ABSTRACT
In South Korea, commons have raised expectations among activists and researchers about how practices and theories in critical urban geography can be synthesized. Despite the wide use of the concept since the mid-2010s, there is no agreed Korean translation of commons, indicating the ongoing discussions on what commons refers to. This chapter introduces how commons are understood, experienced, and practiced in the particular locality of Seoul, by presenting the case of the Gyeonguiseon Gongyuji movement from 2016 to 2020. The movement began when activists, evictees, and interested supporters squatted in a square, built on an old railway in the city center of Seoul, to claim people’s planning and use of the state-owned land against private development. Many of the squatters were nomads, those who could not stay rooted in a city due to rising property prices, displacement, eviction, and job uncertainty. As a spatial movement and a community, Gongyuji overlaps with conventional urban social movements in South Korea that evolved around property, and also with local activism based on geographically defined community. However, Gongyuji radically diverges from them, in that it cracked the often territorially imagined subject of commons, including categories such as residents or tenants. In this chapter, we narrate the case of Gongyuji to question whether commons are possible for nomads who cannot afford to settle down but desire to make themselves present. Gongyuji shows pitfalls and possibilities that commons encounter—in a contemporary city where geographic rootedness as a condition for making commons is not replicable.
