Governing Human Habitation outside the Normal Order: Architectural Mechanism of the South Korean Frontier Villages

ABSTRACT

This article examines patterns of human habitation in the South Korean border following the Korean War. Focussing in Daema-ri frontier village in Cheorwon abutting the Demilitarised Zone, I analyse how architecture was used by the state as a versatile territorial mechanism for spreading and concentrating populations; its efficiency as a spatio-political device governing selected populations under a certain order desired by the state; and its contradictory role as a platform for political struggles which contests many fundamental aspects of the state prerogatives. Through my examination of Daema-ri’s spatial development – from an illegal, temporary makeshift shelter to a permanent state village – I argue that the frontier settlements, though portrayed as the state solution to emergency induced by the influx of refugees, was actually an outcome of a self-created disorder. It proposes a new analytical framework for the frontier settlements to be considered not simply as a border problem, but as an important architectural tool used by the modern state to establish a centralised system of control over its territory and population.

Notes

1. Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity (Oxon: Routledge, 2011).

2. Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001); Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

3. Rika Devos, Alexander Ortenberg and Vladimir Paperny, eds., Architecture of Great Expositions 1937–1959: Messages of Peace, Images of War (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015).

4. Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 6.

5. Ibid.

6. Wendy Pullan, “Frontier urbanism: the periphery at the centre of contested cities,” The Journal of Architecture, 16: 1 (2011): 15.

7. James Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), xv.

8. Charles Kraythammer, “Cold War relic, present day threat,” The Washington Post, January 5, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cold-war-relic-present-day-threat/2017/01/05/623c720e-d384-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html.

9. Alex Young Il Seo, Constructing Frontier Villages: Human Habitation at the South Korean Borderlands after the Korean War (PhD diss, University of Cambridge, 2020).

10. Suk Young Kim, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

11. Walter Benjamin “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” [1940], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books,1968); Ronnie D. Lipschutz, “(B)orders and (Dis)orders: The Role of Moral Authority in Global Politics,” in Identities, Borders and Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory, eds. Mathias Albert, David Jacobson and Yosef Lapid (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 73–90; Irit Katz, “Camp evolution and Israel’s creation: Between “state of emergency” and “emergence of state,”“ Political Geography, 55 (2016): 144–155.

12. Kim, DMZ Crossing, 104–123.

13. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

14. Wendy Pullan, ‘“Strategic Confusion: Icons and Infrastructures of Conflict in Israel-Palestine,”‘ in “Interventions in the Political Geographies of Walls,” ed., Karen E. Till, Political Geography, 33: 1 (2013): 55–58.

15. The recovered territory is, like the name suggests, a politically charged region that experienced several jurisdictional changes over a short period from North Korea (1945–1951) to the United Nations Command (1951–1954) following the Korean War, before being transferred to South Korea. Under the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 195 enacted on 12 December 1948, and the United Nations Resolution 84 passed on 7 July 1950, governance and civil administration of all land above the 38th Parallel was given to the UNC. Hence, the South Korean government could exert very little, if not no, influence over the recovered territories.

16. Choong Ro Yoon, Anti-Communist Authoritarian State Making in Vietnam and Korea (Seoul: Sunin, 2005); Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995).

17. Eun Heo, “State’s control over the countryside: From taxation to family planning. Open-History Journal, 23 (2006): 56–68; “Ripple effects of the Cold War in East Asia and construction of new anti-communist communities by the government of President Park Chung Hee,” Critical Review of History (2015): 293–326; “Korean Army’s Intervention to Pacification of Farming Areas in South Vietnam and Chains of East-Asia Cold War,” The Journal for the Studies of Korean History, 69 (2017): 449–487.

18. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). See also, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).

19. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vantage Books, 1961).

20. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

21. Including the Republic of Korea National Archives, Cheorwon County Office Archives, Seoul Archives, U.S. National Archives, Gyeonggi-do Memory Archives, and the National Institute of Korean History Archives.

22. Monica Hahn, Hankuk-chŏnchaen-kwa supok-chiku [Korean War and the Recovered Territory] (Seoul: Blue History, 2008).

23. According to Scott, the population in nonstate spaces typically maintained a more mixed economy and was highly mobile, severely limiting the possibilities for reliable state appropriation. Scott, Seeing like a State, 186–191.

24. Christopher Rudolph, “Sovereignty and Territorial Borders in a Global Age,” International Studies Review, 7:1 (2005): 1–20.

