Which citizenship do you mean? The case of the Seokkwan Doosan apartment complex in Seoul

Abstract

Although applying a specific perspective (e.g. energy citizenship) provides valuable information about citizens’ actions in relation to energy issues, confining their actions into just one category risks limiting our knowledge. This paper explores this hypothesis through a case study of residents’ energy-related activities at the Seokkwan Doosan apartment complex in Seoul. This research compares four citizenship types with Andrew Dobson’s categories and applies them all to the case study. This research yields the following findings. The Seokkwan case appears to have a mixture of all the citizenship characteristics discussed in this paper. The case study shows that only the concept of sustainability citizenship is suitable for explaining both rights and responsibilities. Although the case study only focuses on the private sphere, residents’ activities clearly had public implications, which are characteristics of all the types of citizenship. Regarding territoriality and nonterritoriality, aspects of ecological, sustainability, and energy citizenships appear only weakly. The case study reveals virtues of all citizenships. This case study reveals that the hypothesis is correct: we should be cautious about applying only a particular type of citizenship to a diverse case study.