Description

Speculative property bubble has become a lived experience of many urbanites in the global South and in particular, East Asia that experienced condensed urbanisation under strong states. East Asian economies have been paying a committed attention to property development, aiming to maximise rent extraction through commodification of space and yet resulting in gentrification, domicide and dispossession. Mega-projects are launched to produce brand new towns sometimes labelled as eco- or smart cities, despite the reality that these projects usually turn out to be nothing more than real estate speculation. The urbanisation experience is negatively shared by indigenous populations whose dwellings and farmlands for survival are destructed to make ways for new real estate investments. Given the substantial impact on the built environment and especially the existing residential landscape, the contemporary speculative urbanisation in East Asia or the global East, and to a large extent in other economies increasingly subject to planetary urbanisation, witnesses harmful concentration of resources in fixed assets, especially the real estate sector, creating housing poverty of affluence.

Keynote Speech by Hyun Bang Shin, Associate Professor, Geography and Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science
“The Political Economy of Speculative Urbanisation in East Asia”

Hyun Bang Shin is Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at London School of Economics and Political Science. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of speculative urbanisation, the politics of redevelopment and displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city, and mega-events as urban spectacles, with particular attention to Asian cities. His publications include an edited volume Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015) and a monograph Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016). His on-going book projects include a monograph Making China Urban (Routledge), and a co-edited volume Contesting Urban Space in East Asia (Palgrave Macmillan).

Panelists:
Laam Hae, Associate Professor, Political Science, York University
The “Construction State” Unbounded: Variegated Neoliberal Urbanization and Struggles over Greenbelt Deregulation in the Seoul Metropolitan Region
Jesook Song, Professor, Anthropology, Interim Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto
Dialogue of “Asia as Method” and Urban Studies: Hyunjang (Core-Location) and Social Humanities
Hae Yeon Choo, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Toronto
Speculative Self-making: Class Mobility, Homeownership, and Real Estate Investment in South Korea

Description

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a “transborder redress culture.” A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique— of “comfort women” redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

Yoneyama is Professor of Women and Gender Studies Institute and Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto. She is the author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California Press, 1999), Violence, War, Redress: Politics of Multiculturalism (published in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2003), and a co-edited volume, Perilous Memories: Asia-Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001).

Books will be available for sale. Event runs 3 PM – 5 PM, reception follows.

Description

This talk offers a relational analysis of distinct yet linked forms of U.S. colonial domination in Asia and the Pacific rather than a focus on one form that tends to elide the other. It demonstrates how the nexus of U.S. militarism, imperialism, and settler colonialism – a conjunction theorized as settler modernity – is largely structured through temporal and spatial exceptions. The temporal exception takes the form of debt imperialism, a process through which the U.S. is able to roll over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conform to the homogenous time of repayment. The spatial exception, a locus in which forms of sovereignty at once proliferate and negate one another, is constituted through sites such as POW camps, refugee camps, military bases and camptowns, and unincorporated as well as incorporated territories. The talk focuses on the Korean War POW camp in particular through an analysis of Ha Jin’s novel War Trash.

Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and positions: asia critique.

Description

This paper traces the rise of environmental consciousness and movements in Korea after 1945. In particular, it locates the origins of environmentalism in rural Korea with agricultural farming communities and cooperatives, such as Hansalim, leading the way. In laying out their philosophies and practices, this paper shows how these agricultural-based movements embodied and materialized a form of anarchism. It concludes with a discussion on how their forms of an environmental-based anarchism has influenced contemporary drives for creating an alternative economy for social renewal.

Albert L. Park is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. As a historian of modern Korea and East Asia, his current research interest is centered on the relationship between culture and political economy and alternative forms of modernity. He is the author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea and is the co-editor of Encountering Modernity: Christianity and East Asia. His next research project examines the origins of environmental movements in modern Korea and their relationship to anarchism and democracy. Dr. Park is Co-Principal Investigator of EnviroLab Asia—a Henry Luce Foundation-funded initiative at the Claremont Colleges that studies environmental issues in Asia through an interdisciplinary lens. He is the recipient of three Fulbright Fellowships and fellowships from the Korea Foundation and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. A native of Chicago, he received his B.A. with honors from Northwestern University, an M.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.