Přednášky: East Asian Urban and Regional Development

Bae-Gyoon Park is a Professor of Geography in the College of Education at Seoul National University in Korea, and the director of Center for Asian Cities (CAC) at Seoul National University Asia Center. His recent research focuses on geo-political economies of East Asian border regions and (post) developmental urbanism in East Asia. He is an editor of Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia (Blackwell 2012), Developmentalist Cities? (Brill 2019), and several Korean-written books. He has also published papers in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Critical Sociology, Political Geography, Economic Geography and Critical Asian Studies.

Special zones and territorialities of East Asian developmental states

This lecture aims to provide a conceptual framework to see the special zones in East Asia in relation to the territoriality of the state. In particular, I try to theorize the special zones in relation to the dialectics of the contradictory relations between mobility and fixity inherent in the territoriality of the modern nation state. In addition, it will be suggested to see special zones as an essential part of the spatiality of the East Asian developmental states, given the spatio-temporal contexts of the East Asian capitalist development. On the basis of these theoretical discussions, I will divide the special zones that have been developed in East Asia since the 1960s into 3 different types: 1) special zones in transition economies, 2) developmentalist special zones, 3) neo-liberal special zones.

25.3. 2019, Monday, 15.00 - 17.00 lecture and discussion, discussant prof. Petr Pavlínek

Pravá rýsovna, Albertov 6, Praha 2

Urban ideology, Gangnam-ization of Korean urban development and the hegemony of Korean capitalism

This lecture addresses the ways in which a dominant discursive and imaginary representation of what the urban should be about has shaped the forms of urban development in South Korea. In particular, it argues that. (1) the ways in which the developmental processes and life style of Gangnam, the first modern new town in Korea, have been discursively represented, have greatly influenced the formation of dominant discursive and imaginary representation of what the urban should be about in Korea, thereby resulting in the construction of a certain urban ideology, and (2) the urban ideology, constructed through certain discursive representations of Gangnam, has greatly influenced the ways in which the Korean middle class has desired, aspired and consumed particular forms of urban space, thereby resulting in the spatial replication of the Gangnam-like urban forms throughout the country.

26.3. 2019, Tuesday, 13.00 - 14.30 lecture and discussion, discussant prof. Luděk Sýkora

followed by 14.45-15.30 seminar with PhD students, Levá rýsovna, Albertov 6, Praha 2