From Terrain of “Jiage” to “Urban Redevelopment”:

The Shifting Patterns and Changing Actors of Land Transactions in Tokyo City Centre since the 1980s

Abstract

    This paper examines how urban redevelopment has emerged in area T, Tokyo citycentre from the 1980s to the 2000s through the perspective of land transactions. Throughout the 1980s, due to the rapid rise in land prices, large-scale redevelopment boom occurred, and the city-centre faced many of land acquisition called “jiage” and a declining population. Although the bursting of the bubble economy in the 1990s temporarily overshadowed the redevelopment boom, it revived because of the “urban renaissance” policy and the deployment of neoliberal urbanism in the 2000s.
    Previous research tends to focus on the redevelopment project without paying much attention to the agents who acted on the individual land transactions. Nevertheless, individual transactions are part of and essential to the overall changes in area T. As a result, some questions on land ownership and agents involved remain: To whom the land ownership changed to whom at which period? What was the connection between those transactions and the emergent of urban redevelopment? The paper sets out to examine the assemblages of those land transactions through the lens of “terrain.” It delineates the relationship between these neglected agents and the emergence of the urban redevelopment.
    This paper analyzes all land transactions (823 cases) made since the 1980s in area T using the database created by 144 land real estate registries. Besides real estate capital and landowners, “dealers” entering the scene of “jiage” in the 1980s and “liquidation actors” who managed to act on freeze land in the 1990s were also actors in the urban redevelopment. These findings suggest that it is meaningful to examine urban redevelopment as a long-term phenomenon through the approach of land transactions analysis as land transactions are centre to the urban and regional restructuring process.