25,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
RESCALING URBAN POVERTY "In this path-breaking book, Mahito Hayashi explores the rescaled geographies of homelessness that have been produced in contemporary Japanese cities. Through an original synthesis of regulationist political economy and immersive place-based research, Hayashi situates urban homelessness in Japan in comparative-international contexts. The book offers new theoretical perspectives from which to decipher emergent forms of urban marginality and their contestation." --Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago "Mahito Hayashi traces the shifting spatial strategies of unhoused people as they create spaces of emancipation within Japanese cities. Attending to the complexities of contentious class politics and livelihoods barely sustained by the survival economies, Rescaling Urban Poverty is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of the geographies of urban social movements." --Nik Theodore, Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago Rescaling Urban Poverty discloses the hidden dynamics of state rescaling that ensnares homeless people at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. * Explains the oppressive effects of rescaling and its limits in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism * Uses ethnography as a re-ontologising medium of critical theorisation in Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands * Develops rich context-based and field-based arguments about social movements, poverty and housing policy, and public space formation in Japan * Uncovers the radical geographies of placemaking, commoning, and translation that can create prohomeless urban environments under rescaling * Refines the method of abstraction to broaden the international scope of critical literatures and links different scholarly standpoints without obscuring disagreements By advancing a broad research program for homelessness and poverty, Rescaling Urban Poverty provides the essential understanding of how state rescaling ensnares homeless and impoverished people in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism. Its three angles - national states, public and private spaces, and urban social movements - uncover the hidden dynamics of rescaling that emerge, and are resisted, at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Evidence is drawn from Japanese cities where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork and develops robust urban narratives by mobilising spatial regulation theory, metabolism theory, state theory, and critical housing theory. The book cross-fertilises these Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands through meticulous efforts to reinterpret both old and new texts. By building bridges between classical and contemporary interests, and between the theories and Japanese cities, this book attracts various audiences in geography, sociology, urban studies, and political economy.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 638
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
RGS-IBG Book Series
For further information about the series and a full list of published and forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com
Published
Rescaling Urban Poverty: Homelessness, State Restructuring and City Politics in JapanMahito Hayashi
The Urban Question in Africa: Uneven Geographies of TransitionPádraig R. Carmody, James T. Murphy, Richard Grant and Francis Y. Owusu
Theory and Explanation in GeographyHenry Wai-chung Yeung
Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998Ruth Craggs
How Cities Learn: Tracing Bus Rapid Transit in South AfricaAstrid Wood
Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and PracticeLoretta Lees and Elanor Warwick
Geomorphology and the Carbon CycleMartin Evans
The Unsettling Outdoors: Environmental Estrangement in Everyday LifeRussell Hitchings
Respatialising Finance: Power, Politics and Offshore Renminbi Market Making in LondonSarah Hall
Bodies, Affects, Politics: The Clash of Bodily RegimesSteve Pile
Home SOS: Gender, Violence, and Survival in Crisis Ordinary CambodiaKatherine Brickell
Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks Across and Beyond South India, c. 1900-1930Andrew Davies
Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain’s Iraq War through ArtAlan Ingram
On Shifting Foundations: State Rescaling, Policy Experimentation And EconomicRestructuring In Post-1949 ChinaKean Fan Lim
Global Asian City: Migration, Desire and the Politics of Encounter in 21st Century SeoulFrancis L. Collins
Transnational Geographies Of The Heart: Intimate Subjectivities In A Globalizing CityKatie Walsh
Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War GermanyIan Klinke
Work-Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and InnovationAl James
Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and BiopoliticsSteve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham, John Allen and Simon Carter
Smoking Geographies: Space, Place and TobaccoRoss Barnett, Graham Moon, Jamie Pearce, Lee Thompson and Liz Twigg
Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government-in-ExileFiona McConnell
Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum SystemNick Gill
Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional TransformationsJohn Pickles and Adrian Smith, with Robert Begg, Milan Buček, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pástor
Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in BerlinAlexander Vasudevan
Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in IndiaPhilippa Williams
Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West AfricaStefan Ouma
Africa’s Information Revolution: Technical Regimes and Production Networks in South Africa and TanzaniaJames T. Murphy and Pádraig Carmody
Origination: The Geographies of Brands and BrandingAndy Pike
In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk BroadsDavid Matless
Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European DiplomacyMerje Kuus
Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in CubaMarisa Wilson
Material Politics: Disputes Along the PipelineAndrew Barry
Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural EconomyMaureen Molloy and Wendy Larner
Working Lives - Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945-2007Linda McDowell
Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological HistoryAndrew Warren
Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen MasseyEdited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter
The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton BosniaAlex Jeffrey
Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal AssemblageColin McFarlane
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical ConsumptionClive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke & Alice Malpass
Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist CitiesAlison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek
Swept Up Lives? Re-envisioning the Homeless CityPaul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen
Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, AffectsPeter Adey
Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life LinesDavid Ley
State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British AtmosphereMark Whitehead
Complex Locations: Women’s geographical work in the UK 1850–1970Avril Maddrell
Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South IndiaJeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard
Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape TownAndrew Tucker
Arsenic Pollution: A Global SynthesisPeter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards
Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global NetworksDavid Featherstone
Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?Hester Parr
Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in VulnerabilityGeorgina H. Endfield
Geochemical Sediments and LandscapesEdited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren
Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 MotorwayPeter Merriman
Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban PolicyMustafa Dikeç
Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape ChangeMartin Evans and Jeff Warburton
Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban GovernmentalitiesStephen Legg
People/States/TerritoriesRhys Jones
Publics and the CityKurt Iveson
After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial ChangeMick Dunford and Lidia Greco
Putting Workfare in PlacePeter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel
Domicile and DiasporaAlison Blunt
Geographies and MoralitiesEdited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith
Military GeographiesRachel Woodward
A New Deal for Transport?Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw
Geographies of British ModernityEdited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short
Lost Geographies of PowerJohn Allen
Globalizing South ChinaCarolyn L. Cartier
Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 YearsEdited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee
Rescaling Urban Poverty
Homelessness, State Restructuring and City Politics in Japan
Mahito Hayashi
This edition first published 2024
© 2024 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
This Work is a co-publication between The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Mahito Hayashi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered Office(s)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Office
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
The contents of this work are intended to further general scientific research, understanding, and discussion only and are not intended and should not be relied upon as recommending or promoting scientific method, diagnosis, or treatment by physicians for any particular patient. In view of ongoing research, equipment modifications, changes in governmental regulations, and the constant flow of information relating to the use of medicines, equipment, and devices, the reader is urged to review and evaluate the information provided in the package insert or instructions for each medicine, equipment, or device for, among other things, any changes in the instructions or indication of usage and for added warnings and precautions. While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Hardback ISBN: 9781119690979; Paperback ISBN: 9781119691020; ePub ISBN: 9781119691105; ePDF ISBN: 9781119691044; oBook ISBN: 9781119691051
Cover Image: © Mahito Hayashi
Cover design by Wiley
Set in 10/12pt Plantin Std by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
For Shoko and Kenjiro, with love
Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface and Acknowledgements
Part One Theory, Method, Context
1. Introduction and Theoretical Framework
Urban Political Economy: For Homelessness?
