Future Day and Songdo (송도국제업무단지 )

Songdo Under Construction, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

March 1 is the inaugural celebration of Future Day, and it's got me thinking about urban futures again.  On my futurist bookshself at the moment: Aerotropolis, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.  It's a business book, really: breathless descriptions of fabulous capitalists and the globetrotting edge cities they build.  I'm reading it because South Korea's Songdo is a poster child for this vision of the future.  At 7 miles from Incheon International Airport, this massive development on land reclaimed from tidal flats is supposed to represent the city of the future--a networked hub with near-immediate access to most of Asia, hard-wired for ubiquitous computing, and constructed for minimal levels of car pollution (although building a new city from scratch surely caused some pollution!).  Songdo will join other poster-cities for globalization, including Dubai and Shanghai.

As Kasarda and Lindsay point out, Songdo, and the many aerotropolis-like encampments in China and Southeast Asia, takes globalization as a mode of production as its organizing principle--both in its design and in its function.  It's all about circulating capital; and it's built to circulate capital and the humans that serve it in the most efficient way possible, from high-rise apartment to subway to airport and back.  They wonder "whether we will consciously choose to live in cities built in globalization's image--machines for living linked in great chains and tasked with specific functions: factories, farms, headquarters, hospitals, and hubs" (p. 13).  Living in Songdo means defining oneself according to flows of capital--living at the the vertiginous heights of advanced capitalism.  

Is this "the future"?  It's certainly one version of urban futures.  But I wonder if Songdo and Dubai are the only places "built in globalization's image".  An alternative possibility on the other end of the globalization scale: temporary housing fashioned from discarded cargo pallets.  The idea here is to utilize pallets discarded from

Pallet House, OpenArchitectureNetwork.org

cargo shipments (including international aid shipments) in order to build temporary (yet sturdy) housing for the enormous mass of refugees and urban poor.  This is another future certainly, but not one reflected in Songdo's design.

Similar to the "appropriate technology" debate in anthropology and development in the 1960's and 1970's, we see here a division: graceful, gated, LEED certified aerotropolises rising out of ground in Asia, squatter- and refugee settlements for the poor in the Global South.  Similar to solar ovens and composting toilets--clever technological hacks, but hacks for those on the other end of capital flows.

As David Harvey, Mike Davis and many others have predicted, the tendency for globalization is to develop according to a power-law distribution of wealth.  Both rich and poor are embedded in global movements of capital, but at opposite ends.  But living in Songdo means that this "other" globalization (what Gordon Mathews suggestively terms "low-end" globalization) is never visible, even though the "high end" spires and parks of Songdo very much depends on the contributions of the "low-end". Songdo--as a city of the future--suggests another future for the city: the ideological division of the world by social class, the networked hubs for the wealthy developing apart from globalized spaces for the poor.  If this seems like the inevitable future, then it is only because we have already (although perhaps tacitly) accepted the logic of these spaces of exception. 

But if we're choosing to live in globalization's image (or, indeed, if we have no choice in the matter), then we might choose a built environment that embraces (at least symbolically) more of the global supply chain.  Devoting a city of flows of financiers and computer programmers represents one end of that, but what about the massive cement industry that supports the spires of Songdo (Korea is the world's fifth largest producer of cement)?  And what about the host of other goods and services that move through, borne not on airplanes, but on trains and cargo ships? 

Globalization layers on inequalities after inequalities.  In terms of urban life, one of the most glaring: enormous amalgams of surplus capital to those states that can afford it (or, in South Korea's case, merely underwrite it), and make-shift re-use and re-purposing for an enormous cross-section of global poor.

Contrast this to Keetwonen, a massive student dormitory complex in Amsterdam fashioned entirely out of re-purposed shipping containers.  While denizens of Amsterdam's Keetwonen are hardly helping the world's poor, they are--at least in a symbolic way--engaging both ends of the supply chain.

If we're to build in globalization's image, then I am advocating a Jane Jacobs approach.  A future city that consciously connects with global flows at multiple ends--that includes multiple reminders of globalization's inequalities and builds accordingly. 

Keetwonen: the largest container city in the world

A Korean multiculturalism?

A journalist contacted me about race and racism in South Korea, and I summarized some of my thinking (and prognostications) for him.  You may not believe it, but I think some of the most interesting (and potentially positive) things are happening right now with attempts to address race and multiculturalism in South Korea.

