Suburban fortunes : urban policies, planning and suburban transformation in Tokyo metropolis

Over recent decades, Tokyo’s suburban territory has experienced new path-dependent, multifaceted restructuring in the context of stagnation and/or decline, which has been materialised by interactions among urban policies, economic restructuring and socio-demographic transformation. In this process, Tokyo’s suburban territory has been increasingly isolated in political and administrative, economic and socio-demographic terms, incorporating the multi-dimensional divergence of outer suburban municipalities. Consequently, municipal governments and other local actors have been left to tackle suburban shrinkage alone under the retreat of upper-level governmental entities and global economic actors. Exploring underlying mechanisms, this research reveals that the multi-dimensional suburban isolation has been created by the metropolitan-wide dynamics of inter-governmental, inter-sectoral and inter-actor dynamics. It also reveals that the multi-dimensional outer suburban divergence has been created by local-wide differentiations of these metropolitan-wide dynamics, resulting in the difficulty of inter-municipal collaboration especially for industrial and commercial promotion. Consequently, Tokyo’s suburban territory has been degenerating from ‘post-suburban’ spaces to balkanised spaces with less diverse activities. Especially, its economy has been increasingly localised with weakened linkages to external territories including global economic circuits. Now, integrated suburban economic development is crucial for the future suburban sustainability and regeneration of Tokyo Metropolis. In this vein, this research proposes a new approach of integrated urban-suburban economic development that ensures multi-dimensional urban-suburban linkages to create new platforms for collaborations among different actors for suburban economic development. This approach can be established by creating new modes of inter-governmental, inter-sectoral and inter-actor dynamics. Through this approach, Tokyo’s suburban territory would be re-positioned within vertically and horizontally integrated economic spaces under inter-governmental and intra-governmental integrations. Then, on the basis of Tokyo’s empirical evidences, this research concludes the importance of evolutionary perspective-based investigations into active and latent dynamics within various suburban transformations worldwide, as well as proposes policy and planning implications for other large metropolises.