The birth of urban modernity in Gangnam, Seoul

摘要

Cultivating a nationalist stance of'ethics', and thereby producing a strong legitimacy to set up an effective model for development, Gangnam's planners adopted a set of pre-emptory policies in order to reshape the area into the representative urban image of the future nation. On the one hand, in order to complement rapidly-expanding industrialisation, they employed the tyranny of defensive emergency and rationalised its use of authoritarian power in Land Repartition. On the other hand, Apatu and Neighbourhood Units - novel dwelling environments and a medium to convey the national trajectory of new urban modernity - were utilised in order to create a class structure locked in the new spatiality of Gangnam. Rather than incrementally improving dense working-class sectors, the state authorities explored clean slate urbanisation where these ideas worked as a strategy to mobilise the housing demands of emerging middle-class and their socioeconomic desires. In doing so communitarian ideals of collective living and the modernist proposition for a classless society through vertical living were transformed into a highly-materialist culture and a core spatial mechanism for reproducing social relations. In utter contrast to the intentions of the early modernists, the development of Gangnam reversed the role of the state, and in so doing totalitarian urban policy combined the 'will to be a nation' with the selfish desire for personal gain. Erasing any meaningful public sphere, the highly authoritarian and militaristic state occupies an important part of the 'Koreanised' developmental story as exemplified in Land Repartition, Apatu, and Neighbourhood Units. Through a critical assessment of the birth of Gangnam, one can register the contemporary urban consciousness as expressed in the song 'Gangnam Style' from an ethical and political standpoint. Without people's will and ability to steer the public sphere towards a common end, this dismaying and disheartening consumerist space of Gangnam, which grew out of South Korea's industrial and urban modernity during the 1960s and 1970s, will continue to remain 'a means of exploitation, or the newest fad of the richest class, the symbol of a profitable, spectacular efficiency'. The transformation of the principles of modernist architecture in Gangnam has shown what it could become without such ethical basis. Gangnam's hyper faddish youth and glitzy residential towers stand today as a total betrayal to the ideals of early modernists who had deplored speculative desire and muted social concerns of the private sectors, and trusted that the sound-will of their welfare state is the only solution to those urban 'ills'. In the place of public responsibility, the South Korean state embraced the unchecked ambition for private wealth by heightening the capitalist urban culture of Gangnam through encouraging speculation, vanity, and the drive to surpass others.