Practicing urban commons between autonomy and togetherness: a genealogical analysis of the urban precariat movements in Tokyo and Seoul

Han, Didi (2021) Practicing urban commons between autonomy and togetherness: a genealogical analysis of the urban precariat movements in Tokyo and Seoul. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis examines practices of urban commons developed by precariat movements in Tokyo and Seoul. While the global rise and expansion of capitalist cities have produced precarity through ever-changing modes of governance, the urban precariat around the world has sought alternatives in each context. This study takes a comparative look at how the urban precariat’s alternative practices simultaneously shape and are shaped by the uneven and fluid processes of urbanisation. Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic research, 70 in-depth interviews, and extensive archival data, this thesis provides three sets of comparative analysis regarding situated value struggles of the urban precariat at different times. Firstly, it investigates how day labourers in Tokyo and housewives of shacktowns in Seoul were not only the source of the most precarious forms of labour power in constructing these cities in the post-war period, but also emerged as agents of urban movements contesting social norms around work and home. Secondly, it explores the value struggles of youth who decided to live as the “voluntary poor” when Japan and South Korea began neoliberal restructuring. Desiring to escape wage-labour relations, the precariat in Tokyo and Seoul chose work and home as strategic terrains in value struggles over surplus. Lastly, the thesis analyses contemporary precariat movements in Tokyo and Seoul in historical perspective. By tracing enduring traits of social movements in each city, it explores how the precariat in these cities has developed different strategies around autonomy and community to confront the ideology of self-reliance. This thesis contributes to broader discussions around commons and the precariat that challenge the capitalist production of subjectivity by adding a view from Global East. Producing an unprecedented genealogical cartography of precariat movements in Tokyo and Seoul, the thesis empirically unpacks the persistent tensions between autonomy and community that mark the precariat’s situated production of urban commons.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2021 Didi Kyoung-ae Han
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Shin, Hyun Bang and Low, Murray
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4654

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