The German Legacy in the urban Milieu of Seoul

Abstract

Land Readjustment is a land development technique to deal with worldwide urbanization and subsequent demand for urban lots. Started from the legislation by Frankfurt’s mayor Franz Adickes, this modern technique provided an effective means to reduce the inconveniences of land fragmentation and to construct urban infrastructures without expensive acquisition of land, and besides, to control profit allocation. As long as it was an effort for public management of urban space, the initiative of landowners and their cooperation were not always free from government intervention. Under the authoritarian regimes of Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, and (post)colonial Korea. LR was invented, adopted and enforced, where the role of charismatic leaders such as Franz Adickes, Gotō Shinpei and Park Jǒng-Hee was always crucial. The ambivalence of LR between coercion from higher authorities and voluntary demands of urban proprietors, between municipal socialism and capitalist modernization is most clearly revealed in (post)colonial Seoul, but it is also a global legacy across the continent. In terms of its coercive and developmental rationality, the LR has been an arbiter of transnational urbanity/modernity.