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

Introduction

How do policies travel across different locales in different countries? Why have certain urban policies acquired a hegemonic position in the context of rapid globalization? This paper examines these questions through the case of ‘place marketing’ (or ‘city marketing’), a trend that generated buzz among geographers, urban planners and policy-makers in South Korea in the 1990s. ¹ These actors prescribed place marketing as a promising local growth strategy in an era of expanding local autonomy in Korea. In Korean academic and policy circles, place marketing mainly referred to culture-focused urban development policies and branding efforts used to enhance the image of a place – similar to the ways that it was practiced in Western cities (Kearns and Philo, 1993; Ward, 1998). As members of various think-tanks and research institutes for local governments, groups of urban planners and geographers functioned as intermediaries who studied Western place-marketing experiences, and consistently made a claim that place marketing could provide a ‘new paradigm’ (Lee MY, 2006) of local growth in Korea that would rectify urban problems generated by the developmentalist urbanization that dominated in the previous decades.

How did the coterie of urban scholars and policy makers in Korea – which I call ‘place marketers’ in this paper – come to learn place-marketing policies implemented in Western countries? What political economic contexts have these actors been situated in and influenced by? How do they frame the necessity of place marketing in the Korean urban context? And, why did a significant segment of critical urban scholars also participate in underlining the urgency of practicing place marketing in Korea? This paper explores these questions in relation to Korean cities’ transition to a post-developmentalist paradigm, and traces the contradictory outcomes of place-marketing strategies implemented in different places in Korea. I show how, rather than provoking a homogenization of policy landscapes across different locales, traveling neoliberal policies such as place-marketing practices have, as a ‘policy in motion’ (Ward, 2006), produced uneven and ‘variegated’ outcomes in these locales (Brenner et al., 2010). Nonetheless, adoption of place-marketing strategies in Korea in the early 1990s was part of neoliberal urbanization, and their implementation have produced struggles similar to those that have unfolded in neoliberalizing cities in other countries, with the consequence of constraining the scope of an autonomous and democratic politics of place in Korea.

This paper, while built on the analysis of a body of literature on place marketing published both within and outside of Korea, is also founded on the author’s previous experience in the mid to late 1990s as an urban planning practitioner and place marketer. Therefore, a crucial element of the writing and analysis here is also autoethnographical (Ellis and Bochner, 2000), in the sense that it reflects the author’s previous participation in place marketing policy circles and observation of their various practices. The author wrote her master’s degree thesis on place marketing, where she analyzed how place-marketing strategies were generating conflicts between different non-/local actors and prescribed normative solutions for what a better direction for place marketing might entail. After completing her master’s degree and before going to the US for her Ph.D. studies, she worked for an urban planning firm, and then the Seoul Research Institute (SRI), a research institute established to frame and assist policy-making processes by the Seoul municipal government. At the SRI, the author was involved in a handful of place-marketing projects that aimed at the cultural revitalization of Seoul, and also co-authored an article that pleaded to the Seoul municipal government to adopt a marketing perspective to better promote Seoul’s cultural assets (Hahn and Hae, 2001). Therefore, this paper contains an element of reflection and self-critique upon the author’s previous role as a place marketer, and how she, like her colleagues, became an agent of the globalization of neoliberal urban policy in a non-Western context.

Translocalization of Urban Cultural Policies

In postindustrial Western societies, culture has increasingly become seen as one of the essential elements that allegedly helped to resolve problems that cities confronted after deindustrialization in the 1960s and the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. The association of cities with playful cultures was said to help eliminate the image of dereliction of these cities (Holcomb, 1993). The cultural vitality of cities was also deployed as a magnet to attract labor forces to high-end service businesses that enhance cities’ economic competitiveness – the labor forces largely corresponding to Florida’s (2004) ‘creative class’. For groups like the creative class, it was argued, the prospect of experiencing urban ‘authenticity’ and the consumption of an urban lifestyle has become an important factor in their choice of habitats and workplaces (also see Ley, 1996). Commerce and institutions associated with distinctive cultural styles are also often mobilized by realtors and developers to brand neighborhoods as chic, in the hopes of resuscitating derelict real estate markets (Harvey, 2003; Tretter, 2009).

