“Gyeryong Mountain: reckless development and the drawing of an immoral landscape”

Résumé En

This presentation is the result of a recent fieldwork for my doctoral thesis in cultural geography conducted last Septembre and Octobre, in Gyeyryong mountain, which is located in the Chungnam Province, between Daejeon, in the East, Gongju, in the North West, and Gyeryong City, in the South.One of the central concepts of my thesis is ''dwelling" (Tuan, 1977, Lussault, Paquot, Younes, 2007), translated in French as “habiter”, which is not reduced to its narrow sense of “logding oneself” or “residing” (as in Korean 거주하다), but has a broader meaning, as it not only takes into account the ontological relationship of man with its environment and “the poetics of space”. It also focuses on the organisation of space and on the representations the geographical actors have of the mountain.The modernisation and the development of South Korea which occured under the Park Chung Hee regime did not only transform the urban environment, it also left its marks upon the mountainous landscape of the nation. The developmentalist state conducted a massive reforestation campaign (산림녹화) that gained popular support, and which consisted in greening the bare mountains (민둥산) of the country (Lee & Kim, 2010). Under the authoritarian regime, the green mountains (푸른 숲, 푸른 산) became a symbolic landscape for national development (Jin Jeong-Heon, 2016). Today, when the mountains are concerned the word « development » often appears with a negative prefix : the term nangeabal (which can be translated in English as “over-development”/“reckless development”/ or even “unsustainable development”) is repeatedly used by the media and the inhabitants to qualify, denounce, and condemn an uncontrolled and harmful urbanisation of the mountain degrading both the beauty of the landscape and the natural environment around. In the village of Hakbong, the imposing complexes of motels and muintels bordering the road, which leads to the entrance of the National Park, are perceived as the products of this thoughtless development.The term nangaebal raises the questions of what is deemed to be a rightful and correct development, and how land planning and the landscape it produces collide with the symbolic landscape of the mountain. It also raises the question of legislation (urban regulations and administrative limits) in regards to the significance and the scope of the protected area of Gyeryong mountain, which was established as a National Park in 1968. The protection and transmission of its natural and cultural heritages (유산) contrast with the economic and profit-oriented idea of the mountain as a ressource (자원) to be exploited. This paper analysises the perceptions and reactions of the inhabitants towards the urbanisation of Gyeryong mountain based on an ethnnographic method of direct observation, semi-direct, and informal interviews collected on the field. As it appeared, nature conservation was but one objection put forward against the construction of motels; what mattered first and foremost was the immoral aspects they represented and how they became part of a collective landscape (Cresswell, 1996).