ABSTRACT
Since the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, machizukuri groups and processes have spread widely throughout Japan. The term machizukuri translates literally as either “community development,” “neighborhood building,” or “town making” and is used to describe an extraordinarily wide variety of activities, from economic development initiatives to traditional top-down city planning or urban renewal projects and voluntary social welfare projects, among others (see Sorensen and Funck, 2007). Here we are discussing projects and processes in which community members organize themselves in attempts to gain a degree of influence in managing urban changes in their own neighborhoods. Central to many of these efforts has been the creation of new kinds of civic spaces, both physical and conceptual. Physical civic spaces include neighborhood parks, community centers, temporary transformations of vacant land and buildings by communities and artists, shared meeting spaces, community galleries, and office spaces for civil society organizations. Conceptual civic spaces include the spaces created by new community organizations and events, a new insistence on community consultation and negotiation over permitted development within existing neighborhoods, an assertion of shared rights over neighborhood landscapes and heritages both tangible and intangible, and the creation of new shared activities in and understandings of shared spaces. These processes are interesting in themselves as community-based place governance activities but are also revealing of changing relationships between citizens, civil society, and civic space at the neighborhood scale.
