REGION AND GEOGRAPHY ISSN:2586-1468(Online) 지역과 지리

In Yeongdo-gu, Busan—a region facing the risk of local extinction due to demographic and industrial decline—a rapid “café boom” has been observed since the early 2020s. This study analyzes the dynamics of this café boom, conceptualizing it as “the paradox of the view” by focusing on how the core asset that catalyzed the boom ironically acts as a shackle threatening spatial sustainability. Methodologically, this study employs in-depth interviews with café operators—selected to reflect diverse business histories, scales, and operational models—as primary data, supplemented by interviews with visitors and policymakers. The analysis reveals that the core asset of Yeongdo’s café landscape is a shared landscape resource characterized as a “dynamic view” in which harbors, ships, and bridges converge. However, as all cafés equally appropriate this resource, the landscape has converged toward an upwardly standardized homogenization. The resulting competition to scale up to overcome this homogeneity has led to the exclusion of small-scale independent cafés lacking capital power. Whether industrial heritage is merely consumed as a backdrop or recreated as unique brand equity, and whether “view dependency” can be overcome, are unevenly distributed depending on capital scale; furthermore, local government policies focused on physical landscape improvement have exacerbated these dynamics. Ultimately, while Yeongdo’s café boom grew on the basis of shared landscape assets, its over-appropriation is paradoxically undermining its own foundation. This contradiction raises fundamental critical questions about the dominant perspective that consumes recent café-led urban regeneration solely as a simplistic success narrative.