Urban Scenes and Place Identity: The Case of Seoul

The scene perspective can help us understand cities in terms of cultural amenities. Its abstract characteristics can join Asia with the US and Europe so that social scientists, policymakers, and average citizens can coherently interpret common features of world city systems. Scenes can be defined as the specific lifestyle of a place. Thus, a scene is more than a neighborhood or its physical structures. It includes collections of people labeled by race, class, gender, etc. It also includes specific combinations of these groups and activities that join them together. With these characteristics, scenes show the specific cultural tastes of the residents, shop owners, and visitors. They show their own internal logic and dramas that, for instance, shine glamorously rather than fade into anonymity, project warmth and intimacy rather than distance and aloofness, maintain an authentic and real life rather than a phony existence.

Place identity can be formed through interactions between the physical characteristics of specific places and the people using the physical facilities. In this sense, urban scenes are closely related with place identity. Both urban scenes and place identity are considered as contributing to the creative regeneration of a city. In this paper, we present how urban scenes can contribute to developing place identity in Seoul. To do so, we will compare a Seoul scene map with a map of the floating population of Seoul. This will lead us to incorporate characteristics of people into the facility data of the scene map in the specific place of Seoul. With this analysis, we expect to capture the dynamics of place identity and the influence of scenes on party identity.