ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the background of the book and the key arguments of its contributors. Recently, the Korean government, armed with its developmental success, has sought an enhanced role in the world of international aid by building the “Korean model”. In this model-building effort, the area of urban development has played an important role. However, the Korean urban development experience has often been reinterpreted in a way that dissociates it from its historical, socioeconomic and political contexts, repackaging it as a commodity in pursuit of a narrowly defined national interest. The authors critically review the recent model-building effort in the urban ODA of Korea, ranging from the “Global Saemaul” strategy to “city export” discourse. They argue how and why these decontextualized versions of the Korean urban development experience could be misleading for countries in the Global South. As a suggestion for academic and policy circles in general, and as a guiding principle for subsequent chapters in particular, the authors underline the need to reconsider the Korean urban development experience by means of (1) contextualizing the Korean urban development experience with a focus on the underlying conditions that shaped the adoption and implementation of particular policies; (2) adopting a balanced view of the Korean urban development experience, recognizing both the positive and negative aspects of the government’s interventions; and (3) going beyond the conventional technology-oriented and business-interested approach, reinterpreting urban development as comprising social institutions embedded in society.
