ABSTRACT
Land Readjustment was a model of urban planning specific to the German context, often referred to in legal parlance as “Lex Adickes.” Resulting from the financial deficit of a late-developed country, this model provided an effective means of comprehensive urban restructuring that later proved popular in East Asian countries, especially in Imperial Japan. The so-called German turn in Japan’s project of Westernization had been under way since the 1880s, but land readjustment was only partially implemented on the Japanese mainland; rather, it proved its greatest utility in Japan’s overseas colonies. In the colonial primate city of Seoul Japanese authorities instrumentalized this European technique for the purpose of colonial domination. The advent of modern urban space was nothing less than the advent of a new principle of rule, under which nothing was allowed to deviate from a total matrix of time and space. These basic trends continued unabated in post-liberation Seoul. The land policies of the Park Jǒng-Hee military government focused on supporting state-dominated economic development rather than on the equitable distribution of ownership, and thereby this authoritarian model of urban planning, although originally of Prussian provenance, pervaded the urban milieu of postcolonial Korea in the form of unconcealed market-oriented economic exploitation.
