On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis

This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of "core location," a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and "Asia as method," a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways in which a place can be studied in the increasingly globalizing world. Examining cases set in Chinatown, the Jeju English education city, rural areas of migrant wives, greenbelts, anti-poverty activist sites, places of community activism, and textile factories in Korea, each chapter develops a relational understanding of a place, in which a place is analyzed as a constellation of local and global forces and processes that interact and contradict in particular ways. Each chapter also explores multiple modes of urban marginality, and discusses how understanding them shapes the methods of academic praxis for social justice causes and decolonial scholarship. This book is the outcome of several years of interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogues among scholars based in geography, architecture, anthropology, and urban politics.