Architecture in Foreign Aid: Housing, Colonial Legacies, and Cold War Imperatives in South Korea, 1953–1970
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This dissertation examines the entanglement of foreign aid and the built environment in post-1953 Korea, situating architectural development within the intertwined legacies of Japanese colonialism, U.S. Cold War imperialism, and the South Korean ruling elite. It reconceptualizes foreign aid as a mode of governance and positions South Korea as a nodal site within overlapping imperial and technocratic regimes. Reading architectural history through the convergence of military, juridical, economic, and epistemological vectors, it reveals how housing projects shaped by foreign aid also functioned as sites where imperial relations, developmental regimes, and social imaginaries were produced, contested, or legitimized. Across four chapters, the dissertation traces the interrelated themes of aid, power, and housing: from militarized humanitarianism in orphanages (Chapter 1) and houses for U.S. personnel (Chapter 2), to the marketization of housing in a capitalist order (Chapter 3), and nationalist developmentalism (Chapter 4). Ultimately, the dissertation offers a situated and layered account of South Korea’s architectural history within the entanglement of housing, foreign aid, the sedimented legacies of different empires, and Cold War geopolitics.