Is there racism in South Korea?  Absolutely, although the real question here is: what is the context for Korean racism?  And how is it different than other countries?  “Minjok" is a neologism borrowed from the Japanese that refers to a national ethnos.  It’s not the same as US operationalizations of race—nor would it be accurate to simply gloss it as “Japanese”.  Instead, it needs to be contextualized in the colonialist past—that is, while Korean minjok makes some of the same historical claims as Japanese minzoku (ancient, homogenous lineage, glorious destiny), Korean nationalist/ ethnic discourse develops first in the crucible of resistance to Japanese imperial ambitions, and then again in the wake of US occupation, partitioning (bundan) and the Korean War.  This is why you might find heavily nationalist rhetoric on both the Left and the Right—there are both conservative and progressive messages there.

But there’s another kind of “race” as well—this one very much the result of occupation by US forces during the USAMGIK period.  This “race” is, perhaps, more familiar to Westerners: the hierarchy of perceived phenotypical differences institutionalized in government, citizenship, employment, media representation, etc.  Koreans adopted this system as well.

But prior to the 1990’s, most people outside of Korea had little opportunity to experience either system—the resident foreign population was negligible.  But as that population has ticked upwards to 2%, so have opportunities for people to define themselves vis-à-vis racial others, and, in particular, guest laborers (who, whatever the complaints of expat American and Canadian English teachers, really bear the brunt of racism in Korea).  People from South Asia or Southeast Asia bear the double, racial burden as being defined both as non-Korean and dark-skinned.

As far as addressing these issues, there are all kinds of things going on right now in Korea, from lots of Korean academics studying multiculturalism, to lots of governmental and non-governmental organizations working to mediate discrimination and prejudice.  So I absolutely see things changing in South Korea.  But some of the more deep-seated (and hence more serious) problems are probably the same factors that contribute to deep racial inequalities in the US: not the incidence of hate speech itself (which, of course, still proliferates here), but in the access to networks of contacts that, in Korea, are invaluable for anything from education and employment to housing and marriage.

This sounds insurmountable—and it is certainly is challenging to progressive elements in South Korean society.  But it’s also exciting, because it means that whatever “multiculturalism” emerges in South Korea will be uniquely Korean—not, in other words, a recapitulation of the sometimes shockingly hollow US-style multiculturalism.  That is, it will address not only racial discrimination and differential citizenship, but also the post-colonial relations that reproduce these powerful inequalities. 

So, I continue to follow this issue, not just because of my Korean research, but to get some ideas for building a more inclusive society in the US.     

Can A Place Be the Future?

In a January 26th New York Times op-ed, "25 Years of Digital Vandalism," William Gibson reflects on the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.  As a genuine futurist, Gibson looks to Stuxnet as a sign of the times--and a bellwether for the future.  He confesses, "I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another."  But he's disappointed in the end, to find that Stuxnet is really just another virus--albeit one perhaps appropriated by one government against another.  He is ambivalent about the meaning of this for the future of nuclear security. 

One of Gibson's strengths is his restless, global search for sites of the future.  Here, he looks to Iran, but he is best known for his (highly selective) evocations of Japanese postmodernity.  But this is a never-ending quest--the future proves elusively peripatetic.  As he commented in a 1989 interview, “I think that at one time the world believed that America was the future, but now the future’s gone somewhere else, perhaps to Japan, it’s probably on its way to Singapore soon but I don’t think we’re it” anymore."

But is this an ultimately pointless quest?  To what extent is it useful to think of the future as another place?  On the one hand, in an era of globalization, there's a certain temporal relativism at work.  One way of thinking of financial arbitrage (and other financial instruments) is precisely that: the exploitation of pricing irregularities that are a function of temporal distance.  After a relatively short time, these differences will disappear in a more homogeneous time of globalized capital.  But those are short, and necessarily fleeting, temporal distortions.   

In a sense, thinking of Iran, Japan or Singapore as "the future"is no more credible than looking to other places as representative of the past, a familiar tactic in 19th century anthropology, and still part of racist, ethnocentric depictions of non-Western peoples as "caught" in the "primitive past."  Here, we're just reversing the gaze--now, because of culture, politics or economy, the other place is thought to exist in an accelerated time horizon; looking at their "present" is said to grant us some insight int our future.  

