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Abstract
This paper attempts to map how creative city policy emerged as a new form of urban politics in East Asia. It locates the emergence of creative city policy within the East Asian context, where the current political economic movement of neoliberalism intersects with the developmental state’s historical legacy. By investigating institutional and economic practices and consequences of creative city policy in Seoul and Yokohama, this study focuses on how the urban place become carefully rearranged settings through certain procedural, institutional, and technical mechanisms implemented by various discursive and material practices of policy actors. Through this analysis, this research critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy driven-development and considers the social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within the new creative city policy discourse.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The old mayor of Seoul, Sehoon, Oh, was a member of the Hannara Party (recently renamed ‘the Saenuri Party’), a conservative political party in Korea. However, when he started his second term as the mayor of Seoul, the outright majority of city’s education council was elected by the members of the oppositional party, the Democratic Party, a social-liberal political party in Korea. For this reason, citizen groups, who were critical of Sehoon Oh’s urban mega construction oriented-creative city policy, cooperated with the oppositional party to oppose both Se-hoon Oh’s free lunch referendum, which proposed to offer a limited free meal service to only 30% of impoverished children, as well as SMG’s creative city policy.