‘Urban regeneration’ to ‘Social regeneration’: Culture and social regeneration through the Culture City of East Asia event initiative in Cheongju South Korea

There is continuing academic and policy interest in the potential for culture-based urban regeneration, including the use of major arts and cultural festivals to attract investment, re-imagine places and create jobs. However, the social regeneration benefits of such events have been questioned especially when cultural events focus mainly on high profile economic development in central areas of a city. Social regeneration needs to be built into cultural event planning. This research seeks to examine how a one-year cultural event can play an influential role in aspects of social regeneration by focusing on the 2015 Culture City of East Asia (CCEA) event in Cheongju, South Korea. The CCEA is a collaboration between South Korea, China and Japan held since 2014, and is aimed at cultural exchange programmes, the development and regeneration of provincial cities through cultural programmes, and building solidarity in the East Asia regions. The research is based on document review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with residents and community representatives in three areas of deprivation in the city. The key findings from the PhD are that social regeneration impacts are limited with limited engagement with the CCEA. The limited social regeneration impact is traced to the weak integration of social regeneration priorities and provision within the CCEA. It is argued that the CCEA reflects the wider tendency for cultural events to focus on visitors to the area, where main cultural venue is located, and reimaging at the expense of social regeneration. In the Korean context the weak dimension of social regeneration is reinforced by the weak and limited aspect of social regeneration nationally. In the CCEA the potential to engage communities through arts and culture is largely unrealised despite some prospect and pressure to widen the scope of the programme. The PhD contributes a distinctive Korean perspective to the literature on arts and culture- based regeneration. As this study relies on qualitative methods, it enables a deeper analysis of social regeneration, and local residents were placed into a high priority to attempt to produce a realistic consideration of how residents consider a cultural approach for regenerating an area, developing communities and individual environments. The findings of this thesis not only advance theory within the culture-led urban regeneration literature, but also offer an insight into the opinions of actual residents that can be referred to in the further management of cultural events, to improve the social regeneration through cultural approach