Diversity of Urban Inclusivity (eBook)

This book explores, situates, and discusses the contours of urban inclusivity amidst and beyond the well-researched neoliberal turn in urban governance. While it is generally accepted that urban social issues are susceptible to global woes, these perceptions draw only limited attention to the plurality of interventions that cities undertake-or facilitate-in managing their social turfs. By addressing the apparent lack of theorizations on everyday heterogeneities in urban place-making, especially in non-Western contexts, this book highlights the role of inclusionary practices by different stakeholders as an explicit pattern of urbanization. It does so by focusing on old urban centralities that have an outspoken history in experimenting with inclusivity.

The book is guided by two interrelated questions: (1) What particular urban settings promote inclusionary features in contrast to the conspicuous exclusionary mechanisms of market-led urbanization, and (2) how do we conceptualize these features in dialogue with concurrent urban theories that continue to grapple with the structural properties of exclusionary urbanization under the auspices of the neoliberal turn and gentrification? To answer these questions, the chapters provide a rich empirical account of inclusionary initiatives by the city governments, the voluntary organization sector, and informal communities, each revealing a unique new set of spatial approaches to urban inclusivity. The book concludes with the political implications of envisioning urban inclusivity as a negotiatory moment between key stakeholder interests in a capitalist society.

Primarily intended for researchers and graduate students in the fields of urban geography, sociology, migration, and welfare studies, the book is also a valuable source for policymakers and practitioners in the fields of social planning and civil society at large. 

Taku Fukumoto is an associate professor in the Department of Japanese Studies, Nanzan University. He received his Ph.D. in geography at the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, in 2018. His expertise includes urban social geography, in particular the historical transition of segregation in Japanese cities and the socio-economic analyses of ethnic enclaves. His recent works focus on the cultural dynamics of Koreatown in Osaka as a part of the recent Korean popular culture wave (Hallyu), as well as local labor and housing conditions of newly arrived immigrants from South America in the Tokai region of Japan. He has recently published his book on Ethnic Vitality in Osaka (in Japanese) from Kyoto University Press.