Borderless village: Challenging the globalist dystopia in ansan, south Korea

This article discusses the development of Borderless Village, a multiethnic town in the planned industrial city of Ansan, South Korea. Despite the original vision of Ansan as a clean, self-sufficient model community, its subsequent development resulted in the creation of seemingly dystopic conditions. The perversion of initial planning goals, however, has not been able to prevent the emergence more recently of a vibrant community based on the promotion of global citizenship rights. This article argues that ambiguity within the process of globalization may bring both negative externalities and opportunities to transform dystopia into utopia. Borderless Village, an NGO promoting the rights of migrant laborers, was born in 2006 when increasing numbers of foreign migrants and questions surrounding their rights as laborers became a central topic in South Korea. Prompted by the Reverend Chun-Eung Park, a representative of Ansan Migrant Shelter, Borderless Village promotes the notion that such laborers are entitled to certain rights regardless of nationality, cultural background , gender, or socioeconomic status. 1 In addition to being the name of an NGO, Borderless Village is a name used to describe the Wongok-dong area of Ansan, home to many of the migrants. This community emerged in part as a response to the many factories in the nearby Banwall Industrial Complex , which provide a substantial number of blue-collar jobs (f i g. 1). For many centuries Ansan was a rural village, but in the late 1970s the Korean government designated it and surrounding areas as a site onto which to divert pollution-inducing industries and the growing population of Seoul. Like new towns elsewhere, designed to alleviate the pressure of urbanization, Ansan was also envisioned as a clean, self-supporting model community. 2 In South Korea, regarded as an ethnically homogenous society (despite the recent increase in minorities), the establishment of Borderless Village represents a radical departure from previous labor struggles. Unlike traditional labor movements, which work within the framework of a nation-state, Borderless Village was based on the concept of " border-Jieheerah Yun has recently completed a Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.