Green Asia Ecocultures, Sustainable Lifestyles, and Ethical Consumption

Urban farming in Tokyo 161
Of course, land usage regulations such as Tokyo Greenbelt Plan and zonings by
Japanese city planning act were established to limit the uncontrolled expansion of
the city. However, except for the establishment of several parks in a section of the
planned greenbelt area, the greenbelt project could not be implemented primarily
due to a lack of funds to acquire land. This led to the need to rely primarily on
regulation of private land usage and an inability to financially compensate private
land owners for restricting their rights to develop their property (Yokohari et al.
2000; Watanabe et al. 2008). Similarly, zoning has not resulted in adequate control
of land usage. Although land within the city has been divided into areas zoned
for urbanization promotion and areas zoned for urbanization control, because the
desires of farmers were respected, substantial farmland is included in areas zoned
for urbanization and, due to insufficient development regulations, small-scale
development has penetrated into areas zoned for urbanization control (Sorensen
2001). Today, the expansive urban sprawl in Japanese suburbs is regarded as a
symbol of the failure of Japan’s modern urban planning, insofar as it has been
modeled after examples in Western countries (Yokohari et al. 2000).
With regard to the formation of urban space in the age of modernism, the
geographer Augustin Berque commented that the uniqueness of a specific place is
reduced by the universality of abstract space (Berque 1993). In the case of the Tokyo
metropolitan area, although the aim was to realize the modernist model of a universal
city through modern urban planning, the intermingling of city and farms can be
understood as a manifestation of the union between universality and uniqueness.
From the standpoint of attempting to realize a Western-style land use regime,
the intermingling of city and farms could be considered a failure of modern urban
planning. However, to conceive of modern urban planning as offering universal
solutions is clearly problematic. As of 2005, Japan’s overall population had
already begun to decline, and it is anticipated that the long-term trend is for most
of the Japanese cities to become smaller (National Institute of Population and
Social Security Research 2014). The destiny of cities, which up to this point had
fundamentally been to expand, has changed dramatically. We have thus entered
an unprecedented era in terms of the history of urban planning in Japan. If we are
to face this new trend of shrinking cities head on, we must naturally, radically
change our way of thinking and fundamentally revise our urban planning system.
Such efforts, in fact, are already underway (Japan Society of Urban and Regional
Planners 2003). The idea that clear demarcation between cities and the surrounding
agricultural area is the global standard and that the achievement of such a state is
the hallmark of modernization may have had currency during the period in which
society was developing and cities were expanding. However, it is clear that, in the
age where some cities are indeed shrinking, other alternatives are necessary. What
is required is a change in our way of thinking that corresponds to societal trends,
not only in terms of social factors such as style of working but also in terms of
spatial factors such as land usage.
If we take the above context into consideration, it follows that we must also
reevaluate the intermingling of cities and farms without prejudice. The existence
of arable land near or within a city is very favorable for agro-activities. If we