Tetsuo Kidokoro

Urban Regeneration and the Shift of Planning Approaches: The Case of Japanese Regional Cities

Japan’s population started to decrease in 2005. Large cities with populations exceeding 1 million people are forecasted to continue seeing population increases until 2015, while the populations of small to medium-sized cities have already started to decline. Thus, the competition for growth among small to medium-sized cities is particularly harsh. Another demographic issue to consider is aging. Japan is the world’s fastest aging society and it is predicted that nearly one-third of the total population will be over 65-years old in 2030. It is surely a big challenge to find ways to maintain social vitality in an aging society. Rural areas surrounding regional cities are aging much more quickly than large metropolitan areas such as Tokyo. Thus, regional cities that serve as central cities of fast aging rural areas play important roles as driving forces of regional economic development.

E-Government practice: what one country could learn from other

E-government changed the way government thinks and functions. All over the world, government tried to get the benefits of e-government. Some of the efforts were successful and some failed. The paper made a comparative study between policy and practice of e-government in Bangladesh and India. The paper identified the causes of success in India and failure in Bangladesh. At the end, suggestion has been provided, so that Bangladesh could learn from the experience of India.

New Directions in Urban Regeneration and the Governance of City Regions

Cities should be recognized as social, economic as well as environmental systems formed through networks of cities, towns and villages rather than as isolated entities. Conceptualized as such, they are often called city regions. Central cities of city regions, which we call regional cities, play a decisive role in regional as well as national development. In an age of globalization, competition among such city regions is one of the major driving forces in their on-going transformation. Globalization may strengthen the sustainability of some city regions through enlarging their economic bases, or may weaken their sustainability through the loss of industrial competitiveness or loss of geopolitical importance. Indeed, regional cities are now at a crossroads of whether they decline or are regenerated under the impacts of globalization.

Towards Sustainable Regeneration of City Regions

As the competition among city regions becomes increasingly harsh in the age of globalization, regional cities have increasingly be requested to play key roles as driving forces of city regions. Sustainable urban regeneration is understood as the regeneration of the attractiveness of cities in a sustainable manner in response to an ever-changing external world. How can this conceptual meaning of sustainable urban regeneration be interpreted in spatial terms? Fig. 16-1 illustrates the relationships between urbanization and the directions of urban spatial development. In the age of urbanization and motorization, selective redevelopment of city center areas and suburban development are facilitated at the same time and sprawl type of spatial development occurs (suburbanization stage). Generally, cities in the developing world are now at this stage of urban development. On the other hand, in the cities where urbanization has already reached a matured stage as observed in most developed countries, investment in extended urban areas becomes a mainstream trend as evidenced in the emergence of edge cities, and investment in old city center areas decreases significantly, in particular, in the old industrial areas. This stage of urban development can be called as the exsurbanization stage.

Open Data Reuse, Recycling and Sharing as Potential Solution to Data and Information Resource Inadequacies.

This paper explores the reuse, recycling and sharing of open data (OD) as a potential solution to bridge gaps in existing baseline data and information in areas with scarce data resources. It focuses on open data generated during disasters, and analyses how these voluminous ‘free disaster data,’ such as social media posts, images, damage assessment reports, etc., could be reused and recycled to serve purposes other than emergency response and relief. To illustrate this, the paper makes use of a previous research that analysed how the open data of Super Typhoon Haiyan, the hydrometeorological disaster which affected several nations, and gained both local and global attention, could be reused and recycled as inputs for development planning, especially in post-disaster recovery and rehabilitation, and pre-disaster mitigation and prevention planning.

Creation of Collaborative Networks at the City-Regional Level: Two Innovative Cases in Japan

City regions are regarded as the networks of cities, towns, and villages that are closely linked to each other. Spatially, city regions can be understood as being composed of three dimensions: an urban service network, eco-cultural network, and regional innovation network. The polycentric network structure of city-regional space proposes an interactive functional relationship in which cities, towns, and villages provide their own unique services for each other. Against such a background, this chapter aims to firstly discuss the spatial concept of sustainable city regions, secondly illustrate the evolution of collaborative networks in polycentric city regions through examination of two Japanese cases, and finally address the importance of frame making, setting up a forum, and forming a strong-tie community and weak-tie network in order to establish effective polycentric city-regional governance.

Analysis of Indian urban policies to identify their potential of achieving inclusive urban growth

India’s approach to development has always been a combination of ‘pro-poor growth’ strategies. In spite of that, majority urban population has remained deprived from basic necessity of human life. In an effort to overhaul this stagnation, the country has consciously shifted its development ideology to inclusive growth in 11th Five-Year Plan 2007. Although the plan did not define inclusive growth, but initiates a debate on the significance of inclusive growth with earlier policy approaches. Initiating a policy argument, this paper records an overview of Indian policy approaches up to year 2014 and analyses its possibilities of achieving inclusive urban growth.

FORMATION OF SOCIAL ECOSYSTEM SPACE OF INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS IN THE CASE OF DHARAVI IN MUMBAI, INDIA

Cities are increasingly informalizing in the world. In particular, the existence of informal settlements including slum areas is the prevailing phenomenon in the cities in developing countries. These informal settlements are often regarded as problematic areas because they lack basic public services and considered as the areas to be redeveloped by the city authorities. Yet, they are, at the same time, attractive places due to their human scale nature and sense of community. This paper aims at exploring the social ecosystems space of Dharavi in Mumbai, India, one of the largest informal settlements in Asia as one case studies towards the new directions of planning which would be based on local rules developed through people’s impromptu as well as incremental efforts for developing communities in informal settlements.

Community-based Approach for Improving Vulnerable Urban Space

According to the statistics of UNHABITAT, about one billion people, one-third of the world’s 3.2-billion urban population, live in substandard informal settlements as of 2005, and this population is increasing by 2.2% annually (Fig. 1-1). The improvement of urban slum areas is one of the critical issues in the 21st century. As much as 40% of the population are estimated to live in substandard informal settlements in Manila. Even in Bangkok, which has achieved remarkable economic growth, the resident population in slum areas is estimated to exceed one million, and the number has not decreased.

ICT for Poverty Alleviation: A Study on Bangladesh

Bangladesh is now one of the world leaders in using telecommunication (mainly phone) for poverty alleviation. Village Pay Phone (VPP) Program - an NGO led initiative has been hailed as one of the first program to use telephone for poverty alleviation (2003). The success of this program led to low-income entrepreneur both in rural and urban areas of Bangladesh to take similar kind of initiative. Studies on VPP program show it can reduce poverty in rural areas. This paper focuses on the performance of the enterprises, which are not in VPP program. We conclude that these initiatives are equally effective in alleviating poverty