Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture–featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture.

By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.

Youjeong Oh is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

Pop City is a uniquely valuable text for celebrity and fan studies researchers... it distinguishes itself from mainstream scholarship on K-pop and the Korean Wave... Oh paints a compelling picture of the uneasy yet instrumental relationship of Korean popular culture to the municipalities—large and small—that gamble resources and political capital.

Jesook Song, Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto:

The significance of Youjeong Oh’s Pop City lies in the fact that it covers urban policy, developmentalism, popular culture and tourism, and affect, while enabling readers to see these aspects as a nexus of contingent assemblages. It will appeal to a multidisciplinary audience and provide significant contributions to urban theory, development studies, geography, ethnographic studies, media and communication studies, affect theories, and Korean studies.

Gabriella Lukacs, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh:

Pop City provides a compelling analysis of contemporary popular culture in South Korea. This book documents how Korean producers harnessed the global popularity of K-Pop to persuade local municipalities to finance the production of dramas in exchange for place branding. A novel rereading of K-pop, the result is a masterpiece that will appeal to readers interested in place branding and South Korean popular culture.