The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Architectural Reconstruction by The Routledge Companion

Author:The Routledge Companion ...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2024-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

13.4.1 Deindustrialisation and hollowing out of the city centre

After the acute economic growth in the 1960s, several factors hollowed the historic city centres. Instead, the suburbs along the highways and bypaths flourished with car-sized broad parking areas and large-sized signboards enough to be recognised by moving eyes at high speed. A Japanese sociologist, Arata Masafumi, attributes the decline of shopping districts and traditional city centres to the following factors:

Modern nuclear families: increasing living standards relocated the children from the shopping districts of local cities to the metropolis. Their family and landowners left in the districts are reluctant to lease their familiar space to another manager out of their family and tend to retain higher rentals. As a result, we have seen a row of closed shutters.

Deregulation on the large-sized stores of national chains: Japanese competition policy, initially inclined toward antimonopoly, introduced globalist or neoliberalist policies in the 1990s: for example, the Act on the Measures by Large-Scale Retail Stores for Preservation of Living Environment in 1998, mentioned above. Even though the penetrations of foreign chains are unsuccessful, national giant chains came to flourish.

Lack of investments in city centres by Japanese fiscal investment and loan programmes: they lost their investments because of the slump in private sectors and the public opinion against inefficient public investments in dams, railroads, or highways in rural areas. They invested instead in connecting roads among cities, which impressed their efficacy for the majority and skipped a time to reach a consensus among much numbers of stakeholders.

Deindustrialisation after the trade conflicts in the 1980s: Japanese production facilities were transferred abroad initially to the competitive developed countries (e.g. the United States in the 1980s) and then to developing countries (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan, and Mainland China) with lower personnel expenses. This movement decreased employment in middle-sized Japanese industrial cities, other than headquarters functions in Tokyo and greater cities. Moreover, national chain stores diverted the vacant broader lots, typically a site of a former factory, along the national highroads connecting the cities to megastores.21

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