Weaving the Common in the Financialized City: A Case of Urban Cohousing Experience in South Korea

Abstract

This chapter examines an urban housing movement called Bin-Zib [empty house and/or guests’ house] in Seoul, South Korea. Opposed to the ideology of private property ownership associated with housing, residents of Bin-Zib have tried to turn urban housing into a common system. Bin-Zib’s experiment over seven years has shown the possibility of creating a common housing system in a radically autonomous manner without state intervention. Three key findings are highlighted in this chapter. First, without explicitly stated ideologies, rules, or a chain of command, Bin-Zib has cultivated communistic relations in their everyday life. Second, while the community cannot avoid confrontations with neoliberal society and conflicts within itself, Bin-Zib members have expanded the scope of the communing experiment to include a network of homes, a café, and a cooperative bank, by inventing an array of strategies and discourses. Last but not the least, although the concept of ‘cohousing’ was quickly captured and exploited by the government and capital in South Korea, Bin-Zib shows that producing and reproducing the common is essentially an issue of creating new relations.