Urban Renaissance as Intensification: Building Regulation and the Rescaling of Place Governance in Tokyo’s High-rise Manshon Boom

Abstract

During the past decade, Tokyo has seen a massive building boom, despite a prolonged economic slump since 1990. Since the 1980s, central government has enacted a steady stream of building code changes that allow much larger buildings. This paper argues that the recent wave of private investment in high-rise intensification has been instigated by these changes to building regulations, so that the form of urban restructuring and the distribution of winners and losers in the process are shaped by the central state, a reverse of the previous trend of decentralisation of planning powers. This restructuring of central/ local government relations can be understood as a creative rescaling of governance power that disrupted established democratic institutional frameworks of decision-making and conflict resolution. This study highlights both the centrality of land assets in Japan’s developmental capitalism and the continuing importance of the distinctive institutional legacies of the developmental state in structuring Japanese urban governance.