Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place

by Youjeong Oh

Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture–featured place selling mediates two separate political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture.

By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.

Genres: Nonfiction

243 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2018

Reviews

[Kim]

It’s highly academic in many areas but also provides a good history/background of the rise of product placement in K-dramas, and how K-beauty, K-pop and growing recognition of Korean cities and districts (such as Gangnam) combined to advance the sense of place as a commodity.

The K-drama section also describes the grueling production schedule of K-dramas and the precarious, speculative nature of the business, especially for independent producers, with examples from various dramas. I appreciated the details!

I did skim the academic parts, since I checked this out for the information, not the thesis, so I can’t comment on that part.

[Ginny]

A super interesting insight on the sociological influences of the hallyu wave

[Luminita]

Had to read it for my thesis. It's very boring