Should I Stay or Should I Go? An Analysis of the Selective Permeability of Busan
Abstract
Our task in this article is to investigate selective permeability in the city of Busan in South Korea. Drawing on Gibson’s tenet that perception organizes around “affordances” or action possibilities, the selective permeability model suggests that a single setting can be objectively supportive or hostile to different individuals. Embodied pragmatists and phenomenologists influenced Gibson, and we explore how factors like cultural habits, language, gender, age, geographical topography, and built form in Busan combine to alter bodily comportment so that action-closing “negative affordances” can manifest to one individual but not another. This, in turn, may make one stay in or retreat from Busan or places in it. For example, there is evidence that middle-aged Russian-speaking men experience greater safety-and thus freedom of movement-in some areas of Busan, as compared to younger Russian-speaking men, not to mention women. Throughout, we follow Dewey’s lead in adopting what might be called “constructive realism,” which holds that changes, once introduced to the world by human actors, are concretely there independently of any single observer-a position that weighs against dismissing