For some urban scholars, these changes have been positive in the sense that urban diversity and vibrancy has finally been restored from the sort of formalistic modernist urban planning that dominated urban aesthetics in the post-war period. This optimism, however, has not gone unchallenged. It was argued that positive appraisals of reclaimed urban vibrancy mask the reality that cultural vibrancy is primarily placed to raise the competitiveness of cities (Peck, 2005); that the urban management that these cultural strategies are part of is now heavily swayed by private interests (Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Harvey, 1989); and that urban cultural landscapes strategically mask the deepening racialized and gendered impoverishment and erosion of democracy in public space under neoliberal urbanization (MacLeod, 2002). Others have also pointed out that certain expressive activities and vernacular cultures have been policed and priced out of redeveloped urban space – supposedly a space of ‘cultural diversity’ – and have been replaced by sanitized cultural commerce (Hae, 2012; Mele, 2000; Zukin, 1982).

The importance of promotion and marketing urban cultures has been widely recognized in non-Western cities. For example, Yeoh (2005) shows how culture-led urban redevelopment and the facilitation of a culture industries sector have been major forces of change throughout Southeast Asian cities. These changes have been driven by ‘place-wars’ undertaken to attract mobile capital, international talent and tourists (Yeoh, 2005: 946). Here, efforts of ‘imagineering’ cities have often involved the promotion of international modernity together with the post-colonial imperative of ‘cultural self-determination’, as illustrated by attempts to preserve local heritage values and a sense of ‘Asian’ identity. These changes, however, have also confronted challenges from local populations. For example, in Penang, Malaysia, residents contested the process of the city being transformed into a tourist/elite-oriented habitat, where they found themselves increasingly being alienated from economic development (Teo, 2003). Locals also contested the reified notions of their ‘heritage’ and ‘history’ marketed in these developments, raising questions about the local embeddedness of this heritage and history (see also Yeoh, 2005: 952–3).

The universalization of the mandate to combine the cultural with the economic can be attributed to the reality that more and more cities in the world are now subject to intensifying global inter-urban competition (Harvey, 1989), which pressures cities to adopt strategies ‘that work’ in this particular global milieu. This explains the increasing global mobilization of neoliberal policies between different cities as ‘best practices’. While policy mobilization between cities is inter-referencing and not always unidirectional (Peck and Theodore, 2010a: 170–1), in this context neoliberal policy paradigms from the West tend to maintain their hegemonic power in knowledge/policy production. Therefore, in addition to studies of coercive forms of policy impositions by international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, recently there has emerged a body of literature that interrogates how policies are made mobile through competitive forms of policy import – that is, the competitive learning of particular types of policies originating from elsewhere by policy intermediaries, such as technocrats, technocratic aides, policy experts and consultants, policy analysts, public intellectuals, and academics (Peck, 2002; Peck and Theodore, 2010a, 2010b, 2015). These policy intermediaries participate in various circuits and sites of knowledge distribution, such as conferences, and make fact-finding trips to model cities to keep track of these programs and policies (McCann, 2008; Peck and Theodore, 2010a).

The imperatives of globalization often naturalize the urgency of implementing neoliberal policies among policy intermediaries, and these intermediaries, therefore, often form ‘epistemic communities’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015: 21–2). Peck (2002: 344) further argues that the translocalization of neoliberal policies has been characterized by ‘fast-policy’ transfers or ‘the importation of off-the-shelf program techniques’. That is, programs and policies are emulated even before in-depth, long-term studies of their effects in the original locale are conducted (Peck and Theodore, 2010b: 199), as politicians who import these programs and policies seek to implement ones that produce quickly quantifiable results that can be used for the purposes of ‘display politics’. Even if an impact study is conducted, evaluation institutions and specialists – which are often in direct or indirect institutional liaison with the ones that develop the policies – already have ideologically skewed standards of what constitute effective policies. They favor metrics that privilege short-term achievements and the reduction of costs in the public sector, and gloss over policies’ unfavorable social repercussions (Peck, 2002: 346, 352). While policy mobility has a long history, the recent translocalization of policies, it has been argued, is characterized by the increasing intensity of mediation by intermediaries, crisis-driven policy transfer, the growing inter-referencing between different locales, and the accelerating velocity of policy learning (Peck and Theodore, 2015: 3–4).

