Tokyo's Urban Restructuring in the Era of Neoliberalism: A Review

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, many urban restructuring researchers interested in Tokyo have inquired impacts of economic globalization approached by world/global city hypothesis. This paper reviews these researches and clarifies research agenda for transformation of urban restructuring in Tokyo under the impact of neoliberal state reform in the late 1990s and 2000s. Some researchers, especially with Regulationist approach, have pointed out Tokyo’s particularity of urban economic and social structure derived from the postwar Japanese “Toyotaist” regulatory regime and the Japanese “developmental” state, compared with New York and London under the North Atlantic Fordist regime and Keynesian welfare state. However, Japanese postwar regime and state have started changing since the crash of bubble economy and the economic turmoil in the “lost decade”. Company welfarism in Toyotaist regime has collapsed and the state apparatus in developmental state has experienced drastic restructuring in the late 1990s and 2000s. For understanding the urban restructuring of Tokyo under the impact of neoliberalism, we must capture the regime shift, state restructuring, and these effects to the economic and social structure of the city. Therefore, we focus attention on theoretical and methodological framework of “neoliberalizing city” researches by European and American urban scholars. This paper makes a point of the potential utility of this framework and discusses some points for the Japanese “neolibelarizing” urban restructuring.