But our more quotidian moments are more obdurately Netwonian or, perhaps the better way to think of it is "more Taylorist."  That is, after the work of F.W. Taylor, time for us is parsed out according to a unified, commodified form, ultimately synchronized into the monolithic, mechanical timepiece of global capital.  

Still, there is a real point to looking past the U.S. or Europe for the future.  And not because it opens up onto some magic window onto the next, big thing.  Call it "cultural arbitrage"--the gap that opens up between global modernity and the kind of hopes and expectations people have for their lives.  Looking somewhere else doesn't mean that our life will become more like their life.   But it does open up the possibility for reflecting on similar conditions in the US.  That is, the "gap" opens up onto our contradictory experiences and expectations and forces us to question the course of our own futures.

We'll be doing this in August of this year with our study abroad course in Seoul, South korea:   Harmony of Modernity and Tradition.  We'll be reflecting on exactly those tensions that open up between people's lives and the modernity that we all share.  We'll be visiting temples, shrines, factories, shopping meccas, nightclubs.  Along the way to making sense of it all, we'll reflect on what it means for us as well.  Seoul not as a window onto the future, but as a means for thinking about our mutual futures.

References

Gibson, William (1989).  Interview (February) with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air."  Washington, D.C.: National Public Radio.   

A Little Korean Science Fiction: 카이와판돔의 번역에 과하여 (Concerning the Translation of Kaiwapandom)

Lee Young-do's "Concerning the Translation of Kaiwapandom" appeared in an anthology of Korean science fiction, Alternative Dream, in 2007. Like many of his sf contemporaries, Lee's work was first available online--with all the advantages and disadvantages that it implies. That medium may be ideal for the world's most wired nation, but it has also served to limit the foreign, scholarly audience for this work. Translators, after all, are less likely to invest their energies in a medium that is, by definition, shifting and protean. So it's nice when presses like 황금가지 (Hwanggeumgaji) publish these collections of stories. As for translators--well, as you see below, I'm not much of one. But I have tried to give you a sense of this interesting story. You can find another translation of the story at Crossroads, an online journal of science and culture published by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. And, in that vein, if you're interested in an English introduction to Korean Science Fiction, you can visit Gord Sellar's blog for a taste of his Korean sf visionquest.

Ultimately, "Kaiwanpandom" is a story steeped in anthropology--a tale about linguistics, language survival and Korean unification--and an ultimately optimistic vision of Korean cultural futures.

The obvious target of Lee's story is the blatant linguistic imperialism in mainstream US- and English sf. How many sf stories hinge on some kind of standard language spoken across a galaxy? How many stories project a future where the people of Earth speak only English? One of the many ironies of golden-age sf is that, in the act of discovering a diversity of intelligent life in the universe, people lose their linguistic and cultural diversity.

Of course, this is a common sense understanding of linguistic hegemony that writers in the US and other English-speaking countries are steeped in and rarely question, a kind of linguistic social Darwinism that not only naturalizes the present dominance of English but also projects it into a future where a monolingual world is an inevitable product of the progress into space.

It is here that "Kaiwapandom" begins. Aliens have made contact with Earth through a kind of receiver system called an "ansible". A dictionary of Galactic Standard has been compiled. But now, the work of cultural translation has begun--starting with mythology (the basics, as it were). After a disastrous attempt to translate one myth (destroying much of California), the alien governing body has initiated an exchange of mythology with the Witanians.

They have sent a kind of alien Cinderella--"Kaiwanpandom". Interpreters around the world are striving to translate cultural texts from the the alien tongue. But, here, there is already the politics of language at stake--it is the "Galactic Standard-English" dictionary that is produced first, after all. Will other Earth languages be swept aside for a single language to communicate with Galactic Standard? Especially since the stakes are so high--the transfer of unimaginable technologies.

But not everyone may view this as a spectacular crisis. As Teacher Lee--the interpreter engaged by some government body to work on the Korean translation in some undisclosed location in the mountains north of Seoul--explains to her bodyguard, Captain Bak (formerly of the North Korean People's Army), you have to take the long view:

We don't know how many viewpoints have disappeared. In reality, other language users take over; in the last century, capitalism was like that, and now it's aliens. Both don't use the languages of other people. [ . . .] When barbarians appear speaking other languages, as a rule they are assimilated or killed off. After this present resistance ends, the Earth will quickly unify under a common language. It's highly possible that will be English. (80)

But there are those that would oppose this change. There's a guerrilla resistance movement to the incursion of alien culture--the "Earthers" (지구주의자). Their goal is to advance a kind of xenophobic agenda--and they have actively tried to stop the translation of the alien myth into Earth languages.

