Envisioning Seoul as a World City: The Cultural Politics of the Hong-dae Cultural District

This article explores how the vision of a world city influences local cultural politics, by looking at an attempt to construct a cultural quarter in Seoul, South Korea. The Hong-dae area of Seoul has a reputation as a vibrant place of urban amenities, emerging cultural forms, and neighbourhoods of cultural workers and artists. In 2003, the city government announced a policy to create a Cultural District in the area. Subsequently, local conflict over defining Hong-dae culture emerged, and the plan was later postponed. This study elucidates how the proposed policy, framed by a vision of Seoul as a world city, led local actors to territorialise, fossilise, ethnicise and capitalise Hong-dae culture. It argues that competition for world city status may politicise and territorialise urban cultural scenes, rather than enhancing the urban amenities of diversity, openness and tolerance.     

Emerging opportunities: nanoelectronics and engineering research in a South Korean university

The Seoul National University Nanoelectronics Institute (SNI) was established in 1996 by an interdisciplinary team of university researchers working together to develop a practical fabrication method for ‘tera-level’ single-electron semiconductor devices. The technical and organizational experiment of the SNI ended abruptly with the Asian financial crisis of 1997 as LG Semiconductor, SNI's patron, faced difficulties. This paper places this episode within the historical context of the development of science and technology in post-liberation South Korea as it coped with the overwhelming forces of globalization since the late 1970s. As the global high-tech trade war escalated in the 1980s, the South Korean government pursued the ‘technology drive policy,’ which emphasized the importance of directed basic research in university laboratories. The increased public and private support for university research transformed a few elite universities from teaching-oriented to research-focused institutions, especially in engineering and science. The new generation of research-intensive academics spearheaded the new national strategy of leapfrogging into the cutting-edge of global technology for the first time in the nation’s modern history.