Closely related to the fast policy movement is ‘selective learning’. That is, the learning tends to focus on policies and programs closely associated with fiscal pragmatism and other neoliberal precepts, and discourages scrutinizing the underlying ideological orientations of the policies (Peck, 2001: 449). Learning also tends to be preoccupied with ‘how-to pragmatism’ (Peck, 2002: 346), such as program design features, administrative routines, techniques, and even the slogans of specific programs (Peck, 2002: 349). This type of selective learning takes an ‘apolitical’ or politically neutral form, although it actually furthers the normalization of neoliberal policy, and thus conforms to the general ‘post-political’ character of the neoliberal era (Peck, 2001: 448; Swyngedouw, 2011). In this process it is a daunting challenge for alternative, anti-neoliberal paradigms to be inserted into the major circuits of policy production, learning and transfer.

There are certainly converging currents among policies implemented in different locales, but translocalization of neoliberal policies has also been uneven and ‘variegated’ (Brenner et al., 2010). This is because various neoliberal policies adopted by actors in specific locales only partially rework and mutate existing mechanisms (often exploiting them to their advantage), and do not alter the existing institutional landscapes in their entirety. However, Brenner et al. (2010: 185) also note that successive sequences of neoliberalization in the last few decades have generated important cumulative impacts upon these uneven institutional landscapes, and that the ‘uneven development of neoliberalization’ in the 1980s across different locales was followed, in the 1990s, by a ‘neoliberalization of uneven development’. The deepening of global neoliberalization, as such, has also been enabled by the ‘growing inter-dependence, inter-referentiality and co-evolution’ of neoliberal policies in the process of their circulation across different localities (Brenner et al., 2010: 209). Therefore, while attending to how neoliberalization is variegated and path-dependently evolving, and multiple, locally contingent factors co-determine neoliberalization in particular places in the process of policy exchange, it is also important not to lose sight of how the unevenness of neoliberalization has been progressively re-patterned to form a broader neoliberal meta-regime across different locales.

On the other hand, some studies have examined the political, economic and social contexts out of which actors in non-Western locales opt to usher in culture-led developments. Kanai and Ortega-Alcázar (2009: 485), for instance, show how the popularity of culture-led urban regeneration in Latin America is the outcome of ‘concurrent, contingent and often contradictory processes of democratization and neoliberalization’. Following political democratization and administrative decentralization, culture-led urban regeneration in Latin American cities emerged as one strategy of social development in disadvantaged areas that had been shorn of governmental subsidies for proper cultural resources. In cities like Mexico City, the culture-led urban regeneration was also expected to reinforce civic identities and the sense of belonging to the city through enhanced citizens’ participation (Kanai and Ortega-Alcázar, 2009: 487). Within these contexts, progressive social movements and grassroots activists in Latin American cities took up the initiatives of culture-led redevelopment and on some occasions, were empowered by various public institutions to direct cultural policy towards socially inclusive goals (Kanai and Ortega-Alcázar, 2009: 486). The cultural initiatives begun by these progressive groups have been limited in their achievements, however. Their efforts were hindered as they were situated within the neoliberal context of limited public intervention, and these groups have, therefore, had to resort to the private sector, which transformed the process to make it congruent with the latter’s interests. In addition, culture-oriented initiatives, even if they were developed by progressives with reformist objectives, have often been exploited to boost the competitiveness of cities at the expense of redistributive social goals and the empowerment of local cultural sectors (Kanai and Ortega-Alcázar, 2009: 493).

The adoption of place-marketing strategies among Korean scholars and policy-makers took a similar trajectory. With democratization and administrative de-centralization in the mid-1990s and in scholarly objections to previous developmental urbanization, place marketing of locales was believed to bring about an opportunity to develop the economic, social, and cultural capital of these locales. In the rest of the paper, I examine the mobilization of place marketing in Korea, local contexts that were facilitative of this mobilization, and the contradictory outcomes unfolding in Korean cities since their initiation.

