ABSTRACT
This chapter examines South Korea’s first modern resort Walkerhill that was built to attract foreign tourists and the American GIs in the region. It shows how the resort operated as a liminal space of tensions and ambiguities: as a tool for the authoritarian state to coerce a more favorable discourse of modernity through the prolonged stimulation of an imminent threat from the North on the one hand, and stirring the public’s imagination of a capitalist prosperous society while patronizing national doctrines of frugality on the other. Through a selective imposition of rules and physical boundaries, Walkerhill disrupted the locals and their basic rights to the city, functioning as a reminder of their exclusion. Ironically, however, it was also these rules that had made Walkerhill unique. In the same manner as it was identified as an icon of discrimination, Walkerhill also came to act as a zone of spatial emancipation.
