Urbanizing the Countryside: The Developmentalist Designs of the New Village and Farmhouse in 1970s Rural Korea

This article delves into the relationships between the renovated farmhouse, restructured village layout, and agricultural production in the New Village Movement of the 1970s. The new rural houses under construction in the 1970s were often called “urban style houses (Tosihyŏng chut’aek)” or “cultural houses (Munhwa chut’aek),” representing a kind of spatial unification or homogenization between domiciles in the countryside and the city. The government’s standardized designs of the urban-style cultural farmhouse paid particular attention to ways of dividing living spaces from workplaces, which were often integrated in earlier designs for farmhouse buildings. This planning was based on a prospect that agricultural production would and should be mechanized and collaborative, as in manufacturing production. The urbanization of rural housing was interconnected with the so-called Village Structural Improvement Project that visualized the whole layout of the rural village and demonstrated how the construction works led to the urbanized lifestyle and industrialized farming methods. However, farmers often complained that the new urban-style farmhouse and village was not optimal for the patterns of life in the countryside, and that the common warehouses under construction were too distant from each farmhouse.