City in a Village: Imagining a Rural Future for South Korea

Abstract

Urban migration and an aging rural population have left numerous regions of South Korea “population extinct” and its villages economically, socially and physically neglected. Top-down rural policies and the promises of modernization prioritize cities, industrialization and individualism over rural living, agriculture, and community. City in a Village 1.0 (CiViChon 1.0) is a narrative tool of invention combines conventional research methods with methods and tools from world building and narrative fiction to imagine an alternative future for village-life in South Korea. CiViChon 1.0 is a fictive village, on a fictive site, inhabited by fictive personas that projects a possible alternative future for rural Korea. Taking into account the history of modernization of the country and current realities, sand based on an epistemology of imagination, CiViChon challenges the inequality and unsustainable practices to imagine a more diverse, equitable, and physically, socially and mentally sustainable rural future. It is a shift that demands an evolutionary shift from the biospheric and geosphere to the development of the noosphere that towards greater individuation and unification of its elements as the complexity consciousness necessary to reconfigure the relationships between humans, and between humans and the non-human world.