This book examines Tokyo’s changes, current challenges, and future trends through a new kind of regional geography and serves as an important source of comprehensive information about the past, present, and future perspectives of Tokyo as a global city. Regional geography relies on two main approaches. The traditional one addresses each geographical element of a region individually and in depth, in a descriptive and static manner. The other focuses on a region’s specific phenomena and realities as a starting point and proceeds to identify the region’s constituent elements and their interactions, which it records and explains in a systematic and dynamic manner. The present volume, unlike its predecessors, relies on the dynamic approach and endeavors to offer a fresh view of Tokyo’s new and diverse geographical realities, analyzed in a holistic, systematic manner allowing identification of its specific features. The book covers a broad range of topics including landform variations and volcanic activity, biodiversity concerns, transportation management, waste management, population issues, religious functions, and urban tourism, all of which facilitate understanding of the unique characteristics of Tokyo. Extensive views from different fields of studies make the book a valuable reference to comprehend both the development of Tokyo into a global city and its sustainability.

This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

This book examines heritage-led regeneration and decision-making processes in Tokyo’s urban centres of Nihonbashi and Marunouchi. Detailing some of the city’s most prominent and recent redevelopment projects, Jiewon Song recognizes key institutions and actors; their collective actions as placemakers; and how they project the authenticity of urban places in planning processes. Song argues that heritage-led regeneration tends to monopolize authenticity by weakening the visibility of other cultural and historic qualities in urban places. Authenticity consequently turns into a singular entity leading to the homogenization of urban places. As cities increasingly seek authenticity in the urban age, nation-states initiate top-down processes to achieve such ends, interweaving nationalism and national narratives into placemaking practices. In this fashion, Song challenges existing scholarship on urban conservation, global cities and the notion of authenticity.

The world today is far less a global village than a “global city”, as global network of multidimensional urban spaces of congestion prominently forming – and also formed by – globalization. But the relevance of cities is nothing but new. They were essential for culture and civilization worldwide, they allowed a centralization of power and knowledge and they were crucial for the division of labor and for the organization of mass demand. Further, as places of intense and continuous interactions, cities are the locations par excellence for global history to take place. Thus, there is a need to study the history of cities in connection with the history of globalization from this perspective. This book is dedicated to contribute to the still underdeveloped but growing literature connecting the history of cities worldwide and their relation to global processes. The authors do so from various disciplinary backgrounds and by referring to different times and places. We visit ancient Alexandria, nineteenth century Zanzibar, and modern-day São Paolo, among others, and we view these cities not only in their globality, but also through their heritage, their economic relevance, their architecture, or financial flows connecting them. Further, the book also contains systematic considerations about “global city”, especially the general role of cities in development, cities in global history teaching, and cities' relationships to global commodity chains.

The book provides a comprehensive appraisal of the interplay between global structural adjustments and the changing role and configuration of Asia's world cities at the close of the twentieth century, with emphasis on the functional importance and complexity of world cities in the global and regional economies.

This photographic Tokyo travel guide explores the dynamic Japanese culture, art and architecture that make Tokyo a world-class city. It has been said that "every city has its high points, but Tokyo is all exclamation points!" The largest and most populous city in the world, Tokyo must be experienced in person to be understood truly. The next best thing? Tokyo Megacity--a visual and descriptive exploration of a city that combines old with new and traditional with trendy, like no other city in the world. This extraordinary book explores Tokyo through 250 revealing photographs by well-known photographer Ben Simmons and over 30 essays by famed author Donald Richie. Their love of the city, their sense of its history, and the deep respect and pure joy felt in being here, shine through on every page. Simmons and Richie show us how modern Tokyo evolved from a patchwork of villages that still exist today as distinct neighborhoods and districts to the modern, trendsetting metropolis renowned the world over--that combine to make Tokyo a unique and special place. Tokyo Megacity presents the districts of the city in the order that they originally developed, starting with the Imperial Palace, sliding down to the "Low City" along the Sumida River, soaring back up to the "Mid-City," and finally, climbing the hills to the newer districts of the "High City." The combination of Ben Simmons' photographs and Donald Richie's text capture, as never before, the tremendous diversity, vitality and sheer livability of the megacity that is Tokyo.

