Divided Tokyo

Tomoko Kubo is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences of the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She is an urban geographer working closely with housing studies. She is the former chair of the Urban Geography Commission’s Young Scholar (YS) Committee of the International Geographical Union (IGU) after winning its 2012 YS Paper competition, and a board member of the Research Committee on Housing and the Built Environment (RC43) of the International Sociological Association (ISA). Her research interests include urbanization and the housing market, urban and housing policy, residential choices under socioeconomic changes, single women’s homeownership, shrinking cities and their revitalization, and aging suburbs in Japan.

• Introduction.- Divided Tokyo: Housing policy, the ideology of homeownership, and the growing contrast between the city center and the suburbs.- The rise of the condominium lifestyle in Japanese cities.- Homeownership by single women in central Tokyo.- New condominium town in the Tokyo Bay area: making “home” an antithesis to rootlessness in suburbia.- Shrinking suburbs in Tokyo.- The generative processes of vacant housing in the shrinking suburbs: The case of Ushiku in Tokyo’s 50-60-km Commuter Belt.- Policy response and civic engagement to address urban shrinkage.- Conclusions.