Reframing Gentrification: How Tenant Shopkeepers’ Activism in Seoul Radically Reframed Gentrification

Critical scholarship on gentrification has contributed significantly to bolstering the rights of working-class residents against the forces that price them out of the city. However, working-class residents are not the only ones who suffer from dispossession and displacement with rampant hyper-commodification of urban space. Based on the case of Seoul, I examine how new agents—tenant shopkeepers—emerged at the forefront of challenging gentrification and successfully reframed the problem of gentrification. Within the new frame, the shopkeepers who make their livelihoods by using urban spaces are pitted against the property owners who attempt to profit at the expense of their tenants. Through this case, I ask ‘How can radical shifts occur in the ways that the problem of gentrification is constructed?’ My answer draws upon the framing theory in the social movement literature which identifies conditions under which a radical departure from institutionalized ways and social norms can transpire even when the radical shift means challenging the entrenched power structure—in my case, the property-ownership-based rights regime. I highlight the importance of further developing a gentrification scholarship on social change that unravels the rise of new locations of resistance, particularly at a time when the advance of gentrification seems inevitable.