The Construction State Unbound? Struggles over the Seoul Metropolitan Region’s Greenbelt in an Era of Planetary Urbanization

This article builds on recent interventions into the study of planetary urbanization that
call for greater interaction with the multiple social struggles and standpoints that embed
this process. To do so, we advocate for academic engagement between planetary
urbanization and the concept of the ‘construction state.’ This is a term used in Japan and
South Korea to describe an alliance between development corporations and the state, one
whose expansionary logic accords with the notions of planetary and extended
urbanization and acts as a co-constitutive, regional driver of it. To better situate this
concept, and to highlight the social struggles that inform it, we examine the politics of
greenbelt deregulation and the expanding real estate-led urbanization in the Seoul
Metropolitan Region in recent decades. We show how the construction state and its
supply-centrism played a key part in the ‘explosive’ process of greenbelt development
and examine the dynamics of the struggles that activists waged against it. By doing so,
we contribute to ongoing debates about planetary urbanization as an open totality of
processes, stress the importance of a situated approach that foregrounds the diverse
practices and struggles that shape it, and encourage communication between critical
standpoints.