This study analyzed the ‘Yeonnam-dong’ space located in Mapo-gu, Seoul, which serves as a space for production and consumption, a space for play, and also a place for young people’s creative experiments. Today, new flows are forming in regional space. In particular, this space attracts new consumers through the creation of a series of infrastructure. As a result, Yeonnam-dong was transformed into a space with the fastest turnover in South Korea and a space where creative experiments took place. At the same time, these changes are full of spectacles, and it is functioning as a space where the power of the cultural industry was conveyed to the public in a sophisticated way. Hence, the ways in which the standardization, uniformity, and identity of commercialized space are linked and combined with the public's desire to resist, subvert, submit, or assimilate are discussed through the voices of the young generation, who experience the space from the perspective of cultural industry theory.
For this, we conducted a combination of in-depth interviews and focus group interviews (FGI) with young people who have repeatedly experienced the Yeonnam-dong area to discuss the social imagination and collective desires pursued by the young generation through the space. Especially, by combining cultural industry theory and postmodern spatial theory, relationships and identities between individuals are formed, transformed, or refracted in a specific space called Yeonnam-dong, and in this process, a series of new socio-cultural meanings and differences are created. Also, this theme was explored through a kind of auto-ethnographic perspective and analysis. This cultural approach to a specific space may present useful observations and implications in terms of cultural policy, as well as academic implications regarding cities, youth, regions, and placeness.