State Rescaling: The Central Concept of this Book
Subcomponent 1: National States
Subcomponent 2: Public and Private Spaces
Subcomponent 3: Urban Social Movements
The Method of Theorisation in this Book
Step 1: Theory Making
Step 2: Theory Specification
Postcolonial Urban Theory
Between Abstract and Concrete
The Structure of this Book
2. Japanese Context and the Regulationist Ethnography
Theory Specification 1: National States
Theory Specification 2: Public and Private Spaces
Theory Specification 3: Urban Social Movements
Regulationist Ethnography
Sites of Participatory Observation
The Nature of Data
Data on Homelessness
Data on Regulation
Data on Social Movements
Subaltern Materials
Conclusion
Part Two National States and Public and Private Spaces
3. Scales of Societalisation: Integral State and the Rescaling of Poverty
Theory and Its “Deviants”
Theoretical Framework
The Nationalised Space of Poverty Regulation
Crises of the Nationalised Space of Poverty Regulation
Rescaling
Comparisons to Brenner’s Meso Model
Mobilising the Theory for Japan
Nationalised Space of Poverty Regulation in Japan
High Growth, c. 1950s–1972
1970s World Crisis and Its Aftermath, c. 1973–1985
Bubble Economy, c. 1986–1991
Postbubble Crisis, c. 1992–2007
The World Financial Crisis, Mass Disasters, and Their Aftermath, c. 2008–2010s
Overview
New Regulatory Spaces in Japan
New Regulatory Spaces
Round One: Ground-Up Rescaling
Round Two: Picking-Off Rescaling
Round Three: Unfolding Rescaling
Conclusion
4. Rescaling Urban Metabolism I: Homeless Labour for “Housing”
The Urban Matrix and the Housing Classes
Metabolism, Societalisation, Rescaling
Metabolism and Societalisation
Rescaling and Reregulation
Specification of Theory
Theory for Japan
Late Formation of the Housing Classes in Japan
Small Use Values Attached to Japan’s Urban Matrix
State-Saturated Societalisation and Consumption in Japan
Ground-Up Rescaling in Japan
Metabolism and Regulation I: Locational Ethnography
Background for Ethnographic Narratives
Small Public Parks
A Municipal Sports Park and a Gymnasium
A Railway Station
The Coast
Metabolism and Regulation II: Multicity Ethnography
Conclusion
5. Rescaling Urban Metabolism II: Homeless Labour for Money
Homeless Recyclers: A Regulationist Approach
Homeless Recyclers in Japan
Regulationist Ethnography I: Regulating the Recycling Metabolism
Regulation in the City of Yokohama
Regulation in the City of Hiratsuka
Summary
Regulationist Ethnography II: New Recycling Strategies
Regulation or Escape?
The First Strategy of Recyclers: Find the Spots
The Second Strategy of Recyclers: Change the Target
The Third Strategy of Recyclers: Etiquette for Neighbourhoods
Summary
Regulationist Ethnography III: Movements for Homeless Recyclers
Any Social Movements?
A Movement in the City of Yokohama
A Movement in the City of Hiratsuka
Summary
Conclusion
Part Three Urban Social Movements
6. Placemaking in the Inner City: Social and Cultural Niches of Homeless Activism
The Inner City: Beyond Regulation
Lefebvre in the Inner City
Revisiting Lefebvre
Expanding Lefebvre
Inclusive Urban Form
Japanese Contexts
Attuning the Theory to Japan
The Kotobuki District
Placemaking in Yokohama’s Inner City: From Run-Ups to the 1970s
Summary
Placemaking in Yokohama’s Inner City: The 1980s
Summary
Placemaking in Yokohama’s Inner City: The 1990s
Summary
Conclusion
7. Commoning around the Inner City: Whose Public? Whose Common?
Commoning, Habiting, Othering
Commoning against Othering
Japanese Parameters of Commoning
Commoning in Yokohama in the 1970s
The Start of Commoning
From Radicalism to Downright Oppression
A National Scale of Commoning?
Disarmament
Summary
Commoning in Yokohama in the 1980s
Between the Two Cycles of Homelessness
Commoning by the Union
Commoning by Housed Citizens
Summary
Commoning in Yokohama in the 1990s–2000s
Commoning Public Spaces
Commoning Public Provision
Discommoning
Summary
Conclusion
8. Translating to New Cities: Geographical and Cultural Expansion
Outlying Cities
Brokerage and Translation
Placemaking in the Outlying Cities
Kotobuki: A House of Brokerage
Placemaking in the City of Sagamihara
Placemaking in the City of Fujisawa
Placemaking in the City of Hiratsuka
Commoning in the Outlying Cities
Early Attempts at Commoning
Successes in Commoning
Solidarity against a New Rescaling
Linking the Cities
Learning the Rescaling
Conclusion
Part Four Towards the Future of Rescaling Studies
9. New Rescalings in Japan
Upscaling of Homeless Politics in the Late 2000s
Neoliberalisation and Workfarist Reform in the 2010s
Rescaling for All
When Public Spaces Are Closed
Repoliticising the Urban
The Inner City against Gentrification
COVID-19, Rescaling, Recommoning
10. Conclusion
Urban Theory and Ethnography
Remapping Urban Political Economy
Habitat and Urban Class Relations
Integral State Rescaling
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
CHAPTER 03
Table 3.1 Japan’s nationalised spaces...
CHAPTER 05
Table 5.1 Ordinances that criminalise...
CHAPTER 07
Table 7.1 Key movement actions...
Table 7.2 Murders and injuries...
Table 7.3 Information-gathering tours...
CHAPTER 08
Table 8.1 Groups for homeless...
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 01
Figure 1.1 Overarching theoretical framework...
Figure 1.2 A geographical approach...
Figure 1.3 Three layers in...
CHAPTER 02
Figure 2.1 Kanagawa Prefecture.Note...
