Heidi Gottfried

Abstract

Tokyo’s dizzyingly disarrayed built environment almost defies rendering an interpretation of the city’s symbolism. To do so, this article puts forth a geography of power approach that imposes order on the urban grid for analyzing Tokyo, both as a symbolic space and as a terrain of struggle. The global ascendance of Tokyo was made possible by the state’s developmental economic projects materialized in massive infrastructure and architecture built during two critical conjunctures, when the fate of the city could have turned out differently. Pinpointing critical conjunctures takes seriously historical contingency in writing the histories of particular urban spaces. The article documents inter-scalar political forces fostering developmental urbanization in Japan. Developmental urbanization grew out of geo-politics and the quelling of social turmoil in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the context of increasing globalization during the 1970s–80s. The post-imperial reclamation of Japan’s place in the region considers the articulation of Japanese capitalist development in American geo-political networks; the subordination of Japanese social movements and labor; and the tensions inherent in an infrastructural fix to the problem of social conflict.

Keywords

Global city, urban developmentalism, inter-scalar, contentious politics, East Asia

From: Critical Sociology 2018 44 (3)

Editor: Wang Yi