The Emergence of Place Marketing in Korea

In 1995, in step with the increasing global popularity of neoliberal ideologies of decentralization and in response to democratization and associated regionalization of politics (Park BG, 2008), the South Korean central government introduced the local self-government system, whereby local politicians (e.g. mayors and local councilors) would be elected by local constituencies, contrary to the previous period in which they were appointed by the central government. The official initiation of the local self-government system triggered deliberations among economists, public policy academics, urban planners and geographers about what should be the priority policy of local governments in order to restore place identity among locals and, most of all, to enhance the autonomy of local economy. Additionally, the slogan of globalization (Segyehwa) promoted by then president Kim Young-Sam added an urgency within local governments to build a city with global competitiveness. Place marketing emerged as one of the prominent policy suggestions favored by these intellectuals. These individuals solicited local governments to pay renewed attention to each place’s cultural assets, which, according to the former, had previously been neglected due to the central government’s prioritization of industrialization (in a privileged few regions) during the developmental statist period. It was urged that places’ cultural assets should be excavated, researched and marketed to improve their appeal to outsiders as well as to locals. As Park K (2002: 31) has pointed out, place marketing surfaced among these intellectuals – among these ‘place marketers’ – as a panacea to the economic and social difficulties that local governments had to tackle.

Quite a few local governments have implemented culture/tourism-oriented strategies since then. ² The most popular strategies of place marketing were festivals in which cities’ unique cultural artifacts, art forms, histories, traditions, vernacular cuisines or certain features of natural environments were featured (Cho, 2000: 115; Paik, 2006: 110). Creating symbolic landmarks, public spaces and cultural streets were also another popular strategy. In justifying the culture-oriented policies, place marketers argued that in the global milieu of intensifying inter-urban competition, creating culturally appealing environments and an associated ‘quality of life’ within places was important in enhancing the competitiveness of cities to global investors, private corporations and tourists (e.g. Lee HY, 2005; Paik, 2006; Park HS, 2000). In the case of Korean cities, with the exception of Seoul and a couple of other economically more developed cities, the primary goal of place-marketing strategies has been to attract tourists (domestic or Chinese/Japanese/Taiwanese), as these local governments seriously lacked industrial/economic infrastructure, capital and professional expertise to attract corporations or global capital. Place marketers drew attention to the fact that locally-based cultural strategies do not demand as prohibitive a sunk cost as other industrial investments would require, in the sense that it is primarily based on the cultural tradition, unique local ways of life and natural environment that already exist in a city (Park SH, 1997). The Korean place-marketing literature also repeatedly pointed out that with the post-Fordist and postmodern turn of global society, and as GDP had increased in major cities in Korea and in other East Asian countries, people were more interested in recreational and cultural entertainment and tourism, and therefore cultural tourism, like many other post-industrial businesses, now promised a profitable future for cities. The same body of literature also contends that place-marketing strategies would create a strong sense of belonging and local pride among locals, which would inculcate social capital among locals, and therefore amount to an ideal vehicle for perfecting the local self-governance system.

As Park BG (2010: 500) argues, place marketing in Korea was taken positively among progressive/critical urbanists, as it was thought to help to restore a sense of community among locals and foster the cultural identities embedded in places, which had been neglected during the ‘developmental urbanization’ (Doucette and Park BG, in this issue) of the 1960s–80s. That is, the economy-centrism and central state-led authoritarian urbanization that characterized the developmental state period was now replaced with a culture-oriented paradigm, the latter of which was (perceived to be) more locally based, and therefore more humane and even democratic (e.g. Lee MY, 2006: 34). The culture-oriented paradigm, ‘place marketers’ argued, would provide local actors with public spheres of reflexivity (if enacted properly), in which different local actors communicate with each other to establish the identity of the place (e.g. Lee HY, 2005; Paik, 2006: 109). Place marketing, it was argued, would provide locals with the power to shape the cultural, social and economic future of their city, and foster endogenous development. This is why place marketers saw place marketing as a potential instance of participatory democracy in the era of local autonomy (e.g. Chun and Shin, 2004: 32–3; Jung, 1999). This approach was in particular espoused by the younger generation of urbanists and geographers, who had studied among themselves critical and/or contemporary versions of Western urban theories (e.g. Marxist and postmodern urban theories), partly in protest to what they considered the apolitical curriculum offered at universities that focused on the traditional area study or quantitative spatial science type of paradigms. The progressive minded student-run Space and Environment Research Group (SERG, Kongkan-hwankyung-Yeonkuhoe) that was based at Seoul National University (SNU), which the author was part of, led the trend. The graduate students – primarily from Geography, Geography Education and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at SNU – that participated in SERG were deeply inspired by Western place-marketing literature in the early to mid-1990s. ³

