This book explores, situates, and discusses the contours of urban inclusivity amidst and beyond the well-researched neoliberal turn in urban governance. While it is generally accepted that urban social issues are susceptible to global woes, these perceptions draw only limited attention to the plurality of interventions that cities undertake-or facilitate-in managing their social turfs. By addressing the apparent lack of theorizations on everyday heterogeneities in urban place-making, especially in non-Western contexts, this book highlights the role of inclusionary practices by different stakeholders as an explicit pattern of urbanization. It does so by focusing on old urban centralities that have an outspoken history in experimenting with inclusivity.

The book is guided by two interrelated questions: (1) What particular urban settings promote inclusionary features in contrast to the conspicuous exclusionary mechanisms of market-led urbanization, and (2) how dowe conceptualize these features in dialogue with concurrent urban theories that continue to grapple with the structural properties of exclusionary urbanization under the auspices of the neoliberal turn and gentrification? To answer these questions, the chapters provide a rich empirical account of inclusionary initiatives by the city governments, the voluntary organization sector, and informal communities, each revealing a unique new set of spatial approaches to urban inclusivity. The book concludes with the political implications of envisioning urban inclusivity as a negotiatory moment between key stakeholder interests in a capitalist society.

Primarily intended for researchers and graduate students in the fields of urban geography, sociology, migration, and welfare studies, the book is also a valuable source for policymakers and practitioners in the fields of social planning and civil society at large.

Autorentext

Toshio Mizuuchi is now an emeritus professor at Osaka Metropolitan City University, where he received his D.Litt. in geography in 2000. He is one of the leading Japanese social geographers and has contributed extensively to international geography through numerous publications on research topics such as critical socio-political urban development, changes in the socio-spatial structure of cities, and studies of homelessness in advanced city-regions of East Asia. Previously, he has held editing positions at the Japanese Journal of Human Geography and City, Culture and Society. Geerhardt Kornatowski is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Global Society, Kyushu University. His research focuses on the spatial manifestation of inequality and non-governmental means of welfare delivery in city-regions of East Asia. His research projects include the spatial politics and practices of inner-city service hubs amidst the processes of urban restructuring and tolerant governance approaches to informal communities. He has published extensively on voluntary care services for the homeless in Hong Kong and migrant workers in Singapore. His recent research activities focus on solidarity networks for foreign workers in Fukuoka City's extended city-region.

Taku Fukumoto is an associate professor in the Department of Japanese Studies, Nanzan University. He received his Ph.D. in geography at the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, in 2018. His expertise includes urban social geography, in particular the historical transition of segregation in Japanese cities and the socio-economic analyses of ethnic enclaves. His recent works focus on the cultural dynamics of Koreatown in Osaka as a part of the recent Korean popular culture wave (Hallyu), as well as local labor and housing conditions of newly arrived immigrants from South America in the Tokai region of Japan. He has recently published his book on Ethnic Vitality in Osaka (in Japanese) from Kyoto University Press.