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From Rubble to the Korean Wave Hub: The Making of the New Digital Media City in Seoul

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Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First Century Asia

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Abstract

Digital Media City (DMC) is an ambitious urban development project on a previous waste disposal site of Seoul. While it had been promoted as the world’s first high-tech complex in the early 2000s, it has now developed into the hub of the Korean Wave, concentrating South Korea’s key media and entertainment industries. This chapter explains how the rise of the Korean Wave and the government’s political and economic aspirations shaped the development of DMC. In particular, we focus on how the Korean Wave, which began as an intangible cultural product, has been translated into tangible urban formation of a planned creative cluster. Although DMC managed to cluster cultural-creative industries, we highlight that intrinsic values of culture are important to further support its creative urban environment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kim Do-nyun is one of the principal designers of the DMC (notably, the designer of the now famous Digital Media Street) and a Professor at Sung Kyun Kwan University in Seoul.

  2. 2.

    Instead of ‘creative class’, this chapter prefers to use the term ‘creative worker’ to refer to all those who work in the CCIs.

  3. 3.

    Revenue came not only from the products, but also from related commodities such as fashion, food, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and cultural tourism.

  4. 4.

    The large Korean conglomerates and ‘chaebols’ are heavily connected in property speculation in the nation’s real estate markets (Sohn 2008). They operate major construction firms and reap profits from the state-financed reformation of the built environment (see Pirie 2008).

  5. 5.

    The construction of DMC began in November 2006.

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Interviews

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. JACOPS Planning & Design, Seoul, South Korea

    Jun-Min Song

  2. KDI School of Public Policy and Management, Seoul, South Korea

    Yu-Min Joo

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  1. Jun-Min Song
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Correspondence to Jun-Min Song .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Caulfield East, VIC, Australia

    Xin Gu

  2. School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Michael Kho Lim

  3. School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Justin O’Connor

  4. Department of Cultural Industry and Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China

    Justin O’Connor

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Song, JM., Joo, YM. (2020). From Rubble to the Korean Wave Hub: The Making of the New Digital Media City in Seoul. In: Gu, X., Lim, M.K., O’Connor, J. (eds) Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First Century Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46291-8_10

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