South Korea's Developmental State Afterlife: Urban Injustice, Spatial Imaginaries, and the Long Shadow of Growth-First Urbanism

With its compressed modernisation under a developmental-state regime, rapid post-war urbanisation, deepening demographic extremes (among the world's lowest fertility rates and fastest-ageing populations), and persistent spatial inequalities, South Korea is an exceptionally revealing setting for examining the consequences of growth-first urbanism. These dynamics have not only produced enduring spatial injustices but shaped a distinct Korean spatial identity, visible in collective behaviours and psychological responses to contemporary crises of regional extinction and demographic decline.

The developmental state was not only an economic project but an authoritarian spatial and political one. Its planning cultures mobilised hope-laden slogans, such as “Joguk geundaehwa” (the modernisation for the fatherland) and “jal sarabose” (let us live well), the latter closely tied to the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), as affective devices that organised collective anticipation and helped naturalise a growth-first national imaginary, privileging economic growth, national discipline, and spatial order over competing alternatives. The congress takes place in Gwangju, where the May 18th Uprising of 1980 gives these concerns historical and political force. Its violent suppression is a reminder that alternative urban futures were not simply absent from dominant imaginaries, but actively foreclosed.

We invite contributions examining how developmental-state legacies, through planning instruments, governance fragmentation, and affective political cultures, reproduce urban injustice across South Korea's cities and shape the spatial identities, collective behaviours, and psychological responses through which contemporary crises (housing decline, climate vulnerability, infrastructural inequality, demographic pressure, uneven welfare provision) are experienced and navigated.

We welcome diverse methodological approaches and papers situated across diverse contexts.