“Matjaz Ursic and Heide Imai’s book plunges deep into the fabric of everyday neighbourhood life in the world’s biggest city. Turning a sceptical eye on the glittering projects of large‐scale urban development, chasing an elusive global creative class, they show how getting a feel for the intricate texture of the city’s soft infrastructure is the only viable starting point for the long term, sustainable creative development of this twenty‐first century metropolis”. —Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy, University of South Australia
“Creativity in Tokyo provides a critical and grass‐roots view to Tokyo’s urban policies and planning, aimed to enhance city’s creative economies. Still today the largest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo is facing urban shrinkage. Exploring the global city at a turning point, Matjaz Ursic and Heide Imai make a strong case for small urban actors and ordinary neighbourhood places as vital elements for success, sustainability and renewal. Based on extensive fieldwork, the authors give new insights about soft cultural and socio‐spatial factors that any policy and plan for urban creativity should take seriously. They claim that Tokyo should use its maturity to build on experience, instead of copying urban redevelopment strategies from elsewhere. This advice applies to many cities and city‐regions in Asia, Europe and the Americas that face similar challenges. Creativity in Tokyo is carefully researched and sharply argued. It is highly recommended reading for urban scholars, students, planners and policy makers”. —Panu Lehtovuori, Professor of Planning Theory, Tampere University, Finland
“Since the dawn of the twenty‐first century, urban regeneration has been the subject of critical scrutiny due to the preference for the common practice of economically successful model application even at the expense of the context. This book is a timely response to this practice. It offers a theoretical framework and empirical data, comprehensively synthesised to establish the unique relationships between creativity and space, using Tokyo as the spatial‐laboratory ground, and argues that urban regeneration must balance these relationships.This book will be essential reading for all who seek to understand and strategically apply the spatial process of urban creativity”. —Apiradee Kasemsook, Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University
“Creativity in Tokyo is a fascinating study of neighborhood‐level transformations in urban life. Across a variety of case studies, we see how entrepreneurs, artists, and producers of culture have worked alongside local civic leaders to revitalize neighborhoods and navigate new forms of locality in an ever more globally‐oriented megacity. The successes (and sometime failures) of these projects offer a compelling perspective for thinking about the future of post‐growth urban life in Japan and beyond”. —Nathaniel M. Smith, Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies, The University of Arizona