How is a multicultural city made? This book examines how Ansan, South Korea, and its migrant-concentrated neighborhood of Wongok-dong have been made, governed, and experienced as multicultural places. It approaches multiculturalism as an urban project shaped by migration, economic restructuring, and city making.
Drawing on ethnographic research, the book traces how developmental-state legacies and neoliberal urban governance shape city branding, a multicultural food street, and migrant-support services provision. These initiatives have expanded migrants’ access to institutions and public visibility while mobilizing their labor and cultural diversity as resources for economic revitalization. By connecting multicultural policies and place-making with residents’ everyday evaluations, the book shows how recognition and misrecognition can be produced together: migrant may be welcomed as workers, consumers, policy beneficiaries, and cultural contributors while remaining only conditionally accepted. The case thus reveals a locally specific form of ‘actually existing multiculturalism’ that challenges Western-centred accounts and offers a new framework for understanding multiculturalism, migrant incorporation, and urban citizenship in East Asia and beyond.
This book will interest scholars and students of migration, social integration, urban sociology, human geography and East Asian studies, as well as policymakers and practitioners working on migrant integration and urban diversity.