CHAPTER 03
Figure 3.1 Rounds of rescaling...
CHAPTER 04
Figure 4.1 People’s...
Figure 4.2 Regulation of urban...
Figure 4.3 Comparative view of...
Figure 4.4 A bench in...
Figure 4.5 A signboard in...
Figure 4.6 A site of...
Figure 4.7 Belongings of a...
Figure 4.8 A notice at...
Figure 4.9 A notice at...
Figure 4.10 A house and...
CHAPTER 05
Figure 5.1 Double-edged metabolism...
Figure 5.2 Homeless people’...
Figure 5.3 Homeless people’...
Figure 5.4 Bicycle of a...
Figure 5.5 Public notice displayed...
Figure 5.6 Notice board at...
Figure 5.7 Homeless recycler’...
Figure 5.8 Yokohama’s...
CHAPTER 06
Figure 6.1 Inclusive urban form...
Figure 6.2 The Kotobuki district...
Figure 6.3 Undated handbill distributed...
Figure 6.4 Handbill distributed in...
CHAPTER 07
Figure 7.1 Handbill distributed at...
Figure 7.2 Handbill distributed to...
Figure 7.3 Handbill distributed to...
Figure 7.4 Letter from the...
Figure 7.5 Yokohama’s...
Figure 7.6 Handbill distributed to...
Figure 7.7 Yokohama’s...
CHAPTER 08
Figure 8.1 Handbill distributed by...
Figure 8.2 Mayor of the...
CHAPTER 09
Figure 9.1 Households on public...
Figure 9.2 Decline in ...
Figure 9.3 Public spaces of...
Guide
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Series Editors’ Preface
Preface and Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
xxii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
List of Figures
Figure 1.1 Overarching theoretical framework of this book.
Figure 1.2 A geographical approach to methodological abstraction.
Figure 1.3 Three layers in each “empirical” chapter.
Figure 2.1 Kanagawa Prefecture.
Figure 3.1 Rounds of rescaling.
Figure 4.1 People’s two metabolic circuits in public space.
Figure 4.2 Regulation of urban encounter and societalisation in public space.
Figure 4.3 Comparative view of Japanese public space: a policy discourse.
Figure 4.4 A bench in Shinshuku Park, 25 August 2004.
Figure 4.5 A signboard in Shinshuku Park, 28 August 2004.
Figure 4.6 A site of homelessness in Hachiman Yama Park, 28 August 2005.
Figure 4.7 Belongings of a homeless person at the stadium, 11 August 2004.
Figure 4.8 A notice at a homeless site beside the gymnasium, 3 April 2004.
Figure 4.9 A notice at the railway station, 2 December 2005.
Figure 4.10 A house and farm of a homeless person in the coastal area, 18 April 2004.
Figure 5.1 Double-edged metabolism of recyclers and its regulation.
Figure 5.2 Homeless People’s Cash Income from Labour, 2003–2012.
Figure 5.3 Homeless People’s Income Generating Activities, 2003–2012.
Figure 5.4 Bicycle of a homeless recycler in Yokohama, 1 January 2019.
Figure 5.5 Public notice displayed at Yokohama’s public dumping sites in 2004.
Figure 5.6 Notice board at Hiratsuka’s public dumping site, September 2004.
Figure 5.7 Homeless recycler’s notes on the days of official garbage collection, 28 August 2005.
Figure 5.8 Yokohama’s limited “acceptance” of homeless recyclers.
Figure 6.1 Inclusive urban form and its urban effects.
Figure 6.2 The Kotobuki district, 1965.
Figure 6.3 Undated Handbill Distributed in Kotobuki in the Mid-1970s.
Figure 6.4 Handbill Distributed in Kotobuki on 4 September 1976.
Figure 7.1 Handbill Distributed at Yokohama’s Junior High Schools in 1983.
Figure 7.2 Handbill Distributed to Homeless People in Yokohama on 21 January 1993.
Figure 7.3 Handbill Distributed to Homeless People in Yokohama on 1 July 1994.
Figure 7.4 Letter from the City of Yokohama to the Movement on 9 August 1994.
Figure 7.5 Yokohama’s food and hotel vouchers issued in the 1990s.
Figure 7.6 Handbill Distributed to Homeless People in Yokohama on 21 September 1994.
Figure 7.7 Yokohama’s food and hotel vouchers issued in the 2000s.
Figure 8.1 Handbill Distributed by Activists in Yokohama on 27 December 1977.
Figure 8.2 Mayor of the city of Hiratsuka listening to activists, 28 November 2005.
Figure 9.1 Households on public assistance between 1976 and 2014.
Figure 9.2 Decline in Countable Homeless People in the Tokyo–Yokohama Region, 2003–2012.
Figure 9.3 Public spaces of central Yokohama, 1 and 2 January 2019.
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Japan’s nationalised spaces of poverty regulation, 1950s–mid-2010s.
Table 5.1 Ordinances that criminalise nonpublic recyclers in Kanagawa Prefecture.
Table 7.1 Key movement actions in and around the Kotobuki district in the 1970s.
Table 7.2 Murders and injuries of homeless people in Yokohama during winter 1983.
Table 7.3 Information-gathering tours for public space commoning.
Table 8.1 Groups for homeless people in Kanagawa Prefecture.
List of Abbreviations
KLH
Kotobuki Livelihood Hall
KSMA
Kotobuki Self-Management Association
MHLW
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
NSPR
Nationalised Space of Poverty Regulation
NUP
New Urban Poverty
Series Editors’ Preface
The RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.
For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:
www.rgsbookseries.com
Ruth Craggs, King’s College London, UKChih Yuan Woon, National University of SingaporeRGS-IBG Book Series Editors
David Featherstone University of Glasgow, UKRGS-IBG Book Series Editor (2015–2019)
Preface and Acknowledgements
My first encounter with homelessness took place in Tokyo. A domestic economic crisis that had begun in 1992 was striking the population hard. In 1997, big firms and banks suddenly started to collapse. Japan was sliding into a double-dip recession. I entered university that same year, and to get there I travelled via big railway stations such as Shinjuku and Tokyo. On each journey, I witnessed sites of homelessness encroaching deeper and deeper into spaces of public transportation, like water endlessly springing up and soaking the ground. The scenes lingered in my heart.
I found a group of homelessness activists on the internet and started to get involved. It only took a short while before I knew that this small group was the most radical organisation for homelessness in Japan, seeking to free up for roofless people every park and alley of Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward. My task in the group was relatively modest: to engage in frequent visits to homeless sites, to distribute meals to homeless people, to sell secondhand clothes at flea markets with homeless youths, and to take part in street demonstrations. This first encounter lasted three years, and the experience taught me how intolerant public spaces can be for people without housing.
