Abstract
Sangha Farm Village is an assemblage of fragments from various recollections of a Korean hometown. It is an attempt to translate the core values of the New Ruralism into a local variant tailored for Korea. While many of the logical underpinnings for the New Ruralism, or the New Urbanism, of which it is a corollary, remain valid and instructive in non-American contexts, it is important to recognize the need for regional specificity within a cultural milieu. Without substituting the shared imagery of an ideal community with a local equivalent that would resonate within the new cultural context, any superficial translation of the principles of the New Ruralism would fail. What complicates the matter even further is the fact that the origin of this imagery to be reconstructed is mostly fictitious, and its roots must be traced from historical literature. To re-imagine and re-formulate the ideal village for Korea, Sangha Farm Village captures and reconstructs key features of hometown memories, as recounted in two sources—an American sociologist’s research paper and a fantasy account by a Korean artist, Kim Beom. By merging the two sources, which bear striking resemblance to each other, Sangha Farm Village simulates a picture of a prototypical Korean hometown, reassembled from fragments of rural memories.
Keywords: New Urbanism, New Ruralism, Agricultural Urbanism, Farm, Hometown, Slow Food, Sustainable Agriculture
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