Consuming Aspiration: Lifestyle Transformation and Spatial Imagination in Seoul's Korean Wave Scenes

Abstract

This dissertation examines how changing ways of life in contemporary Seoul, particularly those increasingly organized around leisure, entertainment, and consumption, become spatially expressed in the built environment. Using the Korean Wave (Hallyu) as a generative lens, it argues that Hallyu should be understood not only as a globally circulating cultural export, but also as a lived urban condition through which aspiration, selfhood, and belonging are materially organized in the city. The study asks to what extent lifestyle transformations associated with demographic change, especially the rise of individualized living, have reshaped Seoul’s urban fabric since the mid-1990s, and how such changes have been enabled and constrained by planning policy, built form, and cultural values. Methodologically, the dissertation combines quantitative spatial analysis, qualitative field observation, and interpretive historical inquiry. Drawing on longitudinal business directory and geospatial data for 426 dongs in Seoul from 1995 to 2022, it analyzes the changing distribution of three Hallyu-related amenity domains: beauty, culinary, and performance. Through the analytical framework of ‘scene,’ the dissertation shows that these amenities function as spatial traces of lifestyle formation and collective aspiration. Empirically, the findings reveal a broad shift from highly concentrated amenity geographies toward more distributed and polycentric patterns across the city, alongside a marked southward reorientation toward Gangnam and other emerging subcenters. At the same time, each domain follows a distinct trajectory. The beauty domain is marked by retreat from historic cores and the rise of new sub-centers especially toward Gangnam’s high-end district, tied to the waning relevance of traditional modes of shopping focused on necessity and the growing prominence of shopping as an experiential practice of self-expression and self-display. The culinary domain continues to anchor itself in workforce-dense cores and university districts, while recent district scale development initiatives increasingly leverage restaurants, cafes, and bars to generate new concentrations of activity, as dining increasingly became a form of aesthetic and social performance. The performance sector exhibits the most consistent and expansive growth, propelled by rising demand for leisure and playfulness that encompass a wide spectrum of performative practices, from karaoke rooms to idol training academies, consolidating Korea’s entertainment industry as a multi-billion-dollar enterprise while embedding performative leisure more deeply into everyday life. The dissertation ultimately argues that these changes cannot be explained by top-down processes of mixed-use intensification or rezoning alone. Rather, they emerge through the reciprocal interplay of consumption and lifestyle patterns, regulation, and building typology, including the incremental transformation of residential, commercial, and industrial fabrics through change-of-use processes. In doing so, the study proposes that mixed use be understood not merely as the functional co-location of different uses, but as a culturally specific urban-spatial condition that mediates a spectrum of spatial and temporal arrangements, enabling continuity through transformation.