Like some Western urbanists, who endorsed culture-led revitalization as a local development paradigm that would liberate urban vernacular cultures from suppressive modern planning, there was a general consensus among these would-be place marketers in the SERG over the progressive effects of place marketing, and a conviction that place marketing would be one of the core urban paradigms in the post-developmentalist period. ⁴ Certainly this younger generation – including the author – was aware, and actually studied, how place marketing during the neoliberal/entrepreneurial turn in Western cities had ushered in racialized and gendered disparity in various locales, and intensified the brutal mechanism of inter-urban competition at a global scale (Koo, 2004; Lee HY, 2005; Lee MY, 2006: 8). However, while we would resist the form of neoliberalism that absolutely prioritized the market force over social considerations, place-marketing strategies that prioritized the cultural embeddedness and the importance of ‘place’ (as supposed to abstract ‘space’) was taken as a benign form of market approach that would bring significant benefits to the local majority. In other words, it can be said that these place marketers as ‘social entrepreneurs’ pursued the progressive competitiveness of places. ⁵

Additionally, after completing their degrees these younger reform-minded students entered various government research institutes as researchers, including local government-subsidiary research institutes (from that time on, this became quite a common career path for students in urban studies and geography, one the author also took). ⁶ At that time, their belief in the progressive and humane possibility of place marketing became the foundation of the policy direction that they proposed to local governments. As these institutes were more practice- and policy-oriented, there was not much room for critiques of place marketing, and researchers mostly focused instead on looking for ‘policies that work’ and strategies for pragmatic implementation of these policies. Various research reports and academic articles authored by these researchers (many of whom were former reform minded SERG students) voiced that if places cannot delink themselves from ‘place wars’ and ‘place auctions’ coming from the growing global competitive pressures, then it would make more sense that places try their best to respond to this pressure and succeed in it, but in a more locally-based and humane way (Lee JH, 2008: fn. 3; Lee SY, 2009; Paik, 2006: 109). Therefore, they opined, denouncing place marketing as a neoliberal policy would not help (Lee MY, 2006). Lee JH (2008: fn. 3) further contended that the criticism of place marketing was simply an academic distraction, and that when we think through local policy fields we should develop a worldview based on practice rather than academic theory. While these place marketers from SERG consistently advocated a more locally embedded and socially inclusive place marketing – which distinguished them from place-marketing strategies developed by experts in the fields of Public Administration, Economics and Business Administration, that had a more uncompromising, pro-market orientation (e.g. Park HS, 2000; Yeom, 2010) – it is not difficult to spot commonalities between these two groups of place marketers, as the next section reveals.

Policy Learning

How place marketing, originating in Western cities, was adopted and implemented in Korea may best be described as ‘voluntary’ and ‘competitive’ as opposed to a coerced process. In the voluntary and competitive process, policy intermediaries actively benchmark the non-local policies and seek to apply them to their places, without explicit political pressure by non-local implementers. These intermediaries primarily respond to the external competitive pressure that places are situated within, and frame the solutions for urban problems according to the competition ideologies that this environment has naturalized. In other words, this external environment has disciplined Korean urbanists to ‘voluntarily’ defer to the policies that embody these ideologies.

