We make sense of urban space by investing it with names, names that over time accrue meanings both polyvalent at any one point in time and mutating through time. The extent and meanings of Shitamachi, one of Tokyo's central territorial concepts, have changed significantly throughout the city's history. In this paper, I first chart these changing meanings and then set the territory within the wider terrain of capital city as vehicle for the twin interests of state and capital. Urban space in Tokyo was used as a formative setting onto which to inscribe an idea of modernisation. Within this larger picture, Shitamachi was seen as representing a past vision of the city, one that was inimical to the interests of a modernising state. It became an industrial zone, a margin within the folds of central space. In recent years, a reassessment has occurred. Shitamachi is now widely celebrated as a space of communal memory and historical identity, even though its extent and meanings remain contested. The richly symbolic spaces of the imagination are thus rooted within a changing political economy.
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