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This book focuses on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urban milieu in contemporary cities. Filled with reflections based on interviews with a diverse range of creative actors in various local neighborhoods in Tokyo, it offers a rare glimpse into the complex set of elements that provide long-term, physical, and sociocultural support to urban creativity. Ursic and Imai highlight the interplay between physical and soft (social) factors in the process of place-making and explore how a city's creativity is influenced by financial support and accessible infrastructure, as well as the sets of informal networks, services, and tacit, locally embedded knowledge that provide the basic layers of stimuli needed for creativity to fully develop. The authors show how the future development of creativity and the overall development of a city depend not only on the (top-down) planning strategies of formal authorities, but also on the appropriate (bottom-up) inclusion of heterogeneous elements that are provided and embedded within the small, hidden context of city spaces.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Tokyo as a Matured City: Torn Between Global Change and Local Lives.- Chapter 3: Conceptualizing Urban Creativity: Searching for Traces of Tokyo's Urban Development.- Chapter 4: Going Small Matters: The Role of Small Creative Actors in Tokyo's Creative Ecosystem.- Chapter 5: Going Local 1: Creative Actors, Spatial Resources, and Social Networks.- Chapter 6: Going Local 2: Subcultural Capital and Social Creativity.- Chapter 7: Going Local 3: The Influence of Cultural Capital on the Creative Capacity of Place.- Chapter 8: Going Local 4: The Significance of Local Soft Environmental Factors for Tokyo's Creative Capacity.- Chapter 9: Concluding Remarks.
About the author
Dr. Matjaz Ursic is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.
Dr. Heide Imai is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Intercultural Communication, Senshu University, Tokyo.
