Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

During the last decade, Los Angeles Koreatown experienced unprecedented changes transforming it from an immigrant ethnic enclave into a transnational economic space. Alongside of the city government’s redevelopment plans and local Korean Americans’ grass-root efforts to regenerate Koreatown, transnational Korean actors have aggressively invested in property as well as business sectors. However, despite these multi-scaled geographic transitions, Koreatown remains one of the poorest and most crime-infested inner-city communities in the City of Los Angeles. This paper, based on a ‘place-based’ bottom-up approach, investigates contradictory geographies of Koreatown in which multi-scaled network of hegemonic transnational, urban and local development actors has developed representational, unlived economies. This research points out that the recent urban regeneration of Koreatown has not only excluded but also exploited local community members such as transnational Korean/Latino workers in the area. This paper conclusively suggests that the sustainable future of Koreatown’s development would stem from place-based community consciousness that crisscrosses racial and ethnic boundaries.