Historicization of Homeless Spaces: The Seoul Train Station Square and the House of Freedom

This paper historicizes “deserving” citizenship of South Korea by tracing spatial changes and meanings of two places: Seoul Train Station Square and a former textile factory renovated to a homeless shelter. Both have been emblematic space where the most homeless people were populated since the break of the Asian Debt Crisis. However, each place embodies different history of “deserving” citizenship in a complementary way. The square, a politically charged literary and physical topography, became a location of protecting “normal” citizen from potentially violent homeless people. The factory, a spatial marker for the state regulation of laborer, became a site to promote the benevolent image of welfare state for protecting homeless people through a demarcation of short-term street living people—as “deserving” homeless citizens—from long term street living people. The embedded history in two places would be the transition of developmental state towards the welfare state that shifted its capitalist state focus from labor/economic policies to welfare policy: neoliberalization of state governance in South Korea. In concrete, this paper examines how homeless people emerged as new welfare subjects in an urban landscape; how only short-term street living people were selected as Historicization of Homeless Spaces: The Seoul Train Station Square and the House of Freedom 194 proper; how various social agents were involved in the process of implementing homeless policies; and how dualistic capitalist control over labor power, such as regular workers and surplus laborer, was imposed. [

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