Re-reading Kaesung Industrial District with the (New) Mobilities Paradigm: Production of Socio-spaces through Commuter Buses as a New Mobility System

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This paper investigates how the commuter buses in Kaesung Industrial District (KID) as a new mobility system produced new social space in and around Kaesung and transformed themselves into ‘network capitals’. The commuter buses not only expanded the living sphere and commuting areas of North Korean labors in KID, but also provided new living rhythm, capitals and power relations to the labors and the local residents. KID has been regarded as a unified and fixed space of exception in state-centered discourses of geo-economics and geopolitics. It is, however, a complex hybrid space composed of numerous mobilities and negotiations among various actants. Its ‘real’ boundaries, while they tend to be assumed as if national ones between the two Koreas, were never fixed or unified but porous and fuzzy. They were operated through human and material networks that spanned over the physical boundaries of KID and nearby areas. The critical apparatus that drove networking was the new mobility system of commuter buses. Drawing on the discourses of the new mobilities paradigm, the paper attempts to reconstruct the story of KID that evolved through accidental combinations of contexual processes, and, thereby, emerging, autopoietic and path-dependent ways. The theories of new mobilities shed light on micro socio-cultural processes in North Korean society hardly dealt with by state-centered approaches. They are also helpful in understanding the processes of producing flexible and dynamic socio-economic spaces through the commuter bus mobility, the cooperative system of two Koreas. In so doing, the paper illuminates ‘real’ effects of KID from multiple aspects.