Relational practices of youth-led local entrepreneurship and the reconfiguration of intimacy in an era of local extinction: A case study of Mokpo’s old town

This study examines how youth-led local entrepreneurship reconfigures ways of living in place and the organisational principles of social relations in South Korea, where the discourse of local extinction has become pervasive. While dominant narratives frame non-metropolitan regions as spaces of crisis and intervention, and young people as those who have “left” and should “return,” young migrants in the historic inner city of Mokpo, South Jeolla Province, re-signify the locality by recalibrating their life criteria and the density of social relations rather than through moral commitment to place. Rather than reducing youth local entrepreneurship to policy outcomes or economic performance, this study conceptualises it as a form of social practice through which work, identity, and relational networks are reassembled. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews, participant observation, and field documentation with young migrants engaged in entrepreneurial, cultural, and spatial practices in Mokpo’s old downtown area.
The findings show that youth migration to the locality relativises urban-centered normative life trajectories and survival-oriented labor ethics through the pursuit of authenticity. Social relations are transformed from objects of accumulation into resources to be selectively composed and recombined, while settlement is redefined not as a one-time act of permanent fixation but as a skill of repeatedly choosing to stay. Relationships emerge retrospectively as resources woven through post-migration practices and the accumulation of time, and settlement is experienced as a conditional state sustained only as long as its viability endures.
Furthermore, youth local entrepreneurship in Mokpo manifests as a practice of platformed entrepreneurship, in which digital platforms function as relational infrastructures that redistribute the structural risks of small cities while enabling translocal connections. At the same time, platforms generate relational labor, commercialised friendship, and traps of intimacy. In response, young entrepreneurs construct sustainable forms of intimacy through role- and capability-based relational ethics and through the deliberate management of temporal rhythms and spatial conditions. This study highlights both the potential of these practices to disrupt the settlement-centered logic of local extinction discourse and their limitations, particularly in terms of platform dependency and precarity.