Substandard settlements and joint redevelopment projects in Seoul

International Events and Mass Evictions: A Longer View

“…The history of practices of eviction, forced eviction and redevelopment previous to the event‐preparation period serves as an institutional legacy that might predict what is to occur. The data shown here indicates that the preparation period for events was used to create new institutional mechanisms, such as corporate–local government–elite resident partnerships (Ha, 2001), that would come to facilitate greater efficiency and even more ambitious projects in the decades following the landmark event. This is what happened in South Korea, and it is proposed that studies of local public administration in the China case may prove the 2008 Olympics to have parallel effects, albeit in a very different type of system.…”

“…Literature about the 1980s, evidence from neighborhood‐based grassroots social movement groups, and government statistics of more transparent categories used as proxies can be pieced together to give a picture of the forced eviction practices used just prior to the Asian Games and the Olympics. Forced evictions were prevalent in this period (Park, 1990; 1995; Ha, 2001). The precise nature of the causal link relates to the carrying out of the special proclamation from General Chun.…”

“…The historical perspective of redevelopment in Seoul after the Korean War suggests that a large plan to replace self‐built homes (built without permits) in working‐class areas of the city unfolded in fits and starts from the late 1960s onward, making space available for more a lucrative form of housing. Hosting the Olympics provided a major impetus for industrializing such redevelopment administratively (Park, 1991; Kim and Choe, 1997; Ha, 2001) that seems to have made large‐scale redevelopment easier in subsequent eras.…”

“…The rebuilt areas became high‐rise apartment complexes for reasons beyond event‐hosting needs, such as the need to store capital in the built environment, excess building capacity of South Korean construction corporations as Middle East contracts dwindled, and the need to curtail the use of urban land by owner‐ and renter‐squatters. In eliminating squatter use of land and separating ‘owner‐squatters’ from ‘tenant‐squatters’ via a new administrative method of organizing redevelopment, the pre‐1988 Olympics redevelopment process pioneered a new method of accomplishing redevelopment on an enormous scale (Ha, 2001). The Games were used to amplify changes already underway that resulted in the elimination of a way of life (KOCER, 2000; Son, 2003; Cho and Park, 2010).…”

“…There is a growing body of work causally linking the hosting of international events (or mega-events, as they are known to specialists) such as the Olympics to urban growth coalitions promoting major new construction and rebuilding (e.g. Rutheiser, 1997;Hiller, 2000;Burbank et al, 2000;2001). It has even been ascertained (Montanari, 2002: 782) that large events are at this point 'the main urban policy to restructure and reconstruct urban areas'.…”