A little street vending stall in the metropolis: Designerly intervention and urban governance in Seoul

Abstract

This paper examines designerly intervention, a novel art of governing cities, by investigating reflexive technologies in urban planning/design that transformed infrastructure for street vendors in Seoul, South Korea. Influenced by behavioural economics and cognitive sciences, designerly intervention endeavours to be human-scaled, inclusive and participatory. It focuses on designing little devices as an interface between individuals and the environment to elicit city dwellers’ behaviour that enacts massive infrastructure in everyday life. This paper traces how street vendors are incorporated into urban fabric through relational, affective and administrative changes created by the mediation of little devices — standardized street vending stalls. This paper develops new modes of critical inquiry to diagnose the power relations of designerly intervention that are often hidden and implicit in its seemingly reflexive methodologies.

Keywords:

• design
• planning
• infrastructure
• expertise
• affect
• the art of governing

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Martha Lampland for her support and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Isaac Martin, Daniel Navon, Bolun Zhang and three referees of Economy and Society offered invaluable feedback, for which I am thankful. All the shortcomings are the author’s.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval statement

All research participants gave their informed consent for inclusion prior to starting the study. This project was granted ethical approval by the UCSD Institutional Review Boards.

Notes

1 The renovation of techniques is remarkable in development projects, especially in the global South. For example, the triangle of corporations, international organizations and NGOs proposes the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) approach as an alternative development model, which combines humanitarian objectives with a market-driven idea of innovation (Redfield, 2012). Considering poverty as an opportunity for innovation and market, the BOP approach to development takes the poor’s participation in development programmes and their tacit knowledge as crucial elements to cope with the crisis of nation-states and experts as actors of development (Cross & Street, 2009; Elyachar, 2012; Schwittay, 2014). Scholars have criticized this hybrid of entrepreneurial culture and humanitarian objectives for depoliticizing poverty (Scott-Smith, 2013).

2 Studies have examined inclusive urban policies, especially focusing on the projects in the ‘South’, where street vendors were included in formal urban plans (Roever & Skinner, 2016; Skinner, 2008). As shown by the Warwick project in Durban, South Africa, these experimental policies draw upon inclusive ideas and techniques (e.g., knowledge-making based on street vendors’ lived experiences and environmental design to execute social objectives) similar to what I characterized as designerly interventions (Dobson & Skinner, 2009). Acknowledging similar experiments in the global South, I advance previous research by situating the inclusion of street vendors in the plan within the problematizations of infrastructure and government. Inclusive techniques are not mere tools for implementing urban policies but a techno-political medium through which urban entrepreneurialism of officers relates to the everyday life of the informal economy and the street vendor movement at the grassroots. I develop a critical inquiry examining what material effects the idioms of democracy (e.g., deliberation, participation and inclusion) have on social fabrics and what technical means are deployed to materialize such effects.

3 The DSP resembled what critical geographers identified as mega-projects of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2007). With the ambition of making Seoul a financial hub in Asia, the Seoul government implemented a series of market-friendly policies in the 2000s. Considering the DSP as a continuation of such business-friendly policies, critics explained how the DSP opened public space to the capital and served the upper-class ‘world citizens’ with the flexible status of citizenship who consumed the beautified urban landscapes (Choi, 2012). This critique is valid, but I assert that neoliberalism is too totalizing to examine heterogeneous practices involved in designerly interventions.

4 While I previously focused on Kwon’s articulation of ‘space design’ to identify governmental techniques that actualize the DSP, similar visions have been proposed in the development field, especially in the global South. Further studies may be needed to explore how such a wider epistemic community influenced designerly interventions in Seoul.

5 The composition of the committee was determined in 2013. It has 15 committee members — street vendor organizations recommend one-third of them, while Seoul assign the remaining two-thirds. The committee proposed the guidelines in 2018.

6 There have been changes in the design of stalls, but the basic idea has continued that those who get permission should follow the standardized design.

7 The asset criterion was slightly different, following the district in which street vendors ran the business.

8 The caveat is that the affective experiences elicited by standardized stalls are not probable for those displaced from special streets. Thus, I will discuss to what extent street vendors could be included in MPSV in the next section.

9 While I interviewed a few street vendors who worked in KDSC after refusing to participate in MPSV, this study is largely based on interviews with street vendors who stayed in the special streets, as it was hard to meet many street vendors who quit their businesses, especially after suffering from the disastrous effects of COVID-19 during my fieldwork. Further research should focus on the voices of those who left the special streets.

10 However, street vendors’ reappropriation of the standardized stalls did not entirely reformulate the somewhat linear relationship between design and behaviour devised in the MPSV, which indicates limitations related to the disciplinary nature of the MPSV. A further investigation of other empirical instances may be needed to assess designerly intervention's reflexive and dynamic dimensions.

11 Thus, while I initially conceptualized designerly interventions as different from technocratic planning to capture its historical specificity, the subsequent empirical analysis of MPSV explored the messiness and contingency within designerly interventions’ operation without contrasting them with technocracy. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donghyun Koo

Donghyun Koo is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He investigates how the mundane practices of experts and the technical details of urban infrastructure are entangled with how city dwellers claim and experience their rights to a city. His dissertation examines the messiness and heterogeneous practices of urban regeneration in Seoul, South Korea.