Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Greg Clancey, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

It has been almost forgotten that like many cities elsewhere in Asia, Tokyo once had large areas of informal and unplanned settlement, occupied by thousands of tiny houses for the poor—little more than shacks. The twentieth century saw a process of formalization of housing accompanied by the expansion of real estate speculation. This presentation takes up the case of a slumlord-builder in late nineteenth-century Tokyo to consider a transitional moment before modern planning mechanisms and a land-centered real estate market redefined the economics of housing. Micro-scale examination of the economic factors in building Tokyo tenements reveals a settlement-building calculus quite different from the patterns often examined in studies of contemporary megacity informal housing. Tokyo’s case thus encourages us to reconsider how unplanned housing develops and how it might be addressed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jordan Sand is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He holds a masters degree in architecture history from the University of Tokyo and a doctorate in history from Columbia University. His research focuses on material culture and the history of everyday life. He is the author of House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2004), Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013) and 帝国日本の生活空間 (Living Spaces of Imperial Japan; Iwanami Shoten, 2015). He has also published on historical memory, museums and cultural heritage policy, and the history of food. He has served as visiting professor at Sophia University, the University of Tokyo, Michigan University, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He is presently a visiting researcher at Waseda University working on a study of the history of slums in Tokyo and other Asian cities.

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