[Fall 2018] Harmony in Society: Team 연결고리

Team Name: 연결고리

Team Members: Eunsu Cho, Jaehun Shim, Hayeong Jung, Yoonhyung Jung

Our team has decided to solve some specific aspects of the problems of gentrification such as disruption in the local community due to the differences of cultural background and losing the uniqueness to certain regions. To solve these specific aspects, our team has decided to create a non-governmental organization with all of our previous solution proposals as sub-components. Essentially, our team will be trying to help create certain regions that undergo cultural loss due to gentrification to revitalize what they used to own and reshape their cultural identity. In other words, we will be helping local residents to create a cultural harmony among themselves and with existing franchises that has the potential to disrupt their business, creating a symbiotic relationship so that they will need to cooperate with each other. We won’t be solving the whole problem for them, however. Our goal is to help people suffering gentrification to live and conduct business in a sustainable manner.

Our solution mainly deals with the cultural side effects of gentrification: the disparity between shops with popular, rising trends and shops that are unpopular, yet vital to the community. Therefore, our solution is to bring Pop-Up classes to the community and hold the classes with owners of unpopular shops as teachers whereas local residents can participate as audiences. The classes can hold certain concepts such as, “Cinderella Project with --- hair salon,” or “Baking Bunches with --- bakery” to bring interest among the participants and advertise non-popular industries in the region to stand out, ultimately bringing cultural harmony and creating balance between trendy and novel shops, and unpopular, yet demanding stores.