From Camp Town to International City: Us Military Base Expansion and Local Development in Pyeongtaek, South Korea

Abstract

In Pyeongtaek, South Korea, the US military is currently completing construction of its largest overseas base, and tens of thousands of American troops, civilian workers and accompanying family members are relocating to the city. Activist and civil society groups fiercely opposed base expansion in Pyeongtaek, leading to violent confrontations with police in 2006. As many scholars have pointed out, the country's 1980s democratization and 1990s decentralization created the conditions in which such vocal anti‐US and anti‐base politics became possible. Yet it was under the very same conditions that South Korea's central government harnessed local aspirations for urban growth to counter the anti‐base protests. By deregulating land use in Pyeongtaek and promising support for a number of major urban projects, the central government sought to build support for US expansion in the city and re‐cast militarization as a desirable form of ‘international city’ development. Haunted by the specter of gritty soldier‐entertainment ‘camp town’ areas and eager to see urban growth, the city government joined with the central government in constructing Pyeongtaek's new urban vision. However, new projects intended as a form of collective compensation displaced thousands and sparked new protest movements.

Anti‐Prostitution Politics and Militarised Urban Prosperity in the US Military Camptown in Korea

“…Activists blocked state access to the 2,000 acres slated for US military acquisition, relenting only after sustained violent confrontation with the national police (Moon 2012). The state initiated a slate of urban development projects in Pyeongtaek as a form of collective compensation to the city, but those projects ended up displacing thousands of people in the communities adjacent to the camptown (Martin 2018). From there, the Korean state at the central and local levels depoliticised the American militarisation of Pyeongtaek and portrayed it mainly as a set of urban planning opportunities.…”

“…The US military planned to shutter dozens of bases and to transfer some 40,000 American troops, workers, and dependents to the Camp Humphreys base in the city of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul. With the transfer of thousands of Americans to Pyeongtaek and the expansion of Camp Humphreys into the largest US military base on the planet, the United States-Korea alliance pursued an urban strategy of portraying the deepening of American militarisation as a harbinger of post-sex industry urban prosperity (Martin 2018).…”

“Re-membering” South Korea’s Militarized Landscapes in Pax Americana: Post-Cold War US Military Camps, Camptowns, and Former Camptown Women

“…20 Along with camptown economies, Korean men deployed for America's war in Vietnam as, what Jin-Kyung Lee termed, "neocolonized surrogate force," that generated about one-billion-dollars in economic benefits is another well-known example of the Pak government utilizing the American cold war military economy for South Korea's developmentalism. 21 In the post-cold war alliance of today, however, the once money-generating landscapes are transitioning into money-expending spaces for Korea. In the following sub-sections, changes of the built environments and their related social contours in post-cold war today are examined: first, how camps are becoming an ever more insulated little Americas, and then how camptowns are caught in a liminal state between attempts to either historically erase them or revamp them into landscapes of internationalism.…”