Flowing Back to the Future: The Cheongye Stream Restoration and the Remaking of Seoul
by Hong KAL
Abstract: This article concerns how the urban life in Seoul under the Lee Myung-bak government, which pursues neoliberal political economy, has come to present an immense accumulation of spectacles. It examines the Cheonggye stream restoration promoted as upgrading Seoul to become a cleaner, greener and competitive global city. The Cheonggye stream project points to a new form of governance in which the display of national progress through conventional museums or monumental structures, as previous regimes once did, is no longer effective. Instead, the representation of progress of the city and the nation is increasingly being portrayed through the popular use of urban space.
Key words: the Cheonggye stream restoration, Seoul, spectacle, urban redevelopment, public space, national identity, neoliberalism
Introduction: Public space has gained new centrality in the life of Seoul in contemporary Korea. Noticing the political potential as well as the threat of public space, in 2005 the government formally designated the area in front of the City Hall as the Seoul plaza and opened it with an official spectacle, "Hi Seoul Festival". With the construction of the Kwanghwa square in 2009 in front of the Kyǒngbok palace of the Chosǒn dynasty and the new city hall building expected to be completed in 2012 in a design more transparent and open to the public, downtown Seoul is becoming a city of "public spaces." In the remaking of the city through a display of people and participation, the most prestigious and controversial site is probably the new Cheonggye stream. While the Cheonggye stream restoration was aimed at making Seoul a cleaner, greener and competitive global city, it actively employs discourses of restoration, history and people. It is a site that stages images of the collective national body rooted in shared ancestry and historical experience. It makes the current urban transformation historically necessary and even natural and frames collective national subjectivity within the mutually constituting narratives of nationalism and globalization.
Full Article, http://japanfocus.org/site/view/3556
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