The Journal of Culture Contents ISSN:2287-2256(Print) 2671-7026(Online) 문화콘텐츠연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate how profit-driven commercial spaces can overcome the limitations of placelessness and function as local cultural content. To this end, the ‘Samjin Fish Cake Main Store’ in Yeongdo, Busan, which embodies the collective memory of the wartime capital, was selected as the research subject. Furthermore, by applying Edward Relph’s concepts of ‘place identity’ and ‘other-directed place’, a floor-by-floor spatial analysis of the Samjin Fish Cake Main Store was conducted.
Park Jae-deok, the founder of Samjin Fish Cake, established his fish cake business at the entrance of Bongnae Traditional Market in Yeongdo-gu, Busan, in 1950. Since today’s Samjin Fish Cake Main Store was reborn through remodeling at the exact location where the ‘Samjin Food Processing Plant’ was founded in 1953, it can be seen as successfully preserving and recontextualizing the locational origins of that time. As a result of the on-site observation, the physical environment of the Samjin Fish Cake Main Store consists of a commercial and exhibition complex on the first floor, an experience hall on the second floor, and a history and science exhibition hall focusing on Yeongdo and fish cake on the third floor. Within this planned floor-by-floor narrative structure and spatial flow, visitors demonstrated a pattern of transitioning into proactive spatial explorers who voluntarily pass down intergenerational memories. However, during the field observation process, two structural paradoxes underlying these positive achievements were identified.
First, the building’s design, relying solely on steep vertical stairs without accessibility features such as elevators, acted as a physical barrier that fundamentally blocked the access of the elderly, who are the true protagonists of the history. Second, due to the inherent nature of profit-driven commercial spaces, a dilemma emerged where the public narrative of a harsh survival struggle is appropriated into the private brand narrative of a commercial enterprise through exhibits fossilized into consumable images. This raises concerns that even the poignant memories of the local community may be stripped of their historical context and consumed merely as superficial ‘visual entertainment’ for external consumers. Furthermore, consuming the region’s stark history as ‘kitsch’ and subjecting it to ‘museumification’ entails the risk of eventually degrading the site into an other-directed place, a form of placelessness.
In conclusion, while the Samjin Fish Cake Main Store successfully established its place identity and demonstrated its external potential as a local cultural content, it was confirmed to be an ‘incomplete cultural product’ severely constrained by commercial capital’s monopolization of the public narrative. Therefore, for commercial space-based local cultural content to acquire true locality, it must guard against the privatization of public narratives and expand into a cultural platform that interacts organically with the local community. Finally, due to the nature of a micro-level analysis focused on the interior of the space, this study has a limitation in that it could not address the macroeconomic impacts of the large commercial facility on the surrounding original downtown commercial district of Yeongdo, which remains a task to be supplemented through multidisciplinary follow-up research.