ABSTRACT
There is a consensus that a successful city has to have vibrant public spaces where social, cultural, and political lives unfold, where everyday life gets permeated by the finest expressions of urbanity. Polemological in de Certeau’s sense, this essay poses an uneasy question: what if that is not true?
In order to avoid purely theoretical discussion, it focuses at Tokyo and peculiarities shaping this unusual, almost monocultural metropolis. The key argument builds upon the fact that Japanese, along many other non-Western languages, has no equivalent for the term “public.” Neither the transcribed paburiku, nor indigenous kōkyo encapsulates its meaning. Willingly or not, we need to accept that that fundamental concept falls among those in which the non-Western “cultures have shown hardly any interest, to the extent that often they do not even have name for it” (Jullien 2014, 8). Similar is the situation with other foundational Western concepts, such as culture, philosophy, aesthetics, logic, rights.
Tokyo, and many other cities, performs quite well, although they do not conform with foundational principles of the mainstream urban theory. Our emphasis is on the need for local definitions, new, non-dogmatic readings, the application of Lefebvre’s right to the city, and for the right to difference.