Korean urbanists learned place-marketing policies by studying academic/policy documents of model cities, participating in relevant conferences, consulting with model cities’ technocrats and other experts, and often making business trips to these cities. The Western cities were certainly the most favored models (Shin and Stevens, 2013: fn.8). This is especially true, on the one hand, of cities that have developed place-marketing strategies as a response to the declining urban economy after deindustrialization, such as Glasgow, Ipswich, Manchester, Dockland, Pittsburg and Edinburgh, and, on the other hand, European ‘cultural’ cities such as Bilbao and Bologna (Lee HJ, 2001; Lee HY, 2005; Lee MY, 2006; Paik, 2006; Yeom, 2010). Japanese cities with successful and popular cultural festivals and historic districts were also frequently emulated (Chun and Shin, 2004; Lee HJ, 2001; Paik, 2006). Drawing upon marketing theory developed in economics and MBA programs, learning tended to revolve around the following: what place marketing is constitutive of, e.g. visions, goals, consumer market surveys, competitors’ surveys, marketing mixes, organizations for execution, place brands, publicity channels, promotion, sales strategies and public private partnerships (Lee HJ, 2001; Lee MY, 2006; Lee SY, 2009; Park HS, 2000); typologies of different place-marketing strategies (Lee MY, 2006; Paik, 2006); city slogans and brands, unique brand identities and linkages between branding, place making and development of human resources (Lee JH, 2008); strategies to develop distinctive and unique place contents and niche markets (Chun and Shin, 2004; Lee SY, 2009; Paik, 2006); place-marketing evaluation criteria (Paik, 2006); strategic market management and branding efforts (Yeom, 2010); and development of backward and forward linkages of place-marketing programs (Chun and Shin, 2004).

It is quite striking to discover how these research reports and academic articles repeatedly make similar points and inter-reference each other to the point that they look like replicas of one another (whether it is one authored by former SERG members or scholars based in Public Administration, MBA or Economics). The same was observed in these authors’ suggestions of how to enact a successful place-marketing strategy. Almost all these works concur that to be successful in place marketing each place should create unique cultural items and programs and turn places into distinct assets (Lee HJ, 2001; Paik, 2006); these cultural items and programs should be strongly embedded in places and carry the authenticity of the place (esp. Lee MY, 2006); place marketing should be planned and implemented through collaborative social networks and public and private partnerships (the private not only including businesses but also local residents and especially cultural creatives in locales) (Cho, 2000; Lee HJ, 2001); local governments should be entrepreneurial and aggressively seek to create markets and demand (Park HS, 2000); governments should be open-minded, their organizational structures and expertise should be professionalized, and they should support cultural initiatives by civil society (Cho, 2000; Lee MY, 2006); the developed items and programs should be implemented with institutional, spatial and economic sustainability (Paik, 2006); and economic and social effects should be maximized and evaluation criteria should be established (Paik, 2006).

The redistributive injustice and commodification of cultures associated with place marketing and related popular struggles that have occurred in ‘model’ cities are also mentioned in this body of literature, but these are mostly treated as a sidebar, and it is hard to find serious interrogation of these struggles. More interestingly, a number of authors cite Kearns and Philo (1993) (e.g. Chun and Shin, 2004; Lee HY, 2005; Paik, 2006) or Hall and Hubbard (1998) (Lee JH, 2008) – both of which are critical examinations of place marketing – but the majority of these authors only cite them to provide definitions of place marketing or to point out that place marketing emerged out of the deindustrialization experienced in the West in the 1980s. Ironically, when Lee JH (2008: 874) cites them it is only to conclude with the normative urgency of introducing an entrepreneurial turn in the Korean local governance system. These are apt examples of what Peck (2001) called ‘selective learning’.

The authors of these Korean place-marketing works also make the ambiguous argument that cultural infrastructure provisioned through place-marketing policies would eventually benefit everyone in the locale, including disenfranchised populations (Lee HJ, 2001). They also often assert that well-established public-private-civil society networking would help to prevent further marginalization of existing marginalized groups in places (Lee MY, 2006). Worse still, illustrating place-marketing strategies implemented in cities like Liverpool and San Francisco, Lee HJ (2001) argues that place marketing contributed to the demolition of eyesore ghettos, and that despite this demolition that must have displaced underclass populations, in the case of San Francisco the city achieved a unity among the different residents as the place-marketing strategies successfully elicited the participation of (obscure) artists in the process. This shows how for certain place marketers, gentrification, even when leading to displacement, was taken as a benefit of place marketing.

