Stitching The 24 Hour City PDF Download

This ethnography explores how people experience time through their passionate and embodied practices in the production of clothes and of the marketplace in the context of Seoul's Dongdaemun Market, South Korea. Dongdaemun is a massive cluster of the garment factories, wholesalers, and retail shopping malls operating 24 hours a day. Once a symbol of arduous manual labor in 1970s-80s, the market's speedy production and its "always-open," overnight business made Dongdaemun an important site for flexible garment production and transnational exchanges, as well as an attractive commodity for both tourists and consumers. I explore the work of diverse market agents, including seamstresses, designers, and entrepreneurs, a civic organization's new market project that problematizes Dongdaemun's fast production as labor exploitation as well as state planners who point to Dongdaemun as exemplary of Seoul as a "Global Design City." I argue for the multiplicity in time to account for various moments of value creation by people's physical, material, and affective attachment and interactions with others, commodities, and space. Each chapter addresses differently converging registers of time - people's daily schedules, generations, moments, paces, night, and historical passages in order to capture the spontaneous, interactive, and repetitive modes of value creation. These moments do not fall into a simple polarity between objective/subjective, abstract/particular, or material/immaterial. In this dissertation, I conceptualize workers' physical presence and mobility, replications and interactions, and intentional and unintentional performances in designing, stitching and selling as passionate, embodied practices. These practices are simultaneously productive of, and motivated by, the fast-paced accumulation, intimate relationships, creative desires and interests, and nighttime affect and energy. I challenge an abstract notion of time that marginalizes human labor and simplifies people's experiences of their work. From the ethnographic details and analysis I argue that "flow" of time consists of a dense entanglement of paces that differ in length, direction, and meanings, allowing multiple articulations of the past, present and future of this emerging urbanity and the people who comprise the space.