REMAPPING SONGDO: A GENEALOGY OF A SMART CITY IN SOUTH KOREA BY CHAMEE YANG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications and Media in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2020 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor James Hay, Chair Professor Cameron McCarthy Associate Professor Anita Say Chan Associate Professor TF Tierney ABSTRACT This dissertation addresses the relationship between history, culture, technology, and urban governance in South Korea. It focuses on the technologies and techniques of making and governing a smart city and argues that they have been shaped by the long-term concerns for security, future, development, and globalization. This is not only evident in national economic policies and public discussions of the smart city and the new media technologies, but also in the spatial-material arrangement of urban environment and individual daily practices interacting with the digital environment. My examination of the New Songdo City in South Korea, one of the first smart cities in the world that is technically run by codes and data, provides a historically informed and locally specific account of what sociopolitical concerns, such as national security, public safety, climate change, and economic development, have guided the digitalization of urban governance. For instance, Songdo has deployed numerous sensors and cameras to monitor the urban infrastructures and public space. Contrary to the common public response to surveillance in the West, Koreans have rapidly adapted to the digital media environment and even perceived the monitoring technologies to be safely ‘watching over’ them. This dissertation explores how Korea’s unique cultural sensibilities to security, privacy, and development have driven the country’s status as one of the most cutting-edge, high-tech nations in the world. At the same time, the ongoing proposals for the ‘K-Smart City’ extend the tradition of the export-oriented industrial model formulated during the 1960s. This dissertation serves as a counterpoint to the proliferating narratives that ascribe a universal value to the smart city, by offering a historical ii and cultural account of the technology and the developmental mentality that characterize Korea’s unique path toward digitalization and globalization. The field of communication and media studies is approached in two differing ways throughout the dissertation. First, I take a socio-material and contextual approach to the smart city and offer a ‘pluralized’ way of thinking about the relationship between media and space. Based on participatory observations, I offer an expanded account of mediation that include urbanization, multiply affected by the governmental rationality and ideal norms of citizenship in South Korea. Second, I take a genealogical approach to the media, cutting across multiple temporalities and scales, and provide a critique in a form of history of the present, by accounting for the problem of power and its relation to the knowledge production and subject formation. Through this genealogy, I trace the history of developmentalism and militarism in South Korean modernization and post-war formation of urban science and technology, by bringing together history of technologies, mentalities, militarism, and developmental government. Following chapters in the dissertation highlight different but interrelated dimensions of the smart city. After briefly reviewing the South Korea’s history of urban planning and its relation to the military government in Chapter 1, I address different dimensions of the smart city in separate chapters – Mobility (Chapter 2), Security (Chapter 3), Environment (Chapter 4), and Futurity (Chapter 5) – and connect them to specific genealogies. I analyze the significance of the smart city with respect to the earlier models of national and urban governance in South Korea and discuss how the complex history embodied and congealed in today’s smart city, as a discourse and a material reality, guides how a desirable future is envisioned and imagined in South Korea. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLES ………………...……………………………………………………………………….vi INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………..…….1 Plan for the Present Work………………………………………………………….…….10 Space……………………………………………………………………………….…….11 (1) Technological zones…………………..………………………………….……...13 (2) Laboratory………...….………………..…………………………………….…..15 (3) Diagrams………………………………..………………………………….…....16 History……..…..………………………………………………………………….….…..19 (1) Media genealogy…………………………..…………………………….……....21 (2) Problematization……………………………..………………………….…..…...23 Culture………..……..…………………………………………………………….……...24 (1) Governmentality ….…………………………..………………………...…….....25 (2) Environmentality ….……………………………………………………..….…..26 (3) Governmobility ………………………………..