The second encounter took place in Kanagawa Prefecture, just south of Tokyo. This place left me with more colourful memories. In Tokyo, I was struggling to adapt to the worlds of homelessness and activism and the tense political situations that surrounded them. In Kanagawa, I had already finished my “socialisation” into the street-level worlds of homelessness and had decided to conduct social research and fieldwork on these worlds. In Tokyo, a lack of clarity about this issue had given me, an undergrad student, somewhat uncertain feelings. In Kanagawa, I was a graduate student, and more forward looking. I worked with different local groups but most frequently took part in groups in two cities, Yokohama and Hiratsuka. The timing was definitive because it was the moment when, for the first time in history, the Japanese state was stepping up its regulation of homelessness. Under the state’s vigorous intervention, the hidden “structure” of homelessness, regulation, and activism was becoming apparent.
Tokyo and Kanagawa, two sites of my unusual urban encounters, form the ontological basis of my research, though only Kanagawa Prefecture provides conjunctural information for this book. Using the same site of fieldwork, in fact, I published a book in Japanese in 2014. This work won an important prize and is considered a unique contribution to the study of urban poverty, social movements, homelessness, and the day labourer population in Japan. All along, my work on homelessness has had a core claim and a specific attribute. Foremost has been the assertion that homelessness can be conceptualised in terms of labour-mediated relations of deprived people to urban nature, of metabolic processes of production and consumption in public spaces, which provoke “normal” (domiciled) society to intervene into the spaces of homelessness. A specific attribute of my work has been a thorough depiction of the long-term history of social movements for homeless people and day labourers in Yokohama’s Kotobuki district and its outskirt areas, which researchers previously had not entirely depicted.
Though my Japanese-language book was successful, I was motivated to write an original book in English, an ambition prompted by Neil Brenner. After publication of the Japanese book in 2014, I started to think deeply about how I could write things differently. Writing a useful scholarly book in English demanded that I construct a comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework that could deliver my message to international audiences. The task was to create a new, large-scale research programme with theoretical rigour and methodological clarity, logically linking various dimensions of my materials and observations. This must guide my narrative for international readers in an intelligible and attractive way.
Rescaling Urban Poverty is the outcome of this multifaceted struggle. Compared to my previous efforts, the present book is more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, more conscious of the meanings of regulationist and critical literature on the issue of “homelessness plus Japan”. The book was created around a carefully woven network of Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian concepts. New materials are used widely, and old information is reexamined. For better or worse, throughout the process of production, I was almost completely confined to one unimpressive area of Japan that is remote from centres of Japan’s national dynamics. I believed that this confined status would be very productive and that it might help my creative endeavour to reach international audiences beyond local milieus.
In this struggle, my companion was Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, rather than other, canonical texts. Gramsci gleaned many new ideas from his famous experience of “being enclosed”. This reflection of my own situation onto the work of the canonical author now looks far more naive and indefensible than it seemed at the time. The truth is that I needed this and other myths to maintain my morale during the extended period of this book’s preparation and writing. In the late days of the writing, someone who shared time with me in New York City made me aware of the city’s old poets, and their works were quickly added to my bookshelf’s mythmaking section.
I hope that a variety of readers will find this book interesting. While the book commits to particular strands of critical urban and capitalism studies, my intention is to make its core debates interesting and intelligible to various kinds of reader—including those who are not very familiar with these discourses. I believe that the modes of argumentation employed here are useful for many audiences who are interested in issues related to policy, poverty, social movements, and the (re)scaling dynamism of state/urban space.
My special thanks go to Neil Brenner, who has given me limitlessly generous support since we met. At the departments of Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where I conducted research as a visiting scholar, he completely internationalised my scope and persuaded me to write for an English audience. I hope I can now demonstrate that Neil’s long-lasting commitment to me—as a researcher and as a person—was not misplaced. Nik Theodore reminded me that I should create, and not just use, theory, and his words have affected the form of this book. David Fasenfest powerfully encouraged me to complete this project during the final few years of the writing by locating my scholarship in active networks of international scholars.
My research has been helped by many scholars in Japan, including Yukihiko Kitagawa, Tan’no Kiyoto, Takashi Machimura, Masao Maruyama, and Akihiko Nishizawa. I remember how generously Yoshiharu Kishi, a teacher of modern German literature, made time for me—someone who had just entered university. At his cosy office, we read classics, with an intention to nurture my ability to read text as text, which Kishi thought to be the only way to “intellectualise” what he called my “turbulent” (sōzōshī) world, a world that was being saturated by Tokyo’s not-so-cosy politics. I am greatful to Kazushi Tamano, an urbanist with whom I started the earliest version of this project when I was an undergrad. Communication with him has inspired my interest in Japanese urban policy and its historical background.
The sustained enthusiasm that Chih Yuan Woon, Ruth Craggs, and David Featherstone—the present and past editors of the RGS-IBG Book Series—have shown for this project in the past several years has incited me to broaden the readership and intellectual basis of this book. I am grateful for anonymous reviewers’ feedback and for the assistance of Durgadevi Shanmugasundaram, Kilmeny MacBride, Giles Flitney, and Todd Manza who helped me with the final processes of this publication. I appreciate the financial support provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI JP21K01931 and JP22H00909).
I deeply thank activists working in and outside of the Kotobuki district. These spirited and thoughtful people have stood with homeless people despite the sometimes difficult consequences of their actions. There were times when mere “compassion” for homeless people could result in difficult relations with municipal workers, security staff, service providers, or local communities. The activists did not preclude collaboration with them. They would, however, emphatically defend homeless people’s survival milieus in public spaces when the “regulators” aspired to flatten these appropriated spaces of homeless people.
