ABSTRACT
This chapter considers state neo-liberalization in relation to the interactions between Japan’s developmental state culture and the role of cities within it. Urban planning has always been the central component of Japan’s national development. At some times, state leaders planned focused urban growth to industrialize the country effectively while at other times they planned balanced urbanization to ensure spatial equality. Since the early 1990s, Japan has been in a long economic recession and in recent years its leaders have applied bold strategies to turn around the stagnation. The general principle for the strategies is that of ‘concentration and selection’, by which the leaders mean the re-emphasis of planning effectiveness based on rational decision making, rather than maintaining a balanced distribution for reasons of equity and political expediency.
Urban regeneration is a key policy arena in which the decision makers practice the rationality principle. At the same time, the state has been implementing state decentralization reform to introduce fiscal accountability and entrepreneurism to local governance. The combination of these neo-liberal policy ideas with the rational planning is important for the state to implement redevelopment of major urban centers, particularly of Tokyo, as the nation’s economic engine. It is a means for the state to legitimize its rational top-down Tokyo-centered development policy while leaving other communities to their own developmental efforts. In these policy initiatives, state planning remains strong and cities are still expected to function as state assets to achieve national goals. Yet, the mixture of state developmentalism and neo-liberalism is now stimulating new urban politics. Bottom-up demands among some urban leaders for drastic state devolution are gaining popular support. These urban leaders advocate the state policy for local-to-local competition and uneven spatial development rather than redistribution, but they want their fair shares of power and fiscal resources from the state. By examining these recent political developments, this chapter offers a comparative means of theorizing neo-liberal state restructuring and urban development. It also discusses the policy implications of neo-liberal state decentralization of the Japanese developmental state.
