ABSTRACT
Even if we define machizukuri much more restrictively as meaning small-scale urban planning projects which involve local people, there are still a tremendous variety of such projects. For example, many local governments describe LR as machizukuri, even though LR projects are a traditional part of the Japanese city planning system, and are rarely initiated by local people, but are usually the result of intensive organising efforts on the part of local government LR departments (Sorensen 2000a). Just as importantly, participation in LR projects is not open to all local residents, but only to landowners and land tenants, so the model of participation is much more restrictive than the more recent wave of participatory approaches. To distinguish such traditional city planning projects from more recent participatory planning efforts, the term “citizen participationbased machizukuri” (shimin sanka no machizukuri ) has recently become popular (see e.g. Watanabe 1999). This is a useful distinction, as the defining feature of the major changes to Japanese planning practice during the 1990s has been the shift towards greater citizen participation in city planning. While for convenience the term machizukuri is used in the rest of this chapter, it refers only to citizen participation-based machizukuri projects and processes for local urban environmental improvement, not to LR, community economic development projects, or traditional top-down city planning approaches.
