The entrepreneurial creative city and its discontents: The politics of art-led urban regeneration in Incheon, South Korea

Abstract

The increasing occurrence of discontent and conflict regarding making creative cities across the globe has led scholars to pay significant attention to the political dimension of creative-city policies. This study, by exploring the controversy over the Incheon Art Platform, a warehouse-turned art space in Incheon, South Korea, offers a situated understanding of how the city government’s entrepreneurial approach to the creative city was resisted and reinterpreted by local civil society groups. Against the backdrop of enhanced urban entrepreneurialism and the rise of civil activism in Incheon, the arrival of the creative city concept has generated opposing interpretations of the role of art and culture between the city government and civil society groups. Given the state’s expansionist policy toward the cultural sector in the nation, the entrepreneurial version of a creative city was first resisted by local cultural actors along with government-sponsored artists and subsequently sparked an artist-inspired anti-entrepreneurism protest in the city. This paper demonstrated how the creative city became a subject of political struggle within the unique relationship between the state and the cultural sector in South Korea, thereby contributing to enriching global urban knowledge on making and remaking creative cities beyond the Global North.