Over the past few decades, Japan has faced severe earthquake disasters, an increasing aging population, declining birth rates, and widening social disparities. These issues have served to highlight gaps left by top-down governance approaches and the urgent need to create resilient societies using more traditional models. Japanese “machizukuri” has developed to become an exceptional example of bottom-up creative approaches based on collective action and use of local resources. Since its evolution in the 1960s, machizukuri has come to define diverse and creative community-driven management models, by which local communities are enabled to actively tackle problem-solving. Including contributions from experts directly engaged in the process, this book explores the original development of machizukuri in Japan, its diffusion through East Asia and the positive outcomes of this transfer. Combining theoretical explanations with practical case studies, from pre-disaster planning in Tokyo, to the revitalization of historic towns and rural areas around Japan, the book looks at specific solutions, tools, and links between academics, communities, organizations, governmental bodies, and the private sector. It will appeal to researchers in planning, community engagement, architecture, urban design, and sustainable development.

Civic engagement is a concept of action that has become part of common vocabulary, not only in the West but also in many other regions of the world as well. A growing, yet still small number of scholarly works has recently emerged showing how in Japan citizen activism, volunteering, and social action for a public cause are dev- oping. This present volume is another, and in my view, important addition to the body of knowledge on civic engagement in Japan. The majority of books on related issues in Japan take on the perspective of organized civic life, in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or nonprofit organizations (NPOs): we know quite a number of things about the quantitative trends in these organizations, on their positioning, on their difficulties, and on the institutional contexts in which they have to work. We know relatively little – except for a small number of topical qualitative case studies – on broad issues that relate to civic engagement in Japan, inside or outside these formal organizations. This volume is the first to offer a wide scope of broad variety of forms of civic engagement in contemporary Japan. The volume is quite forceful in counterbalancing oversimplified ideas on an “ideal” civil society in which state, market, and civil society organizations are in- pendent and at best take on oppositional stances.

The Routledge Companion to Professional Awareness and Diversity in Planning Education engenders a discourse on how urban planning as a discipline is being made attractive to children and youth as they consider their career preferences. It also provides a discourse around the diversity challenges facing the institutions for training urban planning professionals. This Companion is an impressive collection of initiatives, experiences, and lessons in helping children, youth, and the general public appreciate the importance of, and the diversity challenge confronting, the urban planning profession and education. It comprises empirical, experimental, and case study research on initiatives to address the professional awareness and diversity challenges in urban planning. It has uniquely assembled voices and experiences from countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Contributors are educators, practitioners, and activists of urban planning as well as policymakers in their respective countries. This Companion is intended as a resource for urban planning schools and departments, foundations, non-profit organizations, private sector organizations, public institutions, teachers, and alumni, among others to learn and consciously drive efforts to increase planning education awareness among children, youth, and the general public. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The purpose of this volume is to highlight the impacts on civic engagement of social capital, and its various component parts (trust, norms, networks and associations), in diverse parts of Asia. Addressing the pressing need for improved governance within the spatial, political and cultural realities in the rapidly transforming landscapes of Asia, the contributors to the book bring together interdisciplinary work that focuses on the ways in which civic engagement can link with social capital building. The goal of this volume is to inspire policy that recognizes that a vibrant society with access to rich stores of positive social capital requires civil society, alternate civilities and the state. The result is a dialogue on the interplay of social capital and civic engagement in socio-political contexts quite different from those found in the West. This book contributes to current discussions about the nature of social relations and their connection to politics and change and offers a unique lens into the validity of these important concepts in contemporary research across a variety of Asian settings. It will be of interest to social scientists across the board, especially those with an interest in Asia and Asian development.

A revealing look at Japanese design weaving together the stories of people who shaped Japan’s design industries with social history, economic conditions, and geopolitics. From cars to cameras, design from Japan is ubiquitous. So are perceptions of Japanese design, from calming, carefully crafted minimalism to avant-garde catwalk fashion, or the cute, Kawaii aesthetic populating Tokyo streets. But these portrayals overlook the creativity, generosity, and sheer hard work that has gone into creating and maintaining design industries in Japan. In Designing Modern Japan, Sarah Teasley deftly weaves together the personal stories of people who shaped and shape Japan’s design industries with social history, economic conditions, and geopolitics.. Key to her account is how design has been a strategy to help communities thrive during turbulent times, and for making life better along the way. Deeply researched and superbly illustrated, Designing Modern Japan appeals to a wide audience for Japanese design, history, and culture.

This book aims to provide bases for reasoning on what challenges urban-architectural design for vulnerable communities will face in the coming years. Several issues, such as technological development, climate change, political crisis and economic uncertainties show as traditional strategies and methodologies are not sufficient to deeply solve the problems of these complex realities. These new changes, which are studied in different fields of knowledge, highlight the fact that the development of effective solutions must be characterized by multidisciplinary approaches and must be based on strategies promoted by different disciplines. For this reason, this contributed volume collects contributions and considerations from experts in various fields of knowledge working in different parts of the world, such as the Americas, Europe and Asia. The goal is precisely to provide the reader with multidisciplinary knowledge and methodologies in order to better reflect and analyze the challenges that designing for vulnerable communities will face in the next few years. These multidisciplinary studies are organized into five sections: Sustainability and Vulnerabilities in Time of the Anthropocene Approaches, Principles and Paradigms to Contemporary Research and Practice for Vulnerable Communities Designing for Vulnerabilities: Applications and Actions Social Engagement in Vulnerable Communities Between Digital and Humanist Visions Vulnerabilities in Context: Analysis and Projects in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region Design for Vulnerable Communities will be of interest primarily to researchers and professionals in the field of urban-architectural design, but it will also be a useful tool to policy makers and members of civil society at large interested in making cities more inclusive.

Over the last fifteen years local citizens' movements have spread rapidly throughout Japan. This volume examines the growth and nature of civil society participation in local urban and environmental governance.