Abstract
Cultural diversity has come to be celebrated in cities nowadays; even a marginal cultural uniqueness is considered a productive asset, though the commodification of a culture may often leave its bona fide practitioners behind. Moreover, we must not overlook the fact that tourism-centric urban development in multicultural cities is inclined to pursue cultural zoning because the celebration of diversity within a city is often incompatible with the celebration of diversity between cities. In light of this perspective, I focus on the anticrime patrol in the multicultural downtown area of Ueno 2-Chome in the Taito ward of Tokyo, where cultural zoning is very difficult to implement. The main purpose of the patrol is to discourage street solicitation and thereby improve the image of the area, and in this activity, we can find the conjunction between security and community formation, which has been criticized by liberal urban theorists. However, I hesitate to completely criticize the anticrime patrol in this area, mainly supported by the owners and managers of restaurants and taverns whose businesses are difficult to segregate from sex-related businesses in this area not only spatially but also temporally. Only security can be the logical first step for community formation in highly diverse and fluid neighborhoods such as Ueno 2-Chome, namely, distinctly urbanized places, and a shared orientation for community policing can be a catalyst for communication among locally diverse shop owners and managers, helping to overcome static and exclusive zoning-oriented multiculturalism.
