Occupying Shops to Defend Spaces of Livelihoods: From Tenant Shopkeepers’ Fragmentation to Collective Consciousness in Urban Korea

When commercial real estate becomes a highly coveted investment commodity, tensions intensify between those whose interest lies in extracting maximum profits from their properties and those who utilize the very same spaces for making a livelihood. Through ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organization (SMO) in Korea, I analyze the new collective consciousness forming among tenant shopkeepers who are defending their livelihoods against their landlords’ rapacious use of rent hikes and evictions to fully realize the speculative potential of their properties. Examining how the SMO brings together geographically scattered tenant shopkeepers based primarily in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul, I ask, more broadly: How can the self-employed facing precaritization overcome their fragmentation and generate a new collective consciousness based on a politics of solidarity? Drawing from my case study of tenant shopkeepers and the literature on livelihood struggles elsewhere around the globe, I identify the practice of occupying livelihood spaces as playing a pivotal role in the development of a sense of collective among those previously atomized in their struggles. I advance existing scholarship by scrutinizing both the challenges and the transformative potential of the solidarity cultivated through the occupy sites in bridging divergent interests, cultural sensibilities, and political beliefs of the previously unorganized.