……………………………......27 (4) Sociotechnical Imaginaries……………………..…………………………….…28 Research Site: Songdo…………………………………………………………………...29 Outline of the Dissertation……………………………………………………………….32 CHAPTER 1. A PRE-HISTORY OF SMART CITY IN SONGDO…………………………....36 Colonial History and Techniques of Urban Planning…………………………………....39 Cultural Governance and the Formation of the Dutiful Nationals…………………….....45 Militarized Modernity and the Birth of Defensible Subject……………………………..49 Technology and National Development…………………………………………………52 CHAPTER 2. FROM A TRANSIT CITY TO A GLOBAL CITY: HISTORIES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNING THROUGH MOBILITY………………………………57 History of Governing Mobility in South Korea………………………………………….59 (1) National Governmobility: Highways and Microwave Networks….……………..60 (2) Global Governmobility: Airports and the Internet…..…………………………...64 (3) Networked Governmobility: Smart City……..…………………………………..71 Zoning as a Technology for Governing Differentiated Mobilities……………………....74 Songdo, a Global City?......................................................................................................79 CHAPTER 3. SONGDO, THE SAFEST CITY IN SOUTH KOREA: HISTORIES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNING THROUGH RISK AND SECURITY………………….84 National Program of Civil Defense and the Birth of Defensible Subject………………..88 Environmentalization of Urban Risk and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)……………………………………..…………………………………..92 iv Technologies of Defensible Self………………………………………………………...98 Smart City as an Urban Interface and Datafication of Everything……………………..103 A Paradoxical Landscape?...............................................................................................107 CHAPTER 4. SMART AND SUSTAINABLE CITY: HISTORIES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNING THROUGH ENVIRONMENT………………………………………………...109 Sustainable Development and Smart City………………………………………….…..112 South Korea’s New Urban Discourse and Sustainable City……………………………116 Environmentality as a Mode of Governance……………………………………….......122 Government of Environ-Mentality……………………………………………………...130 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...134 CHAPTER 5. K-SMART CITY AND CREATIVE ECONOMY: MYTHOLOGIES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF FUTURE-MAKING………………………………………………..…137 Kinesthetic of Futurity: K-Pop and Smart City………………………………………...139 K-Smart City and the Korean Style Creative Economy …………...…………………..149 Manage Your Passion: From Dutiful Nationals to the Creative Entrepreneurs…………………………………………………..……………………….158 Conclusion………………………………………………………..…………………….167 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………..…………………..170 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………….………………...176 v TABLES Table 1: LEED for Cities Performance Score Categories (USGBC, 2016)………………….127 Table 2: A Diagrammatic Summary of Previous Chapters…………………………………...171 vi INTRODUCTION In 1980, Korean mainstream media, public administrators, businessmen, and general public were fascinated by a book just came out from the US. Even if one had not read the book, it was hard to miss the book title, “The Third Wave,” cited at least several times by the newspapers and broadcast news. New terms such as ‘prosumer’, ‘telecommunity’, and ‘intelligent environment’ often entered public discussions about the future of the nation and of the world. The idea of future society organized around the electronic industry and information and the seemingly inevitable transition of mass society into a more decentralized one instigated hopes about more open and democratic society. It was in the same year that Korea experienced a second military coup in the nation’s history by Jeon Doo-Hwan, who succeeded late Park Chung-Hee’s authoritarian regime and became the president of South Korea. Extending late Park’s presidential legacy, Jeon’s regime established the economic growth and anticommunist national security policy as the prior policy agenda. In 1983, Jeon’s regime expanded the previous Supporting Committee for Semi- conductor and launched the Supporting Committee for Information Industry, to take the lead in building the nation-wide electronic and computer networks. Jeon continued the support for scientific research and development activities at the universities and companies like Samsung, a company that had started its electronics production business in the 1960s. Samsung, like many other chaebols (family-owned large corporations), maintained a close relationship with the government to jumpstart and scale its business in a highly rapid fashion. In 1986, Samsung demonstrated its first Home Automation technology design called the ‘HA101’. In an article published in the Donga Science magazine in 1987, Choi Suk-Gyu, a researcher from Samsung Electronics introduced the notion