Consuming the Korean Mobile Nation: Seoul, Dislocation, and the Search for Belonging in (Food) Media.

In the 1960s and 1970s, future-minded agents of urban transformation, such as Seoul's "Bulldozer Mayor" Kim Hyun-ok and Korea's "national architect", Kim Swoo-geun, led Fordist urban developmental policies that transformed the postwar capital into a paean to the economic miracle.[18] These master plans were fueled by drastic economic initiatives, which catalyzed extreme population growth in Seoul following industrial development.[19] To accommodate workers migrating to the city from the countryside and the growing middle class, Kim Chung-op, an architect for the Seoul government, suggested Western modernist forms, such as Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation as ideal models to house the inhabitants of the growing city (see Figure 1).[20] Mass-produced in Korea, these apartment complexes became synonymous with Western, modern living from the 1970s on and were familiarized through contemporaneous film and media. For the development of Kangnam and contemporary Seoul, see Lett, "Lifestyles", 97-158; and Laura C. Nelson, "'Seoul to the World, the World to Seoul,'" in I Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea i (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 22-70. 37 Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, "The Global I Hansik i Campaign and Commodification of Korean Cuisine", in Kim and Cho, I Korean Popular Culture Reader i , 362-384. Sustained by invisible global participants, transnationally consumed food media linked to physical Korean places reconfigure visual topographies of city and country as distinct byproducts of the particulars of Seoul's urbanism and Korean cybernationalism.[17] VISUALIZING SEOUL, THE MEGAPOLIS OF THE DEVELOPMENTALIST STATE The hyperfocused developmentalism of the Park Chung-hee era onward gave rise to the now (in)famous Miracle on the Han River, which eventually linked Seoul to global capitalist networks. [Extracted from the article]