Soil for cultural production
securing the place for cultural ecology under gentrification
Y. Lee (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
V.E. Balz – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
A. Petrović – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Culture is widely recognised as an essential element that shapes urban vitality, local identity, and economic value. As a result, many cities actively seek to implement culture as part of urban regeneration strategies. However, culture is not something that can simply be installed or imported. While art may be produced through individual creativity, culture emerges through collective processes, requiring sustained interactions between those who produce it, those who experience it, and those who support it. In this sense, culture operates as an ecology rather than an object.
This research argues that the role of urbanism and spatial design is not to insert cultural artefacts, but to cultivate the ground that allow culture to grow on. When culture is treated as an accessory or image, its relational foundations are easily overlooked, resulting in places where culture remains visible but no longer alive. Gentrification intensifies this process by prioritising the most profitable and symbolic aspects of culture, while undermining the spatial and relational foundations that previously sustained cultural production.
Using the indie music scene in Seoul as a case study, this research examines how cultural ecology forms through network of actors and its operation in place. It then explores how this system is disrupted under gentrification, transforming living culture into branded image. The study begins in Hongdae, once a thriving centre of indie culture but now better known for its popularity than for ongoing cultural production. It then traces how cultural ecology relocates within the city and how it is transformed through this movement. Ultimately, it investigates how cultural ecology operates spatially, what kinds of spatial factors support its persistence, and what role spatial design can play in sustaining cultural production under context of urban transformation.