The ‘commodified’ colonial past in small cities: shifting heritage-making from nation-building to city branding in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

Amid increasing interest in city branding in East Asia, the municipalities of Gunsan (South Korea) and Chiayi (Taiwan) chose colonial heritage-making as their city branding strategies to recreate their cities’ identities and regenerate their economies. Both cities were mostly built by Japanese imperial authorities and thrived in the 1920s and 1930s but deteriorated in the post-colonial period. Seeking to overcome long economic recessions, these two small cities endeavoured to rebrand in the twenty-first century. Their cases illustrate novel approaches to adopting colonial heritage-making at the small city level in national contexts where the management of colonial heritage is conducted mostly as part of the nation-building process. By comparing post-colonial Gunsan and Chiayi, this study presents comparative perspectives on post-colonial city branding processes and sheds light on different post-colonial responses to colonial heritage-making. The strategic and pragmatic preservation of colonial heritage in these two small cities has simultaneously produced city narratives of ‘commodified’ colonial modernity that represented the would-be cities’ aspiration for being identified on the global map. We analysed the effects of ‘commodified’ colonial modernity – the recolonisation of past by now – and identified possibilities for alternatives.

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