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Glossary of Terms
Dongja-dong Public Housing Project Timeline

Part 1: The Intersection of Policy and Movement

Chapter 1: Public Development of the Alley in Front of Seoul Station
Chapter 2: The Housing Rights Movement: Changing the Development Landscape

Part 2: The Collision of Public and Private

Chapter 3 Public in the making
Chapter 4: "Effort is the only way to buy."

Residents of Dongja-dong, Part 3

Chapter 5 Who owns it?
Chapter 6: Building a Home for the Residents of the Attic

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A place you can encounter when you turn your head to the right from Seoul Station overlooking Seoul Square.
Behind the towering skyscrapers lies Dongja-dong, Seoul's largest shantytown.
This is a place where those who were separated from their families in childhood, directly hit by the economic crisis, and victims of illegal forced labor gather, and it is the heart of South Korea that has captured the world with the adjective K. It is an administrative district in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, and a 'core site' where the contradictions surrounding development are condensed beyond the slum-dense area.

This book sheds light on the residents of these shantytowns who still have to fight for their right to housing despite the announcement of the "Public Housing and Urban Regeneration Project to Improve the Residential Environment of the Seoul Station Shisha Village (hereinafter referred to as the Dongja-dong Project)", a new news that has reached the area.
Even though two years have passed since the public development plan was announced, there has been no significant progress, and residents are living in small rooms measuring about two pyeong (approximately 7.5 square meters) while paying monthly rents four times higher than the average monthly rent per pyeong for apartments in Seoul.

The history of development in our country, which has prioritized economic rationality as its top priority, has been centered on private development that has resulted in forced evictions and forced migration.
The Dongja-dong project sought to put the brakes on this inertia by adopting a first-migrate, first-good circulation method of building public housing, settling tenants, and then building private housing.
However, in the face of the unwavering goal of profit maximization in real estate investment culture, the public's stated cause is constantly being pushed back in the name of "social consensus."

The authors, professors and students of the 2022 first semester course "Anthropology of Poverty" at Yonsei University's Department of Cultural Anthropology, do not simply list the desires and actions of the subjects as observers conducting field research, but rather as participants and accomplices, they listen to the interests asserted by the residents of the attic, the owner, and the government, while keenly pointing out the relationships between them, which are sometimes conflicting and sometimes colluding.
What the author wants to emphasize through this process is that “even though the battle lines have become more complex, what does not change is the misery of the poor” (10).

Why did the government decide to launch the Dongja-dong project?

Can decent homes and villages be built in the heart of Seoul for the poor? On February 5, 2021, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and Yongsan District announced a redevelopment project plan that could answer this question.
It was a public development project that guaranteed the right to housing for tenants.
The Dongja-dong project, in which the public directly acquires land and develops it for the resettlement of residents, was a truly groundbreaking plan that overturned the existing development logic in which indigenous residents were forced out whenever redevelopment was carried out.


In our society, urban redevelopment has largely been a matter of profit-seeking, and the protection of property rights has taken precedence over the guarantee of housing rights.
But even in this situation, turning points continued to appear.
To address the negative impacts of existing projects, new initiatives were introduced, and in the process, the role of the public was emphasized, creating new values ​​such as "regeneration" and "inclusion" that created a new field of development.
At the same time, social events such as the Gukil Gosiwon fire intersected with various development discourses, and the activities of anti-poverty groups that organized the voices of those living in non-residential housing and emphasized the need for environmental improvement influenced the government's decisions on public housing projects.


“If you look at the 1980s when I was in school, there was a lot of labor movement, but there was also a lot of poverty movement.
(…) What we did at that time was to develop the area while establishing housing measures for the tenants living there, which was an old demand. (51)”

As can be seen in the above remarks by former Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kim Hyun-mee, the moral obligation of the 586 generation, the central actors in the project, to society is also cited as a background that made the public housing project possible.
Policymakers who shared their experiences in the democratization movement, which encompassed labor and poverty movements in their youth, actively pursued the development of shantytowns with the will to solve poverty and housing problems.


