David Harvey
CUNY 

 (What follows is a much modified transcript from Lecture 8 in the series on Marx’s Capital, Volume One, now freely available on http://DavidHarvey.org)

      Back in the fall of 2005, I was co-chair of a jury to select ideas for the design of a completely new city in South Korea.  The city then called The Multifunctional Administrative City was originally planned to be a new capital city but constitutional objections led to it being reduced to a satellite city with many of the administrative functions of government to be placed in the new city, about halfway between Seoul and Busan. The task of the committee was to adjudicate on ideas for the design rather than select any final design with the group in charge of the project being tasked to undertake the final design, incorporating whatever we (and they) thought was useful from the submissions to the competition.  The jury was half Korean and half foreign and weighted heavily with engineers, planners and some prominent architects.  Only two of us had broad social scientific backgrounds. It also became clear that the South Korean government, tired of the formulaic urbanization that had hitherto dominated in South Korea and much of Asia, was deeply interested in doing something different, perhaps a model for a new form of Asiatic urbanization.