This book fundamentally develops arguments that appeared in my previous publications. These include the following:
Theorizing regulation-in-city for homeless people’s subaltern strategy and informality: societalization, metabolism, and classes with(out) housing. Critical Sociology 48 (2): 323–339. [2022; Chapter 1]
Times and spaces of homeless regulation in Japan, 1950s–2000s: historical and contemporary analysis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (4): 1181–1212. [2013; Chapter 3]
Toshikūkan ni sumikomu nojukusha: ‘tsukaeru jimen’ eno shin’nyū to kūkan kanri [Homeless people inhabiting urban space: intrusions into “usable spaces” and spatial control]. Nenpō Shakaigaku Ronshū 18: 182–191. [2005; Chapter 4]
Kenzō kankyō de tashaka sareru jyūtaku kiki: toshi no shizen o meguru rōdō to kanri to yume [Housing crisis being othered at built environments: labour, control, and myths around urban nature]. In: Toshikūkan ni Hisomu Haijyo to Hankō no Chikara [Forces of Exclusion and Resistance within Urban Space] (ed. T. Machimura), 25–60. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. [2013; Chapter 4]
Hōmuresu no hitobito no “kyojyū” to kōkyōkūkan [Homeless people’s “habitation” and public spaces]. In: Hōmuresu to Toshi Kūkan [Homelessness and Urban Space], 60–81. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. [2014; Chapter 4]
Sēsē suru chīki no kyōkai: naibuka shita “hōmuresu mondai” to sēdo henka no rōkaritei [Emerging boundaries of regional society: geographical diffusions of homeless people and institutional changes at the local level]. Soshioroji 52 (1): 53–69. [2007; Chapter 5]
Hōmuresu no hitobito no “shigoto” to kōkyō kūkan: toshizatugyō no “ika” ni yoru haijyo [Homeless people’s “labour” and public space: the exclusion of urban small works by “othering”]. In: Hōmuresu to Toshi Kūkan [Homelessness and Urban Space], 82–109. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. [2014; Chapter 5]
Public space excludes homeless workers in Japan: regulating the “recyclers” for hegemonic habitat. Social Theory and Dynamics 2: 3–17. [2018; Chapter 5]
1970 nendai kara 1980 nendai no kotobukichiku [Kotobuki in the 1970s and 1980s]. In: Hōmuresu to Toshi Kūkan [Homelessness and Urban Space], 110–167. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. [2014; Chapters 6 and 7]
1990 nendai no kotobukichiku [Kotobuki in the 1990s]. In: Hōmuresu to Toshi Kūkan [Homelessness and Urban Space], 172–216. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. [2014; Chapter 8]
2000 nendai no kotobukichiku [Kotobuki in the 2000s]. In: Hōmuresu to Toshi Kūkan [Homelessness and Urban Space], 220–225. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. [2014; Chapter 9]
Rescaled “rebel cities”, nationalization, and the bourgeois utopia: dialectics between urban social movements and regulation for Japan’s homeless. Antipode 47 (2): 419–441. [2015; Chapter 10]
Opening up the welfare state to “outsiders”: pro-homeless activism and neoliberal backlashes in Japan. In: Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia (ed. D. Chiavacci, S. Grano, and J. Obinger): 269–298. [2020; Chapter 10]
Mahito Hayashi
Nagoya
June 2023
Part One Theory, Method, Context
Chapter One Introduction and Theoretical Framework
As I sat down to write this introduction, the media was telling heart-wrenching stories about homeless people in Tokyo, about how “they” experienced a gigantic typhoon—which claimed the lives of one hundred Japanese people in October 2019—differently from “us”. The first report was about two homeless men who tried to enter an evacuation centre set up at a public gymnasium but were immediately rejected by its operator—a municipal government of Tokyo’s Taito Ward—and thrown out into the turbulent weather (Aoki 2019). The second concerned an individual who disappeared in the elevated waters of the Tama River, which runs through the middle of Tokyo; he was swept away by the currents and (according to the media) became the only victim of this typhoon in the Tokyo Metropolis (Adachi and Wada 2019).
Once the typhoon had passed, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government justified the rejection of homeless people from local evacuation centres on the grounds that it has to operate these centres for the benefit of official (“registered”) citizens in Tokyo. Homeless people are not such citizens under Japanese law, although the national government claims that it wants local evacuation centres to be more open to all. On TV and radio, comedians voiced sarcastic and unsympathetic reactions to these events, claiming that homeless people normally avoid public services anyway, and that “we” don’t want to see “them” using the same evacuation centres, even in an emergency. Finally, a small web media agency offered a contrasting picture, focusing on activists working for homeless people. Participants in such homeless-supporting activism, with roots in inner-city areas called yoseba that are historically inhabited by day labourers who can easily end up homeless, denounced the administrators and clamoured for the opening up of evacuation centres to homeless people in the future.
Disasters like this are increasingly common in the early twenty-first century. Global warming is heating up the Pacific, creating larger rain clouds, making Japan highly vulnerable to the climate crisis and increasing the risk for the already disadvantaged.1 At the same time, what we are witnessing in the current phase, according to many scholars, is the longue durée construction and destruction of the environment by capitalism (e.g., Moore 2015). Against this backdrop, these Japanese stories reveal everyday dimensions of homelessness under the capitalist urbanisation of our age.
First, extant forms of the commons for people—emergency reliefs, municipal facilities, community-run services, commonly used urban amenities, inclusive frameworks of citizenship, and the like—can exclude some of the most impoverished people. By locating homeless people within the spaces of arbitrariness, abandonment, and uncertainty, the state and society might be absolved from maintaining impoverished people’s access to the commons.
Second, in our age of generalised poverty, when even middle-class people think of themselves as poor (Lawson et al. 2015), the stigma attached to the “dangerous” class—the homeless as the outsiders of the housed—preserves the integrity of society from the ravages of internal strife; this is, indeed, the externalisation of class antagonism to the wild space of nonhabitat. Homeless people, or the non–housing class, are not just excluded from the “homogeneous risk communities” (Offe 1996, p. 165) but also constitute its internal consistency by being excluded and so delineating its edges from without.
Third, in the face of this difficulty, homeless people try to survive the life-threatening conditions of exclusion and regulation, sometimes with the support of activists, volunteers, and a few municipal workers who are striving to open up the commons to homeless people.
Ultimately, these orthodox and heterodox actors—policymakers, municipal regulators, police officers, housed citizens, homeless people, and activists/volunteers—advance sociocultural actions (framing, placemaking, and translating) through which we may co-construct and counter-construct “homelessness” on different spatial scales.
Rescaling Urban Poverty addresses these currently marginalised homeless-related processes and spaces, revealing that the marginality of “homelessness” owes much to its peripheral relations with normative urban settlement centred on city dwellers who are housed. To unpack this marginal position, this book situates homelessness within urban and territorial contexts of regulation that are intrinsically spatial, social, and multiscalar. In this book, the state and society—domiciled society—denote important nodes of regulation around which these urban/territorial features take observable shape. Hybrid devices, knowledge mobilities, and instantaneous instrumentations are found in abundance within the state–society spectrums, and they also fall within this book’s extensive conceptualisation of regulation. These milieus may normalise malregulated, deregulated, or crisis-prone elements that are rampant in capitalist urbanisation, through precipitating micro spaces and capillary networks of regulation across the state and social sectors.
