Whither World City Tokyo? Re-imagining Urban Social Justice Beyond Developmentalism in Post-growth Japan

Tokyo faces a looming condition of post-growth: decades-long deflation, population aging, growing care gaps and nation-wide population decline projected from 126 million currently to 88 million by 2065. The current conjuncture presents limits to Japan’s developmentalism—a regime of state-led national economic development for rapid industrialization—because a legitimacy of developmental state interventions derives from growth itself. Despite inevitable shrinkage, however, Japan’s developmental state continues to (re)develop central Tokyo where over 300 revitalization projects are underway. This contradictory process of urban spatial restructuring of central Tokyo is set against declining neighbourhoods that experience the concentration of low-income seniors and care deficits. This dissertation examines planning responses to these unprecedented aging and shrinking populations, in search for more equitable urban futures. It attends to the aftermath of compressed urbanization with a focus on understanding emerging patterns of uneven development, inequalities and the crisis of care. To this end, it deploys a relational, multi-scalar methodology that combines political economic accounts with ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo. It examines these post-growth challenges over four empirical chapters. Chapter 1 shows how Japan’s developmentalism has historically mobilized “national land development” to manage a series of political-economic crises and demographic challenges. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Bank of Japan’s abundant supply of cheap money (i.e. unconventional monetary easing), coupled with investments in infrastructures of circulation and special economic zone, has created a condition of speculative urbanization in central Tokyo that is transforming around the concept of convection. Chapter 3 describes planners’ one-way-street understandings of neighbourhood decline that conflates the concentration of low-income seniors and care deficits with the obsolescence of social and physical infrastructures. Chapter 4 examines the crisis of care as a contested terrain of the developmental state control that displaces care needs to peripheries and community-based initiatives that challenge organized state abandonment and disposability. The conclusion discusses contradictions planning must confront in the context of post-growth and population shrinkage: circulation over stasis to promote urbanization by convection; neighbourhood decline as the crisis of care; the remaking of urban-rural relations; and anti-disposability for care-based social economy.

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