25. Monica Hahn, “A Study on the UNC’s Occupation Policy and the Transfer of Administrative Control to the ROK in North Korea,” Critical Review of History, 11 (2008): 360–395.

26. In principle, the AFAK programme sponsored the [re]construction of infrastructure and public facilities such as civic buildings and housing. For an overview of the U.S. aided construction projects see, Dongmin Park, Free World, Cheap Buildings: U.S. Hegemony and the Origins of Modern Architecture in South Korea, 1953–1960 (PhD diss, UC Berkeley, 2016).

27. Young Kyu Kim, Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa [60 year history of Cheorwon administration] (Cheorwon: Cheorwon Centre for History and Culture: 2013), 285.

28. Ibid., 285–286.

29. In the resolution adopted by UNCURK at its 33rd meeting on 9 August 1954, “As such, the stateless region of 2,300 square miles, once home to 130,000 people became an important (and sensitive) spatio-political agenda for the UNC and the South Korean government”, in Hahn, Hankuk-chŏnchaen-kwa supok-chiku, 378.

30. Interview with Kwang Hwan Ko (a former state officer who served in Cheorwon between 1953–63) in Seoul on 5 July 2015.

31. Interview with Hee Suk Lee, a former South Korean military officer and village leader of Yugok-ri frontier village, in Yugok-ri on 8 July 2017.

32. Interview with Ho Shik Kim in Cheorwon on 5 July 2015.

33. Kyung Ho Chang, Hankuk-ŭi chŏnt’ong-kŏnch’uk (Seoul: Culture and Art Press, 1992).

34. Such incidents can still be readily found in the frontier villages today. Due to the “building freeze” policy imposed in these villages the residents would, despite constructing new structurers or making significant alterations to existing buildings, refer to them as “temporary structures”. Seo, Constructing Frontier Villages: Human Habitation at the South Korean Borderlands after the Korean War.

35. Interview with Kyung Sun Park in Daema-ri on 20 August 2017.

36. Paul Oliver, Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture (London: Routledge, 2006).

37. The earliest archaeological evidence suggests its use since 300 BCE in the early iron age. Kee Ho Song, Hankuk kotae-ŭi ondol (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2008).

38. Nam-Il Jun, Se-Hwa Yang, Hyung-Ock Hong, Sei-Kwan Sohn and Myo-Jung Kim, “A Study on the Formation of Urban Squatter in Korea and their Housing Culture from Socio-historical Point of View,” Journal of the Korean housing association, 18: 3 (2007): 14.

39. Yong Su Lee, “The view on Ondol between Japanese and Korean People during the Japanese ruling era: on the “Source Book Related to Housing Culture,”“ The Study of Practice Folkloristics, 18 (2011): 319.

40. Jae-Chul Kang, “A Theory of Poetry on the Persistence and Acculturation of the Traditions of Ondol Culture,” Asian Comparative Folklore, 41 (2010): 201.

41. Interview with Kwang Hwan Ko in Cheorwon on 5 July 2015.

42. Interview with Sung Soon Shin in Daema-ri on 30 August 2017.

43. Interview with Ho Shik Kim in Cheorwon on 5 July 2015.

44. Kim, Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa, 282–285.

45. Hahn, Hankuk-chŏnchaenkwa supok-chiku.

46. Kim, Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa, 290.

47. By 1960s, South Korean authorities were compelled instigate fundamental changes to boost domestic food production as aid from the U.S. dropped from 230 million U.S. dollars between 1959 and 1963 to 110 million dollars between 1964 and 1968. At the time, the U.S. supplied 73% of South Korea’s annual imports while sharing about 12% of its gross national product. Min Yong Lee, “The Vietnam War: South Korea’s Search for National Security,” in The Park Chung Hee Era: Transformation of South Korea, eds. Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 403–429.

48. With a growing urgency to `replace disorder by order’ in the context of Cold War geopolitics, Joong Yoon Park, then a senior advisor at the National Security Council, saw the rural not as the source for the stability of the state, but rather as an area imbued with threat and referred to its inhabitants as “potential enemies” and urged the council to consider the dire need for the “healthy growth of the rural” as it may become an area for easy penetration by the communist North. Eun Heo, “Ripple effects of the Cold War in Asia and construction of new anti-communist communities by the government of President Park Chung Hee,” 304–305.

49. The term “Adjacent Enemy District” or “jeopjuk-jiyuk” was used instead of “Border Area” or “jeopkyung-jiyeok” as currently being used as both Koreas did not recognise each other as a “justified state”, and hence, refrained from using the term.