Geographers already provide spatially informed agendas of regulation theory that are fruitful for this line of research (e.g., Amin 1994; Brenner 1998, 1999; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Collinge 1999; Cox 1997; Goodwin and Painter 1996; Hudson 2001; Jonas 1994, 1996; Jones 1997; Jones and MacLeod 1999; Krätke 1999; MacLeod 1999; MacLeod and Goodwin 1999; Mayer 1994; Painter 1997; Peck 1996; Peck and Tickell 1992, 1995; Swyngedouw 1997; Tickell and Peck 1992). These and other papers, book chapters, and books—many of them published in the 1990s—created a torrent of spatially attuned regulationist research agendas in geography.
With the help of this literature, and through refreshing its concepts in relation to nearby (Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, or other Marxian) theoretical lineages, I argue that homelessness as a sociospatial phenomenon presents a major opportunity to reassert the relevance of these existing understandings of regulation in line with new topics and geographies. These regulationist literatures are used constructively in this book, not only to disclose the urban/territorial centres of the hegemonic landscape but also to reorient critical urban studies thematically to the sociospatial margins of the city (Heynen 2009). Specifically in this book, these margins are the sites where (de)contestation takes place in uncertain and inconclusive ways around the housing crisis of deprived people. The Japanese case is beneficial for this work because it displays both unique patterns and notable similarities to discussions on regulationist approaches (Amin 1994; Boyer and Yamada 2000; Jessop and Sum 2006; Peck and Miyamachi 1994).
By remobilising inherited Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian methodological discussions, and by using them to reframe the central claims of regulationist authors, this book seeks to fill important voids that may be identified within and between different literatures. The essential ideas of classical continental regulationists will be scrutinised carefully (Aglietta 1979 [1976]; Boyer 1990; Boyer and Saillard 2002 [1995]; for influential reviews, see Jessop and Sum 2006). Central to this book, however, is the more recent concept of state rescaling (Brenner 1999, 2004a; Jessop 2002; Peck 2001b, 2002; Swyngedouw 1997), which has been applied to a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts (Boudreau et al. 2007; Brenner 2019; Hayashi 2013a; Keil and Mahon 2009; Li, Xu, and Yeh 2014; Lim 2017; MacKinnon and Show 2010; MacLeavy and Harrison 2010; Park 2013; Sonn 2010; Tsukamoto 2012; Ward and Jonas 2004; Wu 2016; Zhang and He 2021). This spatially regulationist concept will be mobilised intensively in this book to interpret various dimensions of homelessness.
The discussion of “homelessness” in this book can inform the literature in unique ways, in light of my fieldwork experience in Yokohama’s inner-city district (Kotobuki) and its surroundings. In this urban geography, and in urban Japan more generally, there was a conspicuous growth of homelessness within and around inner-city areas during the 1970s. In turn, in the 1990s and 2000s, larger numbers of homeless people began to appear in public spaces. Homeless people came to live side by side with housed citizens, more constantly and more closely, and this created regulatory ruptures in public spaces, which took the form of what I understand as the homeless–housed divide (Cloke, May, and Johnsen 2010; Gowan 2010). I will apply this cyclical understanding to two cycles of homelessness in postwar Japan: the “inner-city cycle” of homelessness, from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, and the “widespread cycle”, beginning in the 1990s.
This cyclical spatialisation of homelessness has stimulated state rescaling dynamics that produce new scales and spaces of regulation. In Japan, an earlier moment of rescaling started in the 1970s, moulding new spaces of homeless regulation in bottom-up ways by deploying locational means of assistance and policing. A newer phase of rescaling began in the 2000s, when the Japanese state provided a national framework for localised regulation and managed rampant interscalar tensions in territorial poverty regulation through selective power devolution to municipalities. There are therefore also two rounds of rescaling in postwar Japan—one starting in the 1970s, which I understand as a haphazard, “group-up round” of rescaling, and another beginning in the 2000s, which I conceive as a more concerted “picking-off round” of rescaling.
My geographically focused and socially entangled fieldwork reveals hidden connections between these cycles of homelessness and rounds of rescaling. The ruptures that homelessness creates in urban society have repeatedly incited Japan’s multiscalar experiments with rescaled/rescaling homeless regulation. Furthermore, these ruptures have been addressed not just by regulating actors but also by homeless people and their supporters. Homeless people’s own practices have complicated all of these processes because homeless people are not unspoken “shadows” of regulation but people who can actively reconstitute Japan’s “well-regulated” urban landscape for living and joy. Activists and volunteers also have formed their own spaces and cycles of urban social movements around—and increasingly beyond—inner-city areas, unlocking public spaces and programmes and producing new urban commons such as liveable shelters, tasty food, reliable information, homeless–housed solidarities, and accessible political opportunities, which may help homeless people’s economic/sociocultural/political life.
In this book, I make an extensive effort to develop robust urban narratives by carefully attending to these multiple aspects of Japanese homelessness. This introductory chapter will mainly embark on substantial theoretical and methodological discussions. I begin by outlining some of the key works in geography that directly address homelessness, detailing a series of urban geography discussions about the utility of political economy concepts for homelessness. My hope is that examination of these debates can steer diverse readers, including those who do not share similar backgrounds, towards the theoretical and methodological core of this book.
Urban Political Economy: For Homelessness?
By using US contexts and highlighting urban policy in New York City, Neil Smith (1996) presented the grand idea of revanchist urbanism, which contributed much to the regulationist explanation of homelessness. His primary task was to produce an anatomy of gentrification, which transforms areas of affordable housing into areas of (conspicuous) consumption for the rich. In this discussion, Smith found homelessness to be an avenue for developing a new paradigm of urban political economy. The gentrification-driven destruction of affordable housing aggravated the housing crisis and relegated many to homelessness. In public spaces, the resulting growth of homelessness dialectally exhibited what Smith (1996, p. 3) calls a “class struggle on Avenue B”, in which homeless people and their supporters aggressively challenged gentrification. Smith argues that these dialectical tensions are what finally drove New York City to its notoriously harsh policing of homeless people.
Building on Smith’s work, Don Mitchell (1997, 2003) presents a more analytic view of homeless regulation under the banner of the “annihilation of space by law”, a play on words from Marx. Mitchell found that the local authorities had a key legislative lever to advance antihomeless policing and to make cities “attractive to both footloose capital and to the footloose middle and upper classes” (Mitchell 1997, p. 305). The utility of this thread of urban political economy is implied in scholarly work emerging from another country in North America, Canada (Blomley 2009).
