• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.305-322
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• 2006

An increasing number of cities employ rescaling strategies that not only construct metropolitan production network scaled down from national context, but also tune up new governance to effectively control local geographies of the city. In this context, urban redevelopment has emerged a key 'global' strategy to empower governmental institutions of the city, which not only eliminate such threatening spatial variables as deteriorated housing, working-class ghettos, and crime areas, but also increase and extract exchange value of those spaces. I view such practices a process of 'glurbanization'. This paper investigates how state/city government employs the discourse of urban re/development for 'inventing' poverty at an urban scale: how it institutionalizes the discourse for implementing concrete projects: and how urban institutional apparatus appropriate their discursive practices of redevelopment for their own ends in the city. By particularly focusing on the California Redevelopment Law and the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, this paper analyzes the ways in which the law and the agency extract value from what they define 'blight areas' by means of eminent domain and tax increment revenues. For empirical analysis I employ discourse analysis and institutional ethnography. I conclusively argue that the urban spaces stigmatized as 'blight areas' are increasingly entrapped by the urban redevelopment agency, which extracts increased exchange value from the areas and redirects it for supporting external investors, private developers, and the body of the agency itself.