From Gyms to Martial Law: A Geographer's Deep Look at Korean Society

The president who believed in feng shui was impeached by citizens who came out to the square, and in early elections, all kinds of promises surrounding space were rampant.
I wake up in a bedroom decorated to my own taste, go to the gym to work out, arrive at work, finish my work, stop by a hot place for a meal, go to the square to express my political opinions, then return home, look at my phone, and then fall asleep.
What is the space where our lives begin, continue, and end? What is the relationship between space and power?

"Power and Space" is a new book written by Professor Shin Hye-ran of the Department of Geography at Seoul National University, who has analyzed cities, space, and geography with simple, intuitive pictures and clear logic.
Shin Hye-ran, who examines space, power, and politics based on 29 keywords and 100 illustrations, including body, gym, house, village, city, festival, religion, memory, election, transportation, new town, water, marriage immigration, North Korean defectors, island, feng shui, happiness, miners, gender, multiculturalism, geopolitics, resistance space, nuclear, martial law, and plaza, talks about political space and spatial politics using the social space of Korea as a stage.
As politics and power are elements that shape individual lives and collective societies, we should critically understand the relationship between power and space to find possibilities for creating better places.
We encourage you to challenge the spatial order we have taken for granted, practice creating desirable places, and imagine spaces that will make our lives and society better places.

I want to talk about a very political space now, ultimately about spatial politics.
It is also a story about the space of power and the power of space.
It is not a stable, hierarchical power, but a power whose existence is determined and changed through endlessly fluctuating interactions.
Politics and power are not negative elements, but rather inevitable and natural parts of our lives and society.
In particular, the process of becoming the master of one's own life and expanding one's freedom of choice through creating a desirable place, rather than a territorial battle to take what belongs to others, is the essence of political space and spatial politics.
--- p.17

Politics within the gym is also fierce.
In any place, people tend to enter and feel that they belong there and are welcome.
The gym is a place where we expose our bodies and become conscious of our own and other people's bodies. Unlike a cafe, where we don't talk to each other or bow our heads, we see our own bodies or other people's bodies reflected in the mirror.
As much as InBody, there is ‘NunBody’ (a compound word of ‘Nun’ and ‘InBody’).
It is also important to check the changes in your body reflected in the mirror, because in the gym, everyone can see everyone else's body.
--- p.38

The bottom line is that no pledges are made within the campaign during the presidential election period.
It will take a long time for politicians and professors to dream of sharing the same space.
The candidate should look into the polymaths and policy innovators with whom he has been close over the years.
Because the presidential campaign is large and the election process is fast-paced, it is possible to stay outside the camp unofficially.
Once you build up a sense of camaraderie and dream of the same space, the rest doesn't really matter.
--- p.132

Of the over 30,000 North Korean defectors, more than 70 percent are women.
These days, it's over 90 percent.
Why are most North Korean defectors women? Middle-aged and older North Korean female defectors are typical.
In the mid to late 1990s, when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I experienced the Arduous March and the informal economic activity of the market.
She believed the rumors spread by the broker that she could make a lot of money by working in China for a short time, so she went to China using illegal means, met a rural Chinese man introduced by the broker, got married, and then worked for a Korean company.
He followed a route set up by a broker introduced by a Korean and went to Laos or Thailand, where he stayed as an illegal resident before coming to Korea.

--- p.188

Resistance against martial law unfolds in multiple layers, across physical, institutional, symbolic, everyday, and digital spaces.
It is an active attempt to create an alternative space that shakes up the spatial order controlled by power and creates a new spatial order.
Although the physical control of martial law was not as effective as in the 1980s, this time around, groups sympathizing with martial law emerged, occupying spaces as if they were resistance forces and demonstrating their collective power.
The mob that attacked the Western District Court was an extreme example of a rebellion against the rule of law.
--- p.318

I started from the premise that 'space is political and politics is spatial.'
From my body to the world, every space we inhabit is permeated by power, and various layers of politics intervene in the process of creating and transforming that space.
The question of who defines the character of a space, names it, occupies it, how it is used, to whom it is open and whom it excludes, is inherently political.
From body building in the gym to the transformation of urban space, the state's control of space through martial law, movement and regulation surrounding national borders, and the global geopolitics of migration, space is not simply a physical backdrop; it is a site where power relations are constantly constructed and reconstructed, and it is both the power relations themselves and the source of power.

--- p.323