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

This article problematizes and interrogates the idea of ‘community’ which is increasingly important in Korean urban policy-making. For the purpose, this article scrutinizes, and compares, how ordinary citizen participants and civil society activist organizations in a ‘community garden’ program of Seoul make sense of, utilize, and practice the policy concept. The neo-Faucauldian perspective of ‘governmentality’ is employed to understand the association between the community-focused policy program and neoliberalism, but Barnett’s(2005) call for ‘bottom-up governmentality’ is taken seriously in order to avoid any deterministic interpretation. On the basis of this eclectic perspective on governmentality, this article presents empirical findings that may suggest a contestation over community between ordinary citizens and civil society activists. More specifically, ordinary citizen participants prioritize place-based, on-the-ground community experiences that are built on common cultivation practices, whereas civil society activists tend to consider community garden as a teleological governmental technology generative of particular citizen subjects. Civic community garden advocacy as such aims to address social, economic, and spatial problems that neoliberalsim has produced, but it also appears to be in a close association with neoliberal urban policy. Thus, the community activism’s meaningfulness lies in its active intervention to neoliberal urban policy, but a gap between ordinary practical achievements and civic activism can be a potential danger to urban community policy. On the basis of this discussion, this article asks more detailed investigations about the taken-for-granted positivity of urban community (re)vitalization programs, and also examinations on whether and how such projects generates emergent tensions between ordinary achievements and policy prescriptions.