Competing visions for urban space in Seoul: Understanding the demolition of Korea's Dongdaemun Baseball Stadium

Abstract

Baseball is arguably the most popular sport in South Korea. In understanding the historical and cultural meaning of the game, the collective memories and emotions associated with the Dongdaemun Baseball Stadium (DBS) are of paramount importance. Built in 1925 by the Japanese imperialists and the oldest modern sporting ground in the country, the DBS hosted numerous culturally and historically significant competitions (Son 2003). Notably, it was the venue where the inaugural Korean professional baseball match took place in 1982, in addition to hosting a series of the East Asian baseball derbies between Japan and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. More importantly, it was regarded as the home of South Korean amateur baseball for more than 30 years, including a number of annual nationwide high school baseball competitions (B. S. Lee 2007). The DBS was, in short, a place imbued with collective sporting memories, nostalgia, and, to some extent, a post-colonial Korean national identity. In spite of the cultural and historical values that the DBS signifies, the baseball stadium was demolished in 2008 as part of Seoul’s revitalization plan. In 2006, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) announced an inner city redevelopment policy that included constructing an iconic building, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, to represent a new urban identity (SMG 2007). The newly elected mayor of Seoul, Mr. Se-hoon Oh, had a strong desire to transform the South Korean capital into a global city, and his municipal administration strategically fostered a fashion and space design industry within the frame of this globalizing policy (Hwang 2014). This plan prioritized the construction of iconic architecture as a way to denote the city’s new post-industrial identity (Kriznik 2011). The place where the old baseball stadium had been standing was chosen to be a site where a new geographical landmark, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), was to be built (Chung 2009). Although a large number of social activists and intellectuals, as well as the baseball community, protested against this mega construction project, the municipality carried out thebuilding work as scheduled while promising to build an alternative baseball stadium on the outskirts of Seoul. In addition, the SMG agreed to create a sport history museum near the DDP in order to commemorate the old stadium’s 83 years at that site. In 2014, the DDP finally opened to the public and the following year, the construction of the new baseball arena, the Gocheok Sky Dome, was also completed. Currently, traces of the collective memories related to the DBS can only be found in a corner of a small museum, in rather fossilized form, without a geographical connection to the actual sporting place. This chapter critically examines the SMG’s recent inner city redevelopment policy in relation to these demolition and construction projects. While being careful not to overly romanticize the sporting past, I argue here that the demolition of the baseball stadium and its subsequent relocation, together with the construction of the new iconic Design Plaza, constitute the annihilation of a public place and its associated collective memories. Further, the Seoul municipality’s desire to become a global city works to destroy certain local histories through its urban rebranding strategy. In this analysis, I emphasize the meanings of the now demolished DBS, as well as the implications of building the Dongdaemun Design Plaza and the Gocheok Sky Dome stadium for their surrounding areas. I will first briefly introduce the notion of the global city and the role of neoliberal globalization, which are necessary to explain Seoul’s aspiration to construct a new urban identity through its architecture.