Subsequent geographical works eloquently questioned what they regarded as the overt simplicity lurking in these neo-Marxist formulations. According to Geoffrey DeVerteuil and his coauthors, US cities are characterised by homeless people’s own efforts to survive. The omission of this aspect by Smith and by Mitchell represents a pitfall in urban political economy perspectives, which characterises the “dominant perspective on homelessness since the 1990s” that ended up in a “singularly punitive framework that downplays, if not wholly ignores, homeless agency” (DeVerteuil, Marr, and Snow 2009, p. 636; see also, DeVerteuil, May, and von Mahs 2009). DeVerteuil (2006, p. 118) develops a similar argument on homeless shelters, another space of homelessness marked by “contradictory tendencies and motivations”. Homeless shelters internalise a spectrum of regulatory inconsistency, even in Los Angeles, where regulation is harsh, which makes these shelters into potential sites for homeless people’s purposive practices.
An even more direct criticism of the Smith–Mitchell line of argument appears in the work of Paul Cloke, Jon May, and Sarah Johnsen (2010). These geographers use the British case of homelessness—its “messy middle grounds” (p. 11)—as an antidote to the “theory-led neo-Marxist critiques” (p. 36). They enumerate the divisions suffered by homeless people and volunteers: the “faith/non-faith divide” (p. 46), the “boundaries between the public and private sector” (p. 25), and the divide “between homeless people and members of the housed public” (p. 67). This enumeration is followed by extensive arguments about the ways in which these divides can be healed. Voluntary actors nurture the “ethical impulses of love, joy, peace, charity, equality” (p. 46), which can overcome such divides. Also, the “maps of the homeless city drawn up by homeless people themselves” (p. 62)—homeless people’s own sensemaking about the spatial distribution of useful/harmful sites in city space—enable homeless people to overcome, though within certain limits, “the hegemonic meanings and mappings of the city” (p. 85).
In short, volunteers (and, to a certain point, homeless people) can co-construct with regulators the local outcome of what Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (2002) call rollout neoliberalism (Cloke, May, and Johnsen 2010, pp. 35–36). They see this possibility as a chance to push back the domain of revanchism, and its theorisation by neo-Marxist scholars, to the North American continent. This stance is reasonable because “the response to this crisis in Britain was more complex [than in the United States]” (p. 30).
All in all, DeVerteuil and his coauthors relativised the urban political economy of Smith and Mitchell from within US cities, while Cloke and his colleagues drew a strong line between Britain and the United States. These geographers established a key debate over political-economic modes of theorisation on homelessness and its urban politics. My own position is that the Smith–Mitchell line of argument—when used as a theory for homelessness—is not immune to criticisms. However, I also argue that the punitive revanchist critiques still offer possibilities for next rounds of critical homeless studies.
Why did the neo-Marxist approach—to homelessness, to regulation, to counterpolitics—provoke such critiques? One reason may be the existing criticism that the approach is too strongly focused on punitive forms of urban regulation and is separated from broader interscalar contexts and in-scale consequences that are not logically or empirically punitive. Critics of Smith and/or Mitchell subscribe to this view, seemingly identifying Marxian streaks in homeless studies with the Smithian theory of urban revanchism (DeVerteuil 2006; DeVerteuil, May, and von Mahs 2009; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick 2010).
My view is that the main components of the Smith–Mitchell line of argument are not entirely free from this criticism. I note, however, that the two authors signalled ways to overcome this criticism when they explored wider scalar contexts of urban regulation or struggle—i.e., when Smith (1993) examined a scale jumping possibility for urban prohomeless politics and when Mitchell (2003) analysed the nested structure of the US court system and the extent to which this legal structure can penetrate actual city space. I develop these scale-sensitive arguments of Smith and Mitchell with regard to homelessness by reconnecting them to more recent conceptual vocabularies that can systematically unpack the scaled/scaling construction of urban regulation.
Furthermore, this book’s approach can address a tricky ambiguity that I find in urban political economy: its lack of clarity about the levels of methodological abstraction in political-economic exploration. Which levels of abstraction should the researcher use, and how are his/her multiple anchors in the abstract–concrete continuum constructed into a research project when the main focus of the study is placed on “urban affairs”? As Cloke, May, and Johnsen (2010) implied in their study of British homelessness, this obscurity of urban political economy in terms of the level(s) of methodological abstraction may foster its alleged appearance of unboundedly ballooning its “applicable” geographies without fetters, beyond the birthplace of political economy concepts (see also Robinson 2006).
However, even this second line of criticism may not hinder urban political economists in engaging with difference/diversity/alterity. A helpful thread of argument for this purpose lies in rescaling theory, which nurtures acute methodological sensitivity to differentiated layers in the abstract–concrete spectrum (Brenner 2004a). I will revive some such layers in abstract–concrete (dis)continuums, not just to tweak existing concepts but also to “sink” political economy theory into the most concrete aspects of the urban lifeworld. This sinking and entrenching of political economy theory within the concrete urban entails a vast use of my ethnographic experience as an ontological springboard for a topical/geographical extension of urban political economy, which will register (not efface) a radical incommensurability of the ethnographer “in the field” (for this methodological discussion, see Chapter 2).
It is hoped that this research programme, drawing upon Euro-American geographical debates, can make theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to existing works in Japan. Geographers, in particular, have discussed municipal policy conditions of homelessness (Mizuuchi 2002), have applied Euro-American geographical conceptions (including those of Neil Smith and Don Mitchell) to Japanese homelessness (Kiener and Mizuuchi 2018), and have analysed local histories of day labourers for homelessness research (Haraguchi 2010). By building a broad interpretational framework based on the state rescaling concept and using it to construct robust urban narratives, this book may help to make these and other discussions about Japan more theoretically intelligible, internationally situated, and empirically multifaceted.2
I will begin my efforts to centre the book’s various arguments on the concept of state rescaling. A further exploration of this concept is beneficial at the outset, for it is a main organising pillar of different research agendas in the book.
State Rescaling: The Central Concept of this Book
According to Neil Brenner’s New State Spaces (2004a), national states that historically entered the era of Atlantic Fordism have undergone, since the late 1970s, the major process of what he understands as state rescaling.3 For Brenner, state rescaling is about the spatial scalar restructuring of state power that destabilises “the primacy of the national scale of political-economic life”. In this process, “we are witnessing … a wide-ranging recalibration of scalar hierarchies and interscalar relations throughout state apparatus as a whole, at once on supranational, national, regional, and urban scales” (pp. 3–4, original emphasis).