The newly revised Globalizing Cities Reader reflects how the geographies of theory have recently shifted away from the western vantage points from which much of the classic work in this field was developed. The expanded volume continues to make available many of the original and foundational works that underpin the research field, while expanding coverage to familiarize students with new theoretical and epistemological positions as well as emerging research foci and horizons. It contains 38 new chapters, including key writings on globalizing cities from leading thinkers such as John Friedmann, Michael Peter Smith, Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, Manuel Castells, Anthony King, Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy, and Fulong Wu. The new Reader reflects the fact that world and global city studies have evolved in exciting and wide-ranging ways, and the very notion of a distinct "global" class of cities has recently been called into question. The sections examine the foundations of the field and processes of urban restructuring and global city formation. A large number of new entries focus on the emerging urban worlds of Asia, Latin America and Africa, including Beijing, Bogota, Cairo, Cape Town, Delhi, Istanbul, Medellin, Mumbai, Phnom Penh, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai. The book also presents cases off the conventional map of global cities research, such as smaller cities and less known urban regions that are undergoing processes of globalization. The book is a key resource for students and scholars alike who seek an accessible compendium of the intellectual foundations of global urban studies as well as an overview of the emergent patterns of early 21st century urbanization and associated sociopolitical contestation around the world.

Global City Makers provides an in-depth account of the role of powerful economic actors in making and un-making global cities. Engaging critically and constructively with global urban studies from a relational economic geography perspective, the book outlines a renewed agenda for global cities research. Focusing on financial services, management consultancy, real estate, commodity trading and maritime industries, the detailed studies in this volume are located across the globe to incorporate major world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo as well as globalizing cities including Mexico City, Hamburg and Mumbai.

For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, Roppongi was an enormously popular nightclub district that stood out from the other pleasure quarters of Tokyo for its mix of international entertainment and people. It was where Japanese and foreigners went to meet and play. With the crash of Japan's bubble economy in the 1990s, however, the neighborhood declined, and it now has a reputation as perhaps Tokyo's most dangerous district—a hotbed of illegal narcotics, prostitution, and other crimes. Its concentration of “bad foreigners,” many from China, Russia and Eastern Europe, West Africa, and Southeast Asia is thought to be the source of the trouble. Roman Adrian Cybriwsky examines how Roppongi's nighttime economy is now under siege by both heavy-handed police action and the conservative Japanese “construction state,” an alliance of large private builders and political interests with broad discretion to redevelop Tokyo. The construction state sees an opportunity to turn prime real estate into high-end residential and retail projects that will “clean up” the area and make Tokyo more competitive with Shanghai and other rising business centers in Asia. Roppongi Crossing is a revealing ethnography of what is arguably the most dynamic district in one of the world's most dynamic cities. Based on extensive fieldwork, it looks at the interplay between the neighborhood's nighttime rhythms; its emerging daytime economy of office towers and shopping malls; Japan's ongoing internationalization and changing ethnic mix; and Roppongi Hills and Tokyo Midtown, the massive new construction projects now looming over the old playground.

During the twentieth century, Japan was transformed from a poor, primarily rural country into one of the world's largest industrial powers and most highly urbanised countries. Interestingly, while Japanese governments and planners borrowed carefully from the planning ideas and methods of many other countries, Japanese urban planning, urban governance and cities developed very differently from those of other developed countries. Japan's distinctive patterns of urbanisation are partly a product of the highly developed urban system, urban traditions and material culture of the pre-modern period, which remained influential until well after the Pacific War. A second key influence has been the dominance of central government in urban affairs, and its consistent prioritisation of economic growth over the public welfare or urban quality of life. André Sorensen examines Japan's urban trajectory from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, paying particular attention to the weak development of Japanese civil society, local governments, and land development and planning regulations.