan Asia: Exploring the Framework through Foodscape Construction in Seoul, South Korea

The Foodscaping Asia book series, and its attached panels proposed for ICAS 13, ‘scape’ some of the most intriguing metropolitan food environments in Asia. Through the lens of South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, this paper introduces the unique Foodscaping framework that sits at the core of the Foodscaping Asia venture using representative examples from original fieldwork. In order to tie together the various presentations of this panel into a coherent whole, this paper begins proceedings by demonstrating the bespoke framework of macro-, micro-, and nano-leveled foodscaping analyses which participants on the panel employ. Taking Seoul as a macro-foodscape (or macro-scape), this paper drills into some of the city’s innumerable micro-scapes; such as the city’s metro network, within which countless individual incidences and locations, here termed nano-scapes, exist, such as the particular branch of Deli Manjoo, a street-style stall selling freshly baked custard buns to commuters, students, and tourists passing through Hongdae underground station. Through representative examples such as the above arranged into a network of micro- and nano-scapes, I cut a slice of Seoul’s culinary terrain and analyze its intricately woven combination of traditional, contemporary, and hybrid food discourses. In doing so, this paper illustrates the benefits of this unique framework in tying together multimodal evidences and interdisciplinary analyses relevant to urban foodscapes, assessing comparability between seemingly-disparate foodscapes around the city, and clearly establishing the links between individual case studies to give a cross-sectional glance into the multifaceted and diverse foodscape of the South Korean capital.