Chisato Asahi – författare

This book focuses on building regional resilience by comprehensively improving regional assets. Regional vulnerability depends on the availability of regional assets for the population, as well as the population’s ability to access those assets. Such assets include the environment, population size, community, and human capital, as well as traditional physical infrastructure. Identifying and improving these regional assets, which provide resource flows to help cope with regional disruptions—natural disasters, economic crises, or demographic changes— serves to mitigate vulnerability and build resiliency.

This book deals with regional sustainability, which is one of the biggest issues in Japan today, and presents suggested methods and cases to show how regional management should be carried out. Today, regions in Japan are facing long-term global challenges such as changes in climate and in international relations, as well as regional financial difficulties due to depopulation and aging. Additional causes are the decline of traditional culture and community sustainability, the crisis of public services, inner- and inter-regional disparities, disaster response, and other local and region-specific issues that are intricately related. To meet the challenge of those issues, local actors must deal with the regional issues themselves and solve them in cooperation with various other stakeholders. From this perspective, the book exhibits regional management frameworks, focusing especially on evaluation, decision making, and aid in multi-dimensional approaches, and examines case studies for making regions sustainable by allowing diverse actors to realize diverse values and standards in cooperation. The chapters cover a wide range of disciplines, including urban science, economics, geography, landscape, real estate, and public finance, which makes it possible to shed light on a particular region.

This book comprises a collection of essays celebrating the life and work of Kiyoko Hagihara, honorary professor of the Graduate School of Urban Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan. Essay contributors include her former students as well as regional scientists with similar interests.