Abstract

Through the autoethnography of residential experiences and self-perceptions of residents of new towns in South Korea, this study examines the affection of Gangnam urbanism that dominates their residential practices and its fractions. In the historical process of Korean urbanization, Gangnam urbanism was developed as the complex consequence of the ideological structuring of the policy planning for the middle-class residential model conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, the housing supply system focusing on the construction of apartment complexes and new towns, and the collective housing practices of citizens in the field of speculative urbanization that expanded in parallel. The reason for focusing on residential experience as a research object is that residential practice as a ‘bodily’ sensation and performance is an affective force that amplifies and reproduces the ideological structure that presupposes Gangnam as an ideal residential space model. By analyzing the autoethnographic narratives of 33 in-depth interviews, this study reveals how the process of housing practice reorients individuals as speculative subjects, the affective mechanisms that orient individuals as speculative subjects, and identify the limits and the possibility of fractures in the dominant Gangnam urbanism that exist behind speculative subjectivity in their statements.