URBAN MANUFACTURING, NOW AGAIN: SEWOON GLOBAL FORUM 2020

The opening event of the ‘Sewoon Global Forum 2020: Local-Recall’ was streamed live over the internet on the 18th of June, 8pm KST. Experts from Korea and abroad who attended the forum last year assembled again to discuss the challenges facing their city, a metropolis experiencing a great many sudden changes, in order to address the new challenges facing urban manufacturing.

The ‘Sewoon Colloquium’, an event hosted last year on the Sewoon Campus of University of Seoul to explore the current status, potential and future of urban manufacturing, was held this year under the new title ‘Local-Recall’ in the form of a global online forum.

The colloquium held in 2019 addressed the complex and dynamic issues emerging from industrial technology, local communities, urban planning and policy and the preservation of history and culture. It discussed shared concerns about cities and manufacturing from various perspectives through an expert presentation and audience discussion. Each session was shared via the webzine . As the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to sweep across the world and establish in 2020 a new norm, the Sewoon Colloquium saw fit to transform itself into an online event and looked to how the current crisis has impacted urban manufacturing, the global production network, and international cities through the lens of the ‘local community’. To speak in concrete terms, the forum will host a talk show ‘Smart Rookies of Neo Manufacturing’, in order to represent voices from across the new manufacturing industry about past and present trials and errors, issue 619), joined the online event from locations as varied as Seoul, New York and Brussels to diagnose the current crisis and discuss the rapidly changing situation in their cities.