The Unfolding Contradictions of Place Marketing

Since the mid-1990s when place marketing started to be widely implemented by local governments, locals have debated over the commodification of cultures involved in place-marketing programs. Criticisms were raised over promoted manufactured cultures that were unrelated to the identity of specific places (Lee SY, 2009: 90). Even when vernacular cultures and traditions were mobilized, they were limited to a few among a wide range of lived cultures in those places, a few that were deemed fit for commodification. Since a main goal of place marketing is to enhance the place’s image, the selected cultures and traditions should not only resonate with a positive image, but also ideally an apolitical one, as political images of a place would narrow the possible types of tourists that a place can attract, and also shut out private capital’s interests in the place. Such selectivity has become a prominent controversy in Kwangju, a city that has been known for its democratic movements and, more specifically, the 1980 Kwangju uprising against the military government, in which 165 people were killed by the government’s army. From 1995, the Kwangju local government started to host Kwangju Biennale with a fine art theme, but art related to the city’s resistant history was excluded there. In response, Minjung artists ⁷ hosted an Anti-Biennale, where they attempted to rework the identity of the city by circulating images of a different and true history of the city against those circulated by the Biennale organizing body (Shin, 2004). Kwangju’s case resonates with some of the place-marketing practices in the Western cities that experienced de-industrialization, such as Glasgow in Scotland, where the local government promoted the ‘city of culture’ campaign and sought to erase the city’s well-known identity associated with a history of a militant working class (Tretter, 2009).

This type of place-marketing strategy is problematic as it promotes cultures that are compatible with pro-market directives (like high-end fine arts that are politically less sensitive). It is additionally problematic because it reifies the notion of place and culture, and represents place as something fixed and closed for the purpose of commodification rather than positing it as a process (Park BG, 2010). Additionally, place marketers’ idealization of place marketing as a site of democracy, in which locals discuss the cultural identity of the place, has proved to be misleading. For example, in Ha-hoe Village in the city of An-dong, one of the officially designated Traditional Folk Villages, villagers problematized the process in which the identity of the place is reified into two tourism-oriented commodities, such as ‘Ha-hoe Mask’ and ‘Ha-hoe Byul-shin Exorcism’ (Noh, 2007). Furthermore, the village has also painfully witnessed the rise of cut-throat competition among local residents who sought to profit by maximizing the commercialization of traditional festivals and patented commodities related to the village’s traditions. Villagers voiced that such commercialization gradually defiled the sense of community among the villagers.

In my own master’s thesis research on festivals in the city of Chun-cheon (Hae, 1999), some festival organizers – who were mostly local artists – protested the local government’s constant demand to increase the commercial viability of the festivals at the expense of artistic quality and community involvement. There were also persistent conflicts between local- and Seoul-based artists and cultural creatives, both of whom were involved in organizing local festivals. Seoul-based artists and cultural creatives were very often favored by the local government that was funding these festivals, as the former were deemed to possess a higher professional cultural capital and a capacity for better profit-making. Place marketers’ claim that local ‘cultural renaissance’ would be enabled by place marketing has been contradicted in these ways.

On the other hand, place marketers’ call for a cultural renaissance does not clearly point out how this renaissance would also lead to enhancing the welfare of citizens at the local scale, especially when the Korean economy and society have been increasingly neoliberalized. Place marketers largely confine their discussions to the enhancement of ‘cultural welfare’, in the sense that place marketing would improve cultural infrastructure, public space and quality of life that local residents can now avail themselves of (Koo, 2004: 222; Lee HJ, 2001: 14). However, place marketers do not explain how enhanced cultural welfare would be translated into economic and social justice at the local scale (e.g. Lee JH, 2008: 888). There is also no consideration of how the produced sense of place identity may elide forms of class consciousness that vary across different class fractions.

In Seoul, which increasingly saw a widening disparity between different classes of people, the local government’s drive for place marketing and the beautification of urban space was coupled with expanding gentrification, the displacement of lower-income households (Kwon, 1994; Shin, 2009) and the pricing-out of vernacular/artist cultural institutions (Kim, 2015). This was further paired with the local government’s strict prohibition of political assembly in beautified public spaces, such as Seoul Square (Seoul Kwang-jang), showing how beautified landscapes can be used for the purpose of political control. Despite the increasing roll-back policies regarding the city’s poor, the Seoul government engaged in branding efforts for the city, such as creating the logo of ‘Hi Seoul’, whose example is vigorously pursued by other local governments.