Even though it seems like a long shot that the Earthers would be after the Korean translation, Teacher Lee explains that, since she is the only real authority on Galactic Standard in Korea, knocking her out would eliminate the whole process of Korean translation altogether. So, in the midst of her work on the translation, the Earthers attack. That's where Captain Bak comes in--jumping in defense of both Teacher Lee and of the Korean language in general.

That is, not only is Captain Bak (as her bodyguard) key to her physical survival, he also articulates the importance of Korea's linguistic survival. His first point concerns the widely held opinion (in Korea, anyway) that Korean is the most logical and scientific of the world's languages, one that Teacher Lee pessimistically dismisses.

"Suppose that it comes to light that the easiest language with which to understand Witan is Korean? What then?"

"Manx may be the closest language to Witan. Yahi or Katavaka may be as well. But in the last century capitalism did away with these languages. And there was no problem with the suitability of these languages.

"This is natural law. It doesn't matter how beautiful or how special the languages that have disappeared are, Only power is important. Because this is natural law I don't get angry or try to resist." (84)

But, despite Teacher Lee's defeatist rendition of linguistic history, Captain Bak doesn't give up. As the two escape from the clutches of the terrorists, Bak pieces together a politics of Korean language survival in the age of Galactic standard.

That politics is premised on his own experiences of what appears to have been a one-sided reunification of North and South Korea--i.e., one where South Korea assimilates the North.

"Teacher Lee, what can you understand if you lose the Fatherland (조국) and the language of the fatherland?
[ . . .]
Now I'm Captain Bak. But at one time I was Bak Weon-jin, an officer of the North Korean People's Army (조선인민군). But it's an even more strange evil to remember that when's there's no longer any position from which to use that name.
[ . . .]
I'm sure you're right when you assert that the weak disappear and the strong proliferate. I've suffered this first hand. I'm talking about cultural language. Korean too will disappear. And some day the world and Witan too."
[ . . .]
"Captain Bak, you're talking about an even larger extinction than I was. Given that, doesn't that make it even more useless?"

"It's not so much extinction as giving up. For adults to arrive at that place you have to give up on your children." (88)

In the end, it's Captain Bak who saves them both from the terrorists. And Korean proves important, after all, in conceptualizing gender terms in Witan (92). One of the translation problems dogging them is the existence of three genders--Woman, Man(1) and Man(2)--each of which can be placed together in any combination to produce different, gendered offspring.

Then there are occasions in Witan when different [gender] combinations are possible. Two women coupled together produce a daughter and a woman coupled with a man(1) produced Man(2) sons. If a combination of three people--two women and a man(1)--is achieved, then you can have a daughter and a man(2) son; three people consisting of one woman, one man(1) and one man(2) give birth to boys of each type. Then if Witanians want to reproduce all of the genders, how do they have to combine?"

"You would need a combination of two women, one man(1) and one man(2)." (92)

This ideal combination of four people as a basic unit for reproducing all genders in Witanian society is known as a Kaiwanpandom. Translated, Teacher Lee decides on "온가시버시" (Ongasibeosi) which we might translate into English as "whole couple."

It's important here that they use "온가시버시"--i.e., combining the pure Korean "온" (on) with the pure Korean "가시버시" (gasibeosi) rather than the Sino-Korean 부부 (bubu). Somehow, this is a better translation of Kaiwapandom than one in Sino-Korean (or in English).

The obvious meanings here include both the survival of Korean in a future dominated by powerful and imperialistic hegemons (i.e., the US). But also the sense of a reunified Korea being one that brings together a combination of different peoples and different customs in order to found a whole. In other words, both Teacher Lee (the embodiment of South Korea's knowledge society) and Captain Bak (the representative of the perpetually militarized North) need to come together to found a stronger, lasting Korean peninsula. The last scene finds Captain Bak giving Teacher Lee cigarettes in the hospital--dreams of unified future, after all.

And there's an argument here for linguistic diversity in general. Implicit in "Kaiwapandom" is the idea that the world is better for the different perspectives different languages bring. And even more than this, that linguistic diversity may be one of the best resources we have for adapting to perpetually changing (and perpetually surprising) cultural futures. The other side to this argument is the acknowledgment that a monolingual future is an ultimately impoverished one.