Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Busan EDC (Busan Eco Delta Smart City) is a smart city project currently under development in the southwestern port city of Busan, South Korea. Its central concern is climate change adaptation; the city had been experiencing an unprecedented number of flash floods and typhoons in the recent years that decimated its agricultural lands and caused a major loss of lives. The experts involved—many of whom were not Busan residents—found it necessary to appropriate the local knowledges of the working-class, low-income communities surrounding the construction site to innovate technologies for an improved water management infrastructure more befitting of current and prospective environmental conditions. The phenomenon in which the knowledges of disadvantaged subjects are crucial for progress and yet are obscured from the state-driven discourses of progress is historically contingent in South Korea. Despite having been excluded from their circulation, socially and economically disadvantaged residents of Seoul and Busan played crucial roles in the development and extension of modern water management infrastructures during the two cities’ precarious post-war, rapid urbanization era (1961-1988). A historical study of this particular infrastructure reveals a unique dialectic between the “front-stage” rhetoric of the future as dictated by the state, and the hidden “back-stage” topographies of power amongst diverse actors that intersect with the forces of technology to ultimately determine it.