The twenty-first century is a time of intensified globalization and is, moreover, the age of the city. Cities are becoming more and more connected as urban ideas and strategies travel across borders. Globally, urban redevelopment/regeneration is increasingly consistent with city making, which is a complex process involving state initiatives, government intervention, public subsidy and the private sector. This book explores Tokyo, which showcases not only the urban experience of Japan but also of a global city. While the book is anchored in Tokyo, it concerns Japanās intentions and motivations for the shaping of Tokyo as a global city, and their broader implications for the survival of the nation-state and its authentic identity. Saskia Sassen (2008, 2006, 1996), who invented the term āglobal cityā, notes that the nation-state has made the current age of globalization and its dynamics possible. Thus, it can be said that the making of global cities is a national scheme promoting selected cities to engage with global political and economic networks in order to achieve national and international competitiveness in global markets.
Sassen (2019, 2007) further defines the global city as a strategic national economic and political site for the management of global economic operations. Nevertheless, the global city also requires a national urban strategy. The national government provides incentives and techniques to assist urban redevelopment activities in cities on the macro level, while precipitating competition between urban districts to achieve global-city status on the micro level. The global city is a national strategic urban place and an emblem of the nation-state. The global, the national and the urban are thus not mutually exclusive. Meanwhile, the concept of the global city has mainly been developed around economic processes in transnational systems. The making of global cities tends to be accompanied by privatization and deregulation reform of the national economy , including a call for private-sector engagement in the form of publicāprivate partnerships. While the existing global city literature has made significant contributions to our understanding of globalization and transnationalism, and the growing interdependence between nation-states and cities, it tends to be limited to global economies and markets. On the one hand it questions the process of globalization that is magnifying the role of speculative capital; but on the other hand, it lacks insight into the interactions between the speculative mechanisms of globalization and the urban built environment , or the consequences on the ground for urban places in cities. There is almost no literature investigating the physical and spatial manifestation of the global city, particularly as it relates to the governance of urban heritage, the construction of urban places and their authenticity.
Against this background, this book draws attention to heritage-led urban regeneration praxis in Tokyo. Increased globalization and prevalent intercontinental cultural programmes such as UNESCO World Heritage and the ācreative cityā concept officially promote the use of heritage as a driver for the quality of place, place identity and uniqueness in urban regeneration. Recent global heritage discourses such as the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (2011) and the ICOMOS Valletta Principles for the Safeguarding and Management of Historic Cities, Towns and Urban Areas (2011) call for an integral and holistic approach to heritage conservation and urban development.1 These international heritage policy documents have evolved from the 1976 UNESCO Nairobi Recommendation and the 1987 ICOMOS Washington Charter . Meanwhile, the concept of historic urban landscape has developed from the Vienna Memorandum (UNESCO), the Declaration on the Conservation of Historic Urban Landscape (UNESCO) and the Xiāan Declaration on the Conservation of the Setting of Heritage Structures, Sites, and Areas (ICOMOS ).2 This latest approach advocates breaking down the barriers between historic and modern as well as between World Heritage and non-World Heritage that are embedded in the existing national and international system (Bandarin 2015).3 By placing heritage conservation at the centre of urban processes, these doctrinal texts pave the way for the field of heritage to intersect with broader and more complex urban issues, playing a positive role in attracting capital and investment and acting for urban identity (Song 2017). Surprisingly, these supra-national heritage policies and guidelines have taken over governance not only of UNESCO World Heritage Sites but equally of non-World Heritage properties on the urban heritage praxis ground, both calling for and challenging the notion of authenticity in the heritage context. In this way, the practice of heritage-led urban regeneration is introducing a combination of global urban and cultural heritage strategies into the space of placemaking. Heritage-led urban regeneration links heritage conservation and urban redevelopment, connecting finance, conservation and economic growth. It has been widely put into practice in the West, in particular across Europe, but is unfamiliar outside the West in such countries as Japan .
Zukin (2009) asserts that global cities seek to overcome the pressure of the significant competition they face by creating their own āauthentic cultural identitiesā. Their key players posit that authentic cultural identities increase differences between cities as well as nations, thus competition between global cities raises the expectation of authenticity. In this context, urban redevelopment comes into play, using heritage conservation to achieve authenticity for urban places. It transforms heritage into an āapparatusā (Harrison 2013)4 or a ādifferencing machineā (Bennett 2006)5 for guaranteeing the authenticity not only of nation-states and cities but also of urban places. In other words, heritage conservation ventures out to large-scale urban scenes at the centre of global city making. Given these concerns, heritage-led urban regeneration is a channel where the global, the national and the urban meet and interact.
Urban redevelopment is also a complex process in itself, requiring multi-level institutions and actors as well as lengthy discussion and negotiation. In the context of global city making, it is the nexus of the political economic power of spatialization and globalization. In this nexus, the strategic alliance between public and private sectors comes to the fore, and plays a central role in financing in the form of publicāprivate partnerships. The force of economic globalization and the power of publicāprivate partnerships together select, frame and conserve heritage properties by managing urban transformation, positioning selected heritage properties prominently and spotlighting the original physical fabric to attain urban distinctiveness in cities. Heritage thus reconfigures urban places and (re)constructs their authenticity in heritage-led urban regeneration. In fact, heritage authenticity expands into a political-economy framework of urban strategies to become the authenticity of urban places.
This book reveals the cultural and micro politics of placemaking in contemporary Tokyo with a particular focus on decision-making processes in heritage-led urban regeneration. It critically investigates the redevelopment projects involved with urban heritage conservation that have taken place in the central business districts of Tokyo. As a global city, Tokyo provides a vantage point for the analysis of heritage-led urban regeneration, the political economy of spatialization and their urban manifestation . In a break with the typical approach of the globalization and global city literature, it depicts the untold aspects of the making of a global city through the prism of multidisciplinary heritage and urban studies. In this book, I argue that despite conservation efforts, the process of heritage-led urban regeneration ironically turns authenticity (multiple authenticities) into a singular entity (a single authenticity). This leads to the homogenization of cities and their urban places, a process that tends to reduce the visibility of smaller and unique urban elements as they become absorbed into a larger framework of urban strategies. In this way, political economic institutions and actors collectively act as place-makers choosing and monopolizing authenticity for urban places, and this in turn becomes urban vision and narrativeāthe weaponization of authenticity. Smith (2002) and Zukin (2011) point out that urban scholars have not clarified how an urban place and an authentic sense of place are constructed but have often left these ideas vague or over-conceptualized. Nor have heritage scholars spelled them out. In responding to this gap, the book takes a systematic and empirical approach to envision what constitutes authenticity and how the authenticity of urban places is shaped in a competitive urban st...