50. Over time, the Ministry of Interior proposed to develop extra 14,876 hectares of land and resettle 8,000 ex-military households by 1971. Kim, Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa, 358–359.

51. Interview with Hee Suk Lee in Yugok-ri on 8 July 2017.

52. Kim Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa, 359–60.

53. Kim, Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa, 357–58.

54. The process of constructing and managing strategic villages was not only new for South Korea. Modern examples of this can be commonly found following World War II in the so-called “new villages” in Malaya specifically designed to isolate and separate certain population groups; or in the form of “strategic hamlets” across Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, also in Jeju Island, Korea, during the U.S. military government period before the Korean War.

55. During the interviews, residents complained about their North-facing windows and front porch instead of south facing windows that would have allowed more light into the house. Some also complained about the materials such as concrete block walls being poor insulators during winter and the slate roofs conducting too much heat during the summer.

56. Heo, “Ripple effects of the Cold War in Asia and construction of new anti-communist communities by the government of President Park Chung Hee,” 293–326.

57. The system underwent routine revision and updates, eventually enabling the state to keep comprehensive and decidedly excessive records ranging over 140 items of individual information. Ki-jung Kim, “A foundation of the totalitarian legal order, the resident registration system,” in Fascism inside us, eds. Chil-hyun Im et al (Seoul: Samin, 2000). (In Korean).

58. Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, Unification Village Residents, Stories of their Life [T’ong-il-ch’on sa-lam-tŭl, kŭ salm-ŭi i-ya-ki] (Suwon: Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, 2013). (In Korean).

59. Interview with Ho Shik Kim in Cheorwon on 5 July 2015.

60. Alex Young Il Seo, “From Disorderly Dispersion to Orderly Concentration: Frontier Villages at the Korean Border 1951–1973,” Scroope: Cambridge University Architecture Journal, 27 (2020): 43–58.

61. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 50.

62. Ibid., 15.

63. Ibid., 376.

64. Wendy Pullan, “Spatial Discontinuities: Conflict Infrastructures in Contested Cities,” in Wendy Pullan and Britt Baillies, eds., Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Everyday (London: Palgrave, 2013), 27.

65. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1998.

66. Jung In Kim, “The New Capital Plan: a South Korean Case,” The Journal of Architecture, 16: 2 (2011): 191–211.

67. Some examples discussed by Scott includes cities such as Brasilia and Chandigarh, the two cities faithfully built according to CIAM doctrines, Soviet collectivisation, and compulsory villagisation in Tanzania. Scott, Seeing Like a State, chapters 4, 6 and 7.

68. Interview with Young Gil Whang in Seoul on 14 August 2016.

69. Won Keun Kim, Doo Soon Lee and Il-hwan Choi, Research on North and South Korean Agrarian Reform at the Recovered Territory (Seoul: Korean rural Economic Institute, 1989), 241–249.

70. Interview with Jube Park in Interview Recordings: Everyday Experience of Modern History in the Recovered Territory, Cheorwon. [Subokjigu Cheorwon-jiyeok juminui hyeondae-sa gyeongheom] (COH002_15), Kyu-jang Kim et al., (Gwacheon-si: National History Compilation Committee, The Archives of Korean History, 2007), 17–18.

71. Interview with Sung Soon Shin in Daema-ri on 30 August 2017.

72. Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987 [1964]).

73. Oliver, Built to Meet Needs, 5.

74. Interview with Kyung Sun Park in Kyu-jang Kim et al., 22–23.

75. Interview with Ho Shik Kim in Daema-ri on 30 August 2017.

76. Kim, Ch’ŏlwŏn-kun chipang-haengchŏng 60nyŏn-sa, 288–290.

77. It may also be that the state did not want to publicise insubordination, which could lead the public to believe that the state was struggling to establish authority and order over the region and its people.

78. Interview with Kwang Hwan Ko in Cheorwon on 5 July 2015.

79. Oliver, Built to Meet Needs, 221; UNCHS Habitat 2003: 17.

80. Existence of these types of dwelling is only made known through interviews of those who had built them. Until now, no known records are found in the official state documents.

81. The Sunshine era is a term describing the period between 1998–2008, when South Korea’s policy towards the North sought political cooperation over military tension.

82. In Daema-ri, residents are continuing to seek legal actions as a community, in order to reclaim their property rights and land entitlement taken away from them with the introduction of the Special Act for Registration and Recovery of Land Ownership at the Recovered Territory in 1982.