The major purpose of this study is to, first, understand the actual living status and problems of multi-cultural families who reside in rural areas, focusing on their agricultural, other economic activities and social welfare services; secondly, to fi...
The major purpose of this study is to, first, understand the actual living status and problems of multi-cultural families who reside in rural areas, focusing on their agricultural, other economic activities and social welfare services; secondly, to find out current status of abolished schools and the plans to utilize the properties of the abolished schools and; thirdly, to propose an indoor space plan for complex cultural center for multi-cultural families in agricultural area, which considers not only the particularity of agricultural district but also multi-culturalism view.
For this purpose, this study aims to observe the actual conditions of multi-cultural families in agricultural district (focused on immigrated women), study the types of immigrant related policies, the actual living status and socio-cultural adaptation level of immigrants with diverse backgrounds and the types of policies, and further search for the possibility to utilize the abolished schools due to the drastic reduction in population as as complex cultural centers for multi-cultural families in agricultural area. In other words, this study seeks for fining a measure to organize complex cultural centers for multi-cultural families by utilizing the abolished schools and finding their activation measures. The data were collected through the study of prior literatures and foreign case studies.
Multi-cultural families means the families that are combined with different racial spouses through an international marriage that it is defined as families composed with a Korean and a foreigner spouse here. Multi-culturalism started to solve a problem of social conflicts and disunion between majority and minority racial groups in the western society, and it means coexistence of plural numbers of cultures within a nation or a society. Such multi-culturalism can be categorized into the government-led multi-cultralism that refers to the ideology or policy that aims to achieve national union through coexistence of various cultural groups, and the citizen-led multi-culturalism that is to protect the identity of the minority groups which earn disadvantages due to the government-led multi-culturalism and government-oriented policies.
Multi-cultural families and international marriages have been increased because of the acceleration of female immigration with the wave of globalization, active encouragement of international marriages by religious groups, and the gender ratio imbalance phenomenon of the domestic population in the marriageable age in Korea, and the international marriage has been also increased as the women defer or avoid their marriages with increase of participation in economic activities and the men residing in agricultural district or having inferior school career become difficult to meet their spouses in Korea.
On the other hand, while Korea’s industrialization has achieved epoch-making growth since 1970, Korea’s industrial structure has also rapidly changed, and most people gathered around the cities, producing many side-infects from the various aspects. In particular, as the population moved to urban areas, the population in the agricultural district decreased. Accordingly, it was very difficult to find an appropriate life quality for the youth, and the number of children in their elementary and middle school ages has drastically decreased. Further, with the development and improvement of transportation and others, the range of living environment has been widening, and with development of communication and transition to informatization society, the school districts have been expanded. These phenomena caused the abolition of a lot of elementary schools and branch schools in the agricultural district.
This study intended to find the utilization measures for the abolished schools in response to such social phenomenon of these times. That is, this study tries to find the development possibilities and alternatives of complex cultural centers for multi-cultural families in the agricultural districts, which can be one of effective utilization measures for the targeted development lands, to promote the economic benefits of the regional society, to achieve preservation of national environment, and to prevent idleness of lands and facility resources.
The policy direction should be set from the multi-culturalism view that enables us to recognize the difference with and cultures of marriage immigrants and the fact they are the people to coexist together. Therefore it is necessary to positively support them in order to positively utilize and develop the diverse cultural capacities of the marriage immigrants. As such, the unification based on diversity rather than one-sided assimilation is made possible by accepting their cultural and racial diversities, respecting freedom of all members of Korean society and promoting their cultural heritages as well.