Neo-industrial Tokyo: Urban Development and Globalisation in Japan's State-centred Developmental Capitalism

Abstract

This paper analyses the relation between Tokyo and globalisation in the framework of regulation theory and attempts to draw theoretical implications for Tokyo's current urban development. Regulation theorists contend that globalisation, particularly global capital and finance mobility, has led to the crisis of regulatory institutions that sustained the post-war Fordist growth regime and that the new finance-market-centred growth regime emerging out of the crisis in the UK and the US is now challenging other capitalist societies. Tokyo's urban experience in the past decade conforms to and yet deviates from regulation theory. The paper argues that, although local and national politics have played the most important role in reshaping Tokyo's urban development, it is Japan's state-centred developmental, capitalist system that has enabled Tokyo to resist the new Anglo-American growth regime. Tokyo's growth strategy in the 1990s has instead re-emphasised manufacturing technology. The impact of the new finance-market-centred growth regime is exaggerated. Urban development in many cities of the world will continue to be far more influenced by local, national and regional politics and institutions than by the new finance market growth regime.