ABSTRACT
Korea after the Asian financial crisis can be divided into two phases. The first phase involved drastic social and economic changes under neoliberalization, which went hand in hand with the decentralization reforms that had begun in the 1990s. Under the dismantling of the developmental state, cities were unleashed from the national urban network to global competition. Embracing neoliberal ideologies, local governments vied to competitively capture international attention and global capital, with their strategies often taking the form of urban megaprojects, as introduced in the previous chapter. This rush of competitive city development efforts that were widespread in the 2000s, however, was not to last long. Megaprojects soon lost their steam amid Korea’s recent years of growth that was slow compared to its past of rapid industrializing and urbanizing. As the country’s economy and population growth continuously spiraled downward, and especially as the rapidly worsening inequality became a notable problem in the society, the “growth-first” ideology finally began to lose its legitimacy. A demand for a society with a different development paradigm became prevalent, which has been clearly reflected in the transformations that Seoul’s governance and policies have undergone with its new progressive mayor. While this chapter explains the shifting paradigm based on the case of Seoul, other Korean cities have also been increasingly putting forward policies that they argue to be “citizen-centered” (e.g., Kim 2014; Yoo 2015). The more recent trend of aspiring to emphasize other values than growth separates the Korean society of the current decade from the first ten years of the twentieth century, which had still been very much oriented to the growth-centered paradigms. The current decade deserves to be distinguished as a second phase after the first phase of neoliberalizing Korea.
