ABSTRACT
A crucial aspect of urban spaces everywhere is the way their residents perceive and appropriate them, which space precisely they define as the territory of their local community, how they govern it and how they organise social interaction on the local level. This is Henri Lefebvre’s espace vécu (see Introduction), and while it is often an absent dimension in urban planners’ and other specialists’ visions, it is nonetheless vital for the human experience of the city past and present. In Japan, a key factor in shaping this dimension has been the neighbourhood assocations (chôkai, chônaikai, jichikai) that encompass nearly all urban households of a district (chô) for administrative and social purposes. Although they lack legal status and thus are to be considered as private organisations of volunteers, they clearly serve administrative purposes in so far as they cooperate with the local authorities by, e.g. forwarding official notes from town-hall to the individual households or by keeping streets and park areas of their districts clean. In addition, they also provide a framework for social life, mainly by organizing social and cultural events for the local community.