If one focuses on phenomena and processes within national boundaries, state rescaling has created waves of devolutionary politics that delegated various regulatory tasks from national to subnational regulatory units. This development is at once a response to and a catalyst for the intensification of globalisation and global city formation, which posed serious threats to the spatial unity of national states. This devolutionary politics of rescaling did not completely undo national states’ responsibilities for their territorial space. National states withstood the “erosion, withering, or demise” (p. 4) even amid the intensification of global city formation.
And yet Brenner thinks that the crisis-induced, crisis-prone, experimental character of state rescaling destabilises our inclinations to “ontologically prejudge” what the state is. So the story is not a return to national states as we know them. The argument can be best depicted as the collapse of “spatial Keynesianism”, which can be defined as a geographical mode of redistribution policy that offset the uneven development of capitalist urbanisation until the 1970s, and its ongoing replacement by “metropolitanized” forms of urban planning (pp. 172–256). Under rescaling, locality-sensitive modes of policymaking and their attraction of local–global networks grew across city regions and saturated national territorial space, making spatial Keynesianism obsolete. The driver of capitalist urbanisation now came largely from fluid, spontaneous, creative socioeconomic relationships in urban society and markets that overwhelmed the fixed, inflexible parameters of Keynesian policymakers (pp. 114–171). As such, state rescaling meant fundamental realignments in the state’s scalar organisation, which remoulded relations between the spatial scalar categories underpinning the capitalist geopolitical economy, but without undoing national states as organisational scaffoldings of urban restructuring.
Brenner (2004a) situates this state rescaling theory against the “end of the nation state” debates (e.g., Ohmae 1995). Instead of being disempowered, national states can reassemble new state capacity from diverse globalisation experiences. This state capacity is understood to redefine state space in more porous, flexible, resilient terms so that national states can collaboratively shape globalisation, with multiple socioeconomic forces residing at different spatial scales. This concept is linked to contemporary arguments about the political economy of scale and multiscale governance (e.g., Jessop 2002; Peck 2002; Smith 1993; Swyngedouw 1997), while Brenner (2004a, p. 75) bases his thesis fundamentally on Henri Lefebvre as a state and urban theorist. This dual reference to Lefebvre allows Brenner to stay deeply engaged with the urban spatialities of state rescaling. As such, his theory of rescaling has provided a broad, postdisciplinary interface through which urbanists can interpret forms and scales of urbanisation with reference to the new geographies of political economy, the de-/re-territorialisation of capital, and the ongoing restructuring of state space.
To use this theory, I will consistently subscribe to what Jamie Peck (2002, p. 357) has discussed as the “scale manager” role of national states, considering this role to be a key platform for national states when these states reconstruct state capacity amid rescaling dynamics. Peck’s suggestion is that national states can discursively and institutionally rearticulate and rephrase the territorial layers of different spatial scales and their interscalar tensions so that national states can perform the strategic role of coordinating rescaling dynamics. I shall interpret this scale manager role, a form of state capacity concomitant with and generative of rescaling, by connecting it to Bob Jessop’s (1982, pp. 123–124; 1990, pp. 8, 268) conception of the unity of the state. If, as Jessop suggests, a certain level of substantive actual unity (compared to formal legal unity) is always required to sustain the state, the national state’s scale-managing role can be understood as functional to the sustaining and rebalancing of this unity under the dynamics of rescaling.
How then can we explain the emergence of this new state capacity in different national regimes? For one thing, there are the famous “path-dependent” mechanisms. These mechanisms can guide the process of rescaling within the relative continuity of regulatory elements (formal and informal). This guiding effect of relative regulatory fixities should persist, to a certain degree, maintaining the territorial form of multiscalar coherence and its substantial unity even in the age of intensive globalisation and rescaling, when disruptions become “normal”. In this light, the Japanese pathways of state rescaling should provide interesting cases for theory. In addition, the uneven emergence of the state’s scale-managing role can also be explained more conceptually with reference to the multiple theoretical terrains of rescaling. As Peck (2002, p. 331) argues, there are “different forms of rescaling”. These include “the hollowing out of the national state, the emergence of localized economies of association, the rescaling of labor organization and regulation, the globalization of economic flows, the formation of territorialized production complexes, the reorganization of governance hierarchies, or the reanimation of agglomeration economies”.
I understand that these different theoretical realms create comparable but uneven geographies of state rescaling in different national regimes. In addition to Peck’s list of “different forms of rescaling”, I shall argue that national welfare regimes and their spatial scalar “workfarist” restructuring, which can take place in the face of new forms of poverty (Peck 2001a, 2002), become a fruitful theoretical arena for rescaling studies. Urban poverty can place significant tension on the interscalar unities of national welfare statism (understood as a territorial rule regime for welfare delivery) in different countries. New regulatory rules, norms, codes, and practices—which emerge in response to new forms of poverty and cohere around subnational scales—destabilise the inherited interscalar balance of national welfare statism, making for the ground-up dynamics of rescaling. This bottom-up drive can push national states to take on the scale management role so that an acceptable level of state space unity can be reconstructed, or at least reperceived, amid the experiences of rescaling that can be highly disruptive to the substantive/actual unity of state space.
Recent work on rescaling has rightly addressed the diverse spaces and processes of state rescaling within the Euro-American world (Boudreau et al. 2007; MacKinnon and Show 2010; MacLeavy and Harrison 2010; Ward and Jonas 2004) and beyond (Hayashi 2013a; Li, Xu, and Yeh 2014; Lim 2017; Park 2013; Sonn 2010; Tsukamoto 2012; Wu 2016; Zhang and He 2021). At the same time, the need now emerges to gauge the extent to which the general—even “strong”—mode of theorisation in the earlier regulationist literature can remain the basis for contemporary rescaling studies. My choice of homelessness for this clarification is sound. Due to their profoundly marginal position vis-à-vis the territorial homogeneity and inclusive hegemony envisioned by spatial Keynesianism, urban poverty and homelessness can powerfully delineate the emergent contours of rescaling dynamics and advance rescaling studies theoretically.
Chapter 3 in particular will closely examine the discussions of continental regulationist thinkers such as Michel Aglietta and Robert Boyer so that background arguments and theoretical scaffoldings supportive of the concept of state rescaling, including “mode of regulation” and “accumulation regime”, can be dovetailed into my research agendas. However, this introductory chapter focuses on more recent strands of regulation theory—the spatialised paradigms.
