Abstract

This study explores the causes of poor walking environment in Korean society from the perspective of the politics of the commons. To this end, media articles were analyzed from 1920s, when the use of modern transportation began in earnest, to 1990s, when some new apartment complexes with improved and differentiated pedestrian environment appeared in Korea. Through a discourse analysis on media articles, the process and causes of socially reconstructed meaning of the roads as the commons and walking on the roads in the process of modernization in Korea were examined. With the introduction of modern public transportation, the road that used to exist as a commons has undergone changes. In the development era of the 1960s and 1980s, the modern meaning of roads and walking was changed, and the meaning was reduced to ‘road = passage.’ There were three main reasons for this reduction in meaning: the demand for a ‘life revolution’ on the road, the spaced violence by the authoritarian state, and growth-centric economic development. After the 1990s, the roads as a commons were restored along with the pedestrian rights movement. On the other hand, the polarization of the pedestrian environment and distortion of the commons in neighboring residential areas were found mainly in the newly constructed apartment complexes. This study is meaningful in clarifying the socially reconstructed process of the meaning of roads as commons and enhancing imagination to improve the walking environment in the future.