ABSTRACT
Renewal of the center of an old city in west Japan is a topic where a sense of the past intersects a vision for the future. It is where the political art of the possible meets the historical residues of the actual. And it is where the earnest efforts of townspeople and some of the civil servants run into the selfimportance of other political actors. As such, the subject of local history and renewal is about the politics of culture and the wider public space of civil society.
