When commercial real estate becomes a highly coveted investment commodity, tensions intensify between those whose interest lies in extracting maximum profits from their properties and those who utilize the very same spaces for making a livelihood. Through ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organization (SMO) in Korea, I analyze the new collective consciousness forming among tenant shopkeepers who are defending their livelihoods against their landlords’ rapacious use of rent hikes and evictions to fully realize the speculative potential of their properties. Examining how the SMO brings together geographically scattered tenant shopkeepers based primarily in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul, I ask, more broadly: How can the self-employed facing precaritization overcome their fragmentation and generate a new collective consciousness based on a politics of solidarity? Drawing from my case study of tenant shopkeepers and the literature on livelihood struggles elsewhere around the globe, I identify the practice of occupying livelihood spaces as playing a pivotal role in the development of a sense of collective among those previously atomized in their struggles. I advance existing scholarship by scrutinizing both the challenges and the transformative potential of the solidarity cultivated through the occupy sites in bridging divergent interests, cultural sensibilities, and political beliefs of the previously unorganized.

中文翻译：

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占领商店保卫生计空间：从租户店主的碎片化到韩国城市的集体意识

当商业房地产成为一种令人垂涎的投资商品时，那些希望从其房产中获取最大利润的人和那些利用同一空间谋生的人之间的紧张关系就会加剧。通过对韩国租户店主社会运动组织（SMO）的人种学研究，我分析了租户店主中形成的新的集体意识，他们正在捍卫自己的生计，反对房东贪婪地利用租金上涨和驱逐，以充分实现投机潜力。他们的财产。在考察 SMO 如何将主要位于首尔大都市区的地理上分散的租户店主聚集在一起时，我更广泛地提出问题：面临不稳定化的自营职业者如何克服他们的分裂，并在团结政治的基础上产生新的集体意识？根据我对租户店主的案例研究以及全球其他地方有关生计斗争的文献，我认为占据生计空间的做法在那些以前在斗争中被原子化的人们的集体意识的发展中发挥着关键作用。我通过仔细审视占领地所培养的团结所面临的挑战和变革潜力，来推进现有的学术研究，以弥合先前无组织的不同利益、文化敏感性和政治信仰。