Stitching the 24-Hour City: Life, Labor, and the Problem of Speed in Seoul
Seo Young Park
Abstract
This book reveals the intense speed of garment production and everyday life in Dongdaemun, a lively market in Seoul, South Korea. Once the site of uprisings against oppressive working conditions in the 1970s and 1980s, Dongdaemun has now become iconic for its creative economy, nightlife, fast-fashion factories, and shopping plazas. The book follows the work of people who witnessed and experienced the rapidly changing marketplace from the inside. Through this approach, it examines the meanings and politics of work in one of the world's most vibrant and dynamic global urban marketplaces. In doin ... More
This book reveals the intense speed of garment production and everyday life in Dongdaemun, a lively market in Seoul, South Korea. Once the site of uprisings against oppressive working conditions in the 1970s and 1980s, Dongdaemun has now become iconic for its creative economy, nightlife, fast-fashion factories, and shopping plazas. The book follows the work of people who witnessed and experienced the rapidly changing marketplace from the inside. Through this approach, it examines the meanings and politics of work in one of the world's most vibrant and dynamic global urban marketplaces. In doing so, it brings readers into close contact with the garment designers, workers, and traders who sustain the extraordinary speed of fast-fashion production and circulation, as well as the labor activists who challenge it. Attending to their narratives and practices of work, the book argues that speed, rather than being a singular drive of acceleration, is an entanglement of uneven paces of life, labor, the market, and the city itself. The book exposes the under-studied experiences with Dongdaemun fast fashion, peeling back layers of temporal politics of labor and urban space to record the human source of the speed that characterizes the never-ending movement of the 24-hour city.
Keywords:
Dongdaemun,
garment production,
Seoul,
urban marketplace,
global marketplaces,
garment designers,
fast-fashion production,
fast fashion,
labor market
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501754265 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501754265.001.0001 |