In less affluent local governments that have been heavily dependent upon the central government’s transfer of subsidies and have suffered from a lack of interest from external capital, the culture-oriented policies and place marketing have been also used as a ‘display politics’ of newly elected local politicians (Chun and Shin, 2004: 39), which further worsened fiscal balances (Park K, 2002: 11). That is, politicians are using cultural revitalization in order to project an impression among residents that something positive has been done by these politicians for the benefit of local residents. For this ideological project, cultural festivals have been organized when it is politically convenient to do so, and often take on a crude commercial character without involving a wider participation among local residents. Local residents became a spectator of this spectacle, and were devoid of productive agency over these festivals (Cho, 2000: 116; Lee SY, 2009: 89). It is also very often observed that, in order to pay back the local landed capital (Toho) that has been the most important political contributor to election campaigns of elected politicians, these politicians have created construction projects under the name of place marketing, such as museums, theaters or culture/knowledge industry complexes (Kang, 2015; Park K, 2002).

Some place marketers contended that the reason why some place-marketing programs at the local scale failed is because of the locale’s heavy dependence on the central government’s local transfer (Park K, 2002: 30), the absence of entrepreneurial, long-term thinking among government officials and politicians (Chun and Shin, 2004), and the replication of similar cultural items and programs across different locales (Chun and Shin, 2004: 41; Lee HY, 2005: 36; Lee JH, 2008: 876; Paik, 2006), as well as crony capitalist liaisons between local politicians and the landed class. As a solution to these problems, these place marketers have called for a more entrepreneurial, creative ‘free’ market-oriented approach and privatization, in which private capitals and corporations are actively sought after by effective and transparent local government machines (e.g. Chu, 1998; Chun and Shin, 2004: 43). ⁸ Place marketers have barely pointed out that place marketing may both be a trigger of gentrification and governmental roll-back of welfare services and the subsequent disparity among different members of the locales (and an ideological mask for this disparity).

Conclusion

It is hard to conclude that place marketing presented a hopeful framework of local democracy, as place marketing has not necessarily assured the democratic process in which locals are empowered to meaningfully participate and deliberate over the future of their own places. Defining the image of the place has been influenced by consideration of market feasibility and political calculation, and has alienated a good portion of local residents both in planning processes and from economic and social benefits of place-marketing programs. In this paper, based on both place-marketing literature and my own past experience as a place marketer, I examined political economic and institutional contexts (i.e. the post-developmental turn of Korean political economy) that were facilitative of the adoption of place marketing among scholars and policy-makers in Korea. While the arrival of place marketing in Korea was a conjunctural outcome of particular changes in Korean political economy and institutions in the mid-1990s, place marketing that was implemented in different places in the past two decades has generated a maelstrom of contradictions similar to those faced by neoliberalizing Western cities that have implemented culture-oriented regeneration policies.

It merits noting how in this process formerly critical urbanists, including myself, became unlikely participants on this place-marketing bandwagon, and how they saw reformist potential from place-marketing strategies and conceived it as a new paradigm that would transcend the problems of developmental urbanization of previous decades. While this faction of urbanists has continued to study and pursue other versions of culture-oriented strategies since the 2000s – including the Creative City paradigm (e.g. Lee JH, 2008: 886) – a more progressive faction of urbanists has also increasingly turned their attention to an alternative policy circuit. Critical geographers and urban planners have looked into such approaches as ‘the right to the city’ and the ‘humane city’ and have started to debate how the activist inspiration associated with these paradigms could be rethought and reworked in the Korean context. While this recent move provides a hopeful glimpse into the fields of urban movement activisms in Korea, whether the alternative, resistant movements can succeed will depend upon the organizational capacity of these activist scholars, their solidarity with grassroots activists, and active participation in progressive international circuits of alternative knowledge production and formation of international solidarity with actors in other places.