Policy, Place, and People in the Making of Agro City Seoul, South Korea

This research investigates the process of remaking Nodeulseom, in Seoul, South Korea, into a globally recognizable urban agriculture site, with a core aim to understand the nature of place-making procesess and the role of urban cultivation. Built on geographical literature on urban cultivation sites, including 'community gardens', this research's analytical attention is focused upon the nexus of policy, place, and people. Post-structural relational perspectives are also employed in order to address the problem of limited relational sensibility in existing studies, which are largely focused on territorial/scalar politics. Drawing upon interviews and archival data, this study finds that the 'project urban cultivation site' is a combined effect of the evolving governance of urban planning and policymaking in Seoul with the emergence of knowledgeable civil society vis a vis urban agriculture activism. The local governance is shifting away from spatial Keynesianism towards competitive urbanism, but the progress of local autonomy is as much important as capitalist accumulation in Seoul. Early urban agriculture activism is attributable to transnational learning and local modifications of Cuban practices in the mid-2000s, but it has been reshaped by Seoul-based advocates of North American-style community gardening. With respect to urban cultivation, Nodeulseom is found to become a place of reflection where middle to upper-middle class cultivators reshape and reconstitute their life through non-capitalist agricultural economic practices and emergent community experiences. However, the lay cultivators' community experiences are different from meanings and expectation of community garden policy advocates, whose interest is aligned to design professionals and neoliberal urban policy. With these empirical findings, this research also sheds some new lights on geographical studies of urban cultivation site, competitive urban governance, policy mobility, and place-making.