Songdo (South Korea), a mega-project in the making: residential neighborhoods of an urban utopia

Lecture by IIAS fellow Dr. Valérie Gelézeau (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris).

Near Seoul, a new city emerges on a vast reclaimed zone from the sea: Songdo, a mega-urban project that is to house about 200 000 inhabitants by 2020. In the globalized competition of large metropolises, this new “International City” is part of the South Korean public policies that try to promote the Seoul capital region as a major hub in North East Asia. The development of Songdo also derives from the opening to foreign investments that followed the financial crisis of 1998 and is at the core of so-called “IFEZ” (Incheon Free Economic Zone). In the programmatic or analytic discourse of planners and developers, Songdo appears as an urban utopia of the 21st century, combining digital technologies (“U-City”, “smart city”) and sustainable development (“green city”). Today, over 70 000 people already settled in – and live between construction sites, brand new skyscrapers, or a public space often referring to foreign locations (the “Central Park”).

This lecture intends to expose the preliminary findings of a research aiming at analyzing the process of place construction in a mega-project typical of Asian contemporary urban development. Anchored in a geographical perspective and grounded on ethnographic research, it will particularly focus on residential neighborhoods where the planning of housing and public facilities meets the actual practices of the pioneering residents of the new city.    

About the speaker

Valérie Gelézeau is associate professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris), within the Centre for Korean Studies, and currently affiliated fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. Her research addresses the various dimensions of space as a social construct in contemporary Korea, via various perspectives including urban geography, cultural geography, regional geography and geopolitics. She is the author of Ap’at’ŭ konghwaguk (“The Republic of Apartments”, Seoul, Humanitas, 2007, a research focusing on the development of apartment complexes in Seoul since the 1970s), Atlas de Séoul (2011, a geographical monograph of Seoul as a megacity) and, with Koen De Ceuster and Alain Delissen, she edited De-bordering Korea. Tangible and intangible legacies of the Sunshine Policy (Routledge 2013).

EHESS webpage: http://crc.ehess.fr/index.php?170

IIAS webpage : http://www.iias.nl/profiles/val%C3%A9rie-gel%C3%A9zeau

About IIAS Lunch Lectures

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