Traveling Policy: Place Marketing and the Neoliberal Turn of Urban Studies in South Korea

Abstract

This paper examines how South Korean policy field in the 1990s adopted Western style place-marketing strategies, and put them into practice as cultural revitalization programs of different Korean cities. The emergence of place marketing in Korea as a new paradigm for local growth stems from Korea’s transition from a developmental to a post-developmental system, which was a conjunctural outcome of democratization, neoliberalization and administrative decentralization of the early 1990s. This paper interrogates how place marketing traveled from the West to Korea in this context. In particular, it attends to how critical urbanists in Korea became a vanguard in mobilizing and developing place marketing for different local governments, perceiving it as a progressive alternative to the authoritarian, economy-centric developmentalist urban paradigm of the previous decades, despite its entanglement in the neoliberal urban paradigm of the West. The paper also examines the contradictions and conflicts that place-marketing policies have generated across different places in Korea.