Article abstract: This article explores the endogenous characteristics of commons within the frameworks of precarity and commons through the urban commons movement in 1970s South Korea. During Korea's compressed capitalist transformation, rural migrants became the urban poor, occupying the lowest position in urban labour hierarchies. Through qualitative research methods and historical analysis, we examine the Nangok shantytown in Seoul, demonstrating how commons production is shaped by specific socio-cultural, geographical, and anthropological realities. Despite their marginalised status in a patriarchal society, urban poor housewives emerged as agents of an urban commons movement by developing new urban sensibilities, challenging the capitalist norms of work and home and the conventional community practice. This article reveals how their “working-in-commons” constituted new social relationships, illuminating how people's collective attempts to reorganise livelihoods transcend the work/home or production/reproduction dichotomy. Our analysis enhances the understanding of the commons movement as rooted in everyday urban struggles in rapidly urbanising societies.

New publication alert 📚✨

I’m delighted to share our new article, “Working-in-Commons in the Middle of Precarity: The Legacy of the Urban Commons Movement of South Korea in the 1970s,” just published in Antipode — now available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.70081.

This study traces the life of poor women and their neighbours in Nangok, a shantytown in Seoul that became a space of everyday struggle, creativity, and collective care in the 1970s. Through their practices of “working-in-commons”—mutual aid, shared childcare, and collective livelihood-making—these women challenged the capitalist boundaries of work and home, and in doing so, forged a different sense of community amid precarity.

The paper is also significant for its focus on a neighbourhood, Nangok, where I conducted my doctoral fieldwork on urban redevelopment in Seoul. This area also became the site of my co-author’s (Didi Kyoung-ae Han) doctoral research on urban precariat movements. It feels especially meaningful to revisit the life of this community years later, reflecting on how their experiences illuminate the continuing relevance of urban commoning in our precarious times.

We hope this paper contributes to rethinking urban commons not as abstract ideals, but as lived practices of survival, solidarity, and imagination in the everyday lives of the urban poor.

👉 Read the full paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.70081

Picture: View of Nangok in 2001 before full-scale demolition for redevelopment; this would be close to a view that interviewees would have seen during their life in Nangok (source: photograph by Hyun Bang Shin, 2001)