ABSTRACT
South Korea’s urban transformation can be characterized by its heavy dependence on what might be termed a “property-based urban development model”. Speculative urbanization, verticalization, accumulation of land rents and the displacement of poor land users are the key features of such a model, which entails unequal redistribution of development gains in favor of property investors and builders. The role of the developmental state was influential, nurturing the growth of real estate capital and the middle class that sustained the Korean experience of property-based urban development. The authoritarian developmental state initially resorted to the use of state power and oppression to realize the urban development that accompanied widespread (physical and exclusionary) displacement and dispossession of extant land users, eventually resorting to the emerging hegemony of property to sustain property-based urban development. By drawing lessons from such experience for urbanizing societies in the Global South, this chapter calls for a contextual understanding of South Korea’s urban development experience and the need for investment in “social infrastructure” to construct a just and inclusive society—a society where the wealth created in the course of urban development is controlled by the public as a collective asset to be spent according to need rather than for the sake of accumulation.
