Neighborhood Scale Place-making in Tokyo

Neighborhood Scale Place-making in Tokyo: Organizing structures and resources

Speaker: Andre Sorensen

Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto

Friday, March 20, 2009
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
208N – Seminar Room, North House
Munk Centre For International Studies
1 Devonshire Place

Register http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=6610

This talk is on the strategies of civic actors in two central Tokyo neighborhoods to claim a voice in managing changes to their community, creating shared meanings for neighborhood streets and public spaces. In Yanaka and Shimokitazawa active community movements have worked to protect and improve shared community spaces by celebrating them as a historic legacy and a shared community resource, investing new and more complex values and claims on shared spaces, and redefining public streets as civic spaces in their neighborhood. They assert the rights of community participation in managing urban change by creating a neighborhood constitution, organizing art events and parades in the streets, engaging new participants in shared property rights, proposing new criteria for evaluating urban change, and telling stories of a strong and distinct community. Existing institutional structures for public participation were sidestepped as compromised in efforts to block redevelopment plans, and new organizing frameworks created.

Andre Sorensen is Associate Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Geography and Programme in Planning, University of Toronto. He has published widely on Japanese urban sprawl, land development, and planning history. His single-author book The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the 21st Century (Routledge 2002) won the book prize of the International Planning History Association in 2004. His current SSHRC-funded research project Who Will Build the Liveable City?: Planning Culture, Civil Society and Local Environmental Governance in Tokyo and Toronto compares the role of civil society organizations in managing shared spaces in two very different cities. He is the editor with P. J. Marcotullio and J. Grant, of Towards Sustainable Cities: East Asian, North American and European Perspectives. (Ashgate 2004) and with C. Funck Living Cities in Japan: Citizens Movements, Machizukuri and Local Environments (Routeledge 2007).