Revitalizing Japan: Architecture, Urbanization, and Degrowth

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book features innovative and productive responses, in the form of architectural design and thinking, to the shift in Japans social condition under demographic changes that are evident in regional cities. These responses also demonstrate the new wave of architectural practice in Japan, focused on the challenges of degrowth.

The shrinking and aging of the population is exacerbating the social decline in the regional cities of Japan. While excluded from the market-driven metropolitan areas, architects of the young generation are beginning to build ways of revitalizing regional cities through innovative design or new ways of practicing. This book features works by seven named or unnamed younger architects in Japan that preempt architectural responses to the post-growth condition, a gripping essay by community designer Ryo Yamazaki, and a captivating photo documentation by Kenta Hasegawa. Keynote essay by Toyo Ito.

Author Bio

MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He served as the dean of the faculty of design between 2008 and 2019. An architect and educator, hiswork focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics. Mostafavi is the author and editor of many books, including Ecological Urbanism(co-edited 2010 and translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); In the Life of Cities(2012); Architecture is Life(2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); Portman's America & Other Speculations (2017); Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017); and Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World (2023). KAYOKO OTA is an architectural curator and editor. Before joining the Japan Research Initiative at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she curated a series of the CCA c/o Tokyo programs for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and was commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her editorial work includes Project Japan: Metabolism Talks... (2011).