Not a buy house, but a live house

In this book, a house is a commodity, a house, and eventually a home (215).
If for the owners of the attic, the attic exists as a commodity: a thing to be bought and sold, a barrier preventing them from falling out of the middle class, a means to realize investment profits, and insurance that guarantees the future, then for the attic residents, the house functions as a physical space where they can escape the snow and rain and lie down in peace, and as a final bastion against street life.
“Even if it is a very narrow space, it is a place of residence that must be protected by some, and a place to live connected to neighbors and the world” (66).

In fact, residents are expanding their homes beyond mere physical spaces into spaces for interaction and care.
The Dongja-dong Sarangbang Village Residents' Cooperative, a resident-led organization, and the Dongja-dong Sarangbang management team are developing the Dongja-dong Saekkum Park and the cooperative/sarangbang office into a community space where they study the spirit of resident organizations, jointly purchase daily necessities, gather for feasts on holidays and Parents' Day, and ask about each other's well-being.
We created a home, a treasure trove, as a care network where people take care of each other.
As the book argues, “What poor people, who have felt the limitations of resources and opportunities throughout their lives, need is not ‘my’ house, but ‘our’ house” (91), public development should not be a project that simply provides ‘new houses’, but a project that creates an ‘environment’ where people can live a humane life with social interaction.
They go beyond cultivating their own homes and actively strive to secure better lands by holding rallies in front of the Presidential Office and the National Assembly in Yongsan, calling for public development.


While the logic of capital encroaches on the public sphere,
The Growing Shadow of 'Slow Violence'

The author's sentiment that runs throughout this book is impatience.
While the policy is not making meaningful progress, the health of the people living in the shantytowns is deteriorating by the day.
Poor housing eats away at your flesh.
Choi Hye-seong (pseudonym), representative of the Korean Doctors' Association for Humanitarian Practice, asserts that health problems cannot be solved unless people change their housing patterns.
Because the cooking facilities are poor, meals become poor, and because the restrooms are poor, digestive diseases become worse.
Since it is difficult to stretch the body, it is natural that the musculoskeletal system is strained.
Although it has been over two years since CEO Choi began providing medical services in Dongja-dong, only a small number of residents have seen their health improve.
He said loneliness in particular had a serious impact on residents' health.
“I always tell them not to drink or smoke whenever they go.
But because my situation doesn't change, I can't quit drinking and smoking, which provide me with comfort. (217)” One resident confided that he cannot invite neighbors or acquaintances into his small room where he can even lie down alone, and that he watches television or drinks all day because negative thoughts come up when he is isolated in a dark and dirty room.

The conditions of a boarding house, which must directly face climate disasters such as heat waves and extreme cold, make daily life a struggle against disaster.
Disasters that have become a part of daily life slowly pour out from the physical structure of the room and accumulate in the lives, thoughts, bodies, and minds of the residents.
Environmentalist Rob Nixon (2011) called this “slow violence.”
Climate disasters gradually approach vulnerable people, becoming a part of their daily lives, and then, at some point, escalate into a major disaster.

Professor Jo Moon-young of Yonsei University's Department of Cultural Anthropology, who compiled this book, concluded the preface as follows:
“While the government indefinitely postponed the district designation, originally scheduled for December 2021, due to conflict over development methods, and even within the authorities, there was a shift in blame, obituaries began to pour in from the Dongja-dong shantytown.
“Sixty residents have passed away in the two years since the project was announced on February 5, 2021 (according to the Dongja-dong Sarangbang Village Residents’ Cooperative).” This book is the result of the will of twenty-six authors to bring to the forefront the discourse on housing rights, which has been overshadowed by property rights and has not been able to be at the center of the capitalist public sphere, and in doing so, to ‘recreate the public.’