Commercial gentrification and ethnic entrepreneurs in Itaewon, Seoul

Commercial gentrification is an urban phenomenon that entails supply and demand changes on businesses impacting entrepreneurs in multiple ways. It has been expanded the realm of studies through multi-disciplinary approaches associated with socio-demographic factors such as class or ethnicity, yet mostly in the Euro-American context. Itaewon, a representative multicultural commercial area in South Korea, has undergone great changes based on the area’s authenticity created by ethnic entrepreneurs that enables the examination of commercial gentrification with relation to ethnicity in a non-Western context. By employing the concept of embeddedness which refers to the survivability of ethnic businesses in certain environmental changes, this research aimed to examine in what ways did commercial gentrification in Itaewon affect the embeddedness of ethnic entrepreneurs during 2015-2019. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data is utilized, focusing on the former by conducting semi-structured interviews with ethnic entrepreneurs in Itaewon. Several supplementary data, including surveys and statistics, were used for triangulation. The supply and demand changes on businesses were materialized simultaneously and interrelated with each other. With some exceptions, local stores were displaced as long-term customers disappeared, while the proportion of boutiques increases with Korean customers seeking authenticity. Meanwhile, a new kind of store “pocha” running a business regardless of the authenticity started to soar its numbers with the growing demand on nightlife that blurs the identity of the area. It is empirically confirmed that the impacts on the market embeddedness of ethnic entrepreneurs due to the changes were varied by the kind of stores. Boutiques and native franchises sufficiently offset the rising rent with the increasing sales based on authenticity adapting non-essential elements of businesses, while those who could not — local stores and large-scale, international franchises — mostly lost the business competitiveness. However, there were nearly no impacts on the social embeddedness as ethnic entrepreneurs’ social network and sense of alienation remained unchanged. The study empowered the academic argument that asserting the different impacts of commercial gentrification depending on the individual position through ethnic entrepreneurs. It also opened a new research agenda of gentrification related to ethnicity in a non-Western context. The study calls for an active role of the public sector, conserving the market embeddedness of ethnic entrepreneurs to maintain the authenticity of a multicultural commercial area and to vitalize the local economy. Meticulous and inclusive policies are needed to ease the inequity in urban society and spaces, leading to a more just city.