This study aims to find out the realities of housing shortage urban laborers suffered during the process of colonial urbacnization, and how dwelling modes have changed as a result of this. From this, I attempted to illuminate one aspect of the base of...
This study aims to find out the realities of housing shortage urban laborers suffered during the process of colonial urbacnization, and how dwelling modes have changed as a result of this. From this, I attempted to illuminate one aspect of the base of laborers' reproduction and changes of their life styles. Further,I intend to examine how this common life matter of housing has been reflected in laborers' calss comscilusness.
Housing problem has occurred and expanded in the process of a surge of urban population with the influs of fallen peasants into citis, and has appered being closely connected with laborers to the extent that the term, housing shortage, was just a short form of'laborers' housing shortage'. As housing problems such as deepening inequality in land and house ownership, lease/rent relationship, and the problem of rent availability aer escalation, laborers' housing shortage took on an evea more serious aspect. Simultaneously, the very dwelling mode itself, including types of house possession, dwelling styles,and dwelling places, was changing.
Laborers generally lived in a type of a rented room or a shared room and built 'mud huts and faulty hoeses' to live in. The form of a rented room to a shared room of laborers was a state in which a number of generations or people dwelled together crammed into one place. This fotm of dwelling seems to have been practiced actively among laborers. Especially by 1930s to 1940s, households in the form of a shared room increased to the ratiom of 1 to 10. On the other hand, a larger number of laborers were living in mus hwts and faulty houses, and, over the period of 1930s, mud huts and faulty houses were being reproduced in all cities on an exponential scale. These structures were too crude to be regarded as a house, but laborers solved their dwelling problem by acquiring these. Besides these, laborers also took mass dwelling in places like laborers' ladgings, boarding houses, or joint billets during the time of 1930s' industrialization. These laborers' lodgings, boaeding houses, or joint billets were taken mostl by lone laborers apart from family who came from otehr regions, and palyed a supplemenrary role in easing their housing problems.
At the same time, spatial separation of laborers' dwellings in which urban laborers lived in big numbers in one same space wa taking place. While laborers had a tendency to crowd around factory districts, general trends in each city were that a great majority of laborers comverged in masses and lived on the outskirts of cities, and that laborers poorer than any in the group formed slums at the feer of mountains. Thus, laborers came to be in a same space. And ethnic and calss discriminations by Japan were emerging with the aid of this spacial separation. Living environment of these comgested ateas of laborers wasn extremely poor, and ig also was estranged from the benefit of city infrastucture.
In a word, housing life of the class of urban labores in 1930s was very unstable and bad. The problem of housing shortage born in rapid changes of cities was in turn changing the very life strucrure of poor urban dwellers. City housing problem served as an occasin, though if potential, to form a common ground of interests in reproduction domain of Korean laborer calss who had been existing in 1930s as various 'laborer groups;'. 'Renters' Union Rallies', and registered complaints about discriminative urban environment on the footing of their same habitation, though sporadically.
Reproduction base of urban laborers has changed with colonial urbanization, which entails the changes of living structure in housing part. Housing shortage, with which their reproduction base was commonly shaken and they had to share similar living conditions, affected the formation of laborers' class consciousness.