Jesook Song

Laam Hae

This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of "core location," a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and "Asia as method," a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways in which a place can be studied in anthe increasingly globalizeding world. Examining cases set in Chinatown, the Jeju English Eeducation Ccity, rural areas of migrant wives, greenbelts, anti-poverty and community activist sites, places of community activism, rural areas home to large numbers of migrant women, and Korea’s Chinatowns, greenbelts, and textile factories in Korea, each chapterthe collection develops a relational understanding of a place, in which a place is analyzed as a constellation of local and global forces and processes that interact and contradict in particular ways. Each chapter also explores multiple modes of urban marginality, and discusses how understanding them shapes the methods of academic praxis for social justice causes and decolonialized scholarship. This book is the outcome of several years of interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogues among scholars based in geography, architecture, anthropology, and urban politics.

Core Location as Method and Praxis

On the Margins of Urban South Korea

In The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City, Hae explores how nightlife in New York City, long associated with various subcultures of social dancing, has been recently transformed as the city has undergone the gentrification of its space and the post-industrialization of its economy and society. This book offers a detailed analysis of the conflicts emerging between newly transplanted middle-class populations and different sectors of nightlife actors, and how these conflicts have led the NYC government to enforce “Quality of Life” policing over nightlife businesses. In particular, it provides a deep investigation of the zoning regulations that the municipal government has employed to control where certain types of nightlife can or cannot be located. Hae demonstrates the ways in which these struggles over nightlife have led to the “gentrification of nightlife,” while infringing on urban inhabitants’ rights of access to spaces of diverse urban subcultures – their “right to the city.” The author also connects these struggles to the widely documented phenomenon of the increasing militarization of social life and space in contemporary cities, and the right to the city movements that have emerged in response. The story presented here involves dynamic and often contradictory interactions between different anti/pro-nightlife actors, illustrating what “actually existing” gentrification and post-industrialization looks like, and providing an urgent example for experts in related fields to consider as part of a re-theorization of gentrification and post-industrialization.

Regulating Spaces of Social Dancing in New York

The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City

Bridging area and postcolonial studies with the critical political economy of South Korea.

Laam Hae

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