Re-visioning sustainability in the city: Urban agriculture in South Korea as a platform of everyday governance

Abstract

This thesis examines the policy-making and everyday governance of urban agriculture (UA) in South Korea. Recently, UA has been adopted as an urban policy solution addressing issues such as food security, environmental justice, and community vitalization, often as a part of government-led urban sustainability and greening agendas. UA has gone through a series of evolutions in Korea. Beginning in the early 2000s as an ecologically-focused grassroots movement, UA was soon taken up by state actors for purposes such as supporting green growth initiatives, drawing attention to rural agriculture, and building world-class green cities. In Korea, UA was formalized at the national policy level through the 2011 Act on Development and Support of Urban Agriculture and has since become a widespread phenomenon in cities across the country. Drawing on 9 months of ethnographic participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, this study illustrates how UA serves as a platform for civil society groups, the national government, and local governments to advance their various political and socio-cultural goals. Using the concept of everyday governance, I argue that UA activists and urban cultivators actively engage in negotiating, resisting, and re-visioning UA as formalized by top-down sustainable development policy. To address the existing barriers to inclusivity and accessibility in formal Korean UA, it is suggested that policies and funding mechanisms offer alternatives to standardized plot distribution and create more opportunities for experiential, communal learning within the garden.