Abstract
There is an increasing flowability of shops along the shopping street in the central part of the metropolis of Osaka. In this situation, the central objective of activation in the shopping street is to create a community centered on shop owners. This paper focuses on the shop ownersʼ social relationships through a case study of the shopping street “Shinsekai” in Osaka. Through analysis, we show the social conditions that caused the formation of this shopping street. The results demonstrate that the shop owners formed communities by forging links through diverse social relationships in the practice of activation in the shopping street. First, the shop owners practiced the activation by building personal relationships founded on community-based organization (shopping street organization and neighborhood associations). In the next stage, the established shop owners made concerted efforts to cooperate with newer shop owners, who raised capital externally, to create an attractive “regional image.”
This paper presents the following significant findings: 1) We point out the importance of personal relationships among the shop owners to form a community through practices of activation in the shopping street. 2) We discovered that organic social relationships among shop owners provided the foundation for community-based organization.
