In almost all developed countries, people enjoy enriched lives due to urbanization. Historically, negative risks that accompany agglomeration, like epidemics, have not deterred urbanization. But the telecommuting that has spread in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic may trigger the transformation of the urban structure in Japan. I offer an explanation of this phenomenon, showing that this transformation is inextricably interrelated to changes within a firm's organization. A fall in the cost of transportation and communication leads to a transformation of the equilibrium between urban and industrial structures.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has had a huge impact on the Japanese economy. This article investigates its economic impact on Japan by observing the very recent trend in demographic statistics on population movement from and into the Tokyo Metropolitan region and its building vacancy rate. The article also explores the simultaneous trend of digitalization of the Japanese economy and geographic distribution of economic activities away from Tokyo that might lead to solving the issue of heavy concentration of economic activities in the capital.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are broad, unexpected, cascading, and cumulative. The interconnectedness of the different factors has produced unforeseen disastrous consequences in cities. Those effects have penetrated widely across different functional areas in a multi-scale and wavy manner. Under such conditions, the form and degree of urban impacts of COVID-19 has been differentiated by class, place, gender, nationality, and other characteristics. Due to the nature of the pandemic, the process of policy responses to COVID-19 has often been mediated by the collection, analytics, and modelling of various clinical, hospital, and social data. A series of responses to the pandemic has created unexpected challenges to make a city more data-driven. At the same time, its effects are still channeled through the political arena and other institutional settings; the social still matters. How to manage cascading urban effects of COVID-19 needs to be assured by democratic decision-making processes and fair procedures.

This paper aims to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the structural factors in the primacy of the Tokyo region and opportunities and issues with regard to the revitalization of the provincial regions of Japan. The primacy of the Tokyo region has been driven by the globalization of the economy and the expansion of knowledge service industries since the late-1980s. The pandemic has not affected Tokyo's dominance as the global node of Japan, but it seems to be affecting the agglomeration structure of the knowledge service industries and their workers to some extent. The pandemic has changed the values of the work-life balance toward a greater emphasis on the latter, and has instilled new work styles (e.g., telework) in Japanese society. The knowledge service industries, especially the information technology, design, and editing industries, have a high affinity with telework. They are trying to promote the decentralization of IT engineers, designers, and related service workers who have hitherto been concentrated in Tokyo. This is a great opportunity for provincial regions to revitalize their socio-economic situation by promoting digital transformation and upgrading their local industries.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the outlook of changes in the spatial order at the urban level after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, and the direction of the review of urban policy. Cities are now in danger of depopulation, economic down-scaling, and monetary loss due to shrinking national wealth. The biggest impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is the early arrival of the urban shrinkage crisis. From now on, it will be important to create cities with increased value as social spaces where diverse human resources are connected in multiple layers, and as physical spaces where economic, living, and working zones overlap. Future urban policies will require a paradigm shift from economic growth specifications to economic contraction specifications. To that end, it is imperative to create cities where goods, money, and information are continuously metabolized through people.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, I would like to introduce the process of collaborative thinking in the midst of a global disaster and some outputs on how the city form should be changed. I will also explain ecological democracy, which is the undercurrent of this collaborative work. The framework of a city in the future is constrained by the framework of the earth, such as global warming and biocultural diversity, yet cherished by the framework of individual life, consisting of the fairness and cooperation of the people. The latter two frameworks require the city framework to meet them. The key to all three frameworks is collaboration with nature. A city form that is prepared for global disasters will allow people to constantly come into contact with nature and restore their ability to cooperate and collaborate.