This article aims to explain the purpose and research context of the special issues covered in the ʻChallenges of Second Cities'. In addition, we review the discussion of the symposium held at the 36th Japan Association for Urban Sociology Annual Meeting in September 2018 and further explore some research agendas regarding urban sociological research on Japanese second cities. While most global city researchers have focused their analysis on global first-ranked cities, e.g. New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, but, recently, some researchers have begun re-aligning their academic interests towards second-rank cities in the global urban hierarchy and subsequently tracing the peculiar historical developmental paths of urban growth and associated policy challenges. Our special articles consider the growth strategies and policy challenges facing such second cities in Japan, namely, Osaka and Nagoya, and a leading example of an European second city, Barcelona. Through our discussions of the special issues, we introduce a new frontier of urban sociological research on large Japanese cities.

    The purpose of this article is to analyze the industrial structure change in Osaka city and to clarify the position of the city management function of Osaka in the times of the globalization. Because the Osaka head office moved to Tokyo and factory left the area, the economy of Osaka declined. However, modern Osaka City has a role as a Central management city in the Kinki area. Osaka City needs to network with Kyoto City and Kobe City and play a role as a central management city in the Kinki area. I think that it will be an important role for the development of Osaka City.

    Contemporary urban network consists of a whole set of multilevel urban systems, of which the global and the national constitutes the most outstanding but not exclusive scales, always superposed and interacting among them. The concept of second city, therefore, can never be separated from specific urban system(s) of reference, whose spatial dimension, hierarchical structure and linkage to other systems, on both upper and lower directions, determine the relative position of the city in question. To understand the dynamics of a second city, we should also take into account the socio-political opportunities and constraints that emanate from human experience shared along the history, usually on national and regional levels. Those can act as path dependent factors affecting the cityʼs strategical decision making.
    Multilevel in urban network and path dependency are the key aspects considered in this article, which focusing on the case of Barcelona, contributes from a geographical perspective to our common inquiry concerning the evolution of second cities. The discussion starts reviewing some classic works in geopolitics to draw clues to set Barcelona as a second city, in both Spanish urban system headed by Madrid and the extensive Mediterranean urban network. Although statistical data allow us to rate the two Spanish urban agglomerations at a secondary position integrated in the whole European urban system, institutional and infrastructural constraints posed by the national capital push the second city on the Iberian fringe to seek for alternative ascending paths in the international context. Severely affected by the bursting of the Spanish real estate boom and with a local economy dependent more than ever on the tourism sector, Barcelona today keeps struggling to build its own strength, making the most of its ability to connect multilevel urban networks.

    This paper consists of six parts. First, it presents the main points in relation to the traditional binomial classification of urban formality and informality based on the overurbanization theory. Second, it presents the main points in relation to the new informality theory developed by Ananya Roy and others, who criticize the traditional informality theory by emphasizing the political process by which the state constructs the binomial classification of urban formality and informality. Third, this paper reinforces Royʼs informality theory by clarifying the role of state sovereignty in constructing the binomial classification of urban formality and informality. Fourth, it introduces the concepts of exceptional situation and Homo Sacer developed by Giorgio Agamben to clarify the position of state sovereignty in Royʼs informality theory. Fifth, it proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing the political process of constructing formality and informality more clearly by emphasizing the decisive role of state sovereignty in the process. This framework aims to join Royʼs theory and Agambenʼs theory, to reconstruct the abstract socio-philosophical Homo Sacer theory of Agamben as an empirical theory for analyzing the urban bottom people, and to construct an overall framework to analyze the relationships among the state, informality, exceptional situations, and Homo Sacer. Thus, it is an attempt to create a critical urban theory in a time of globalization and neoliberalism. Finally, it presents theoretical issues that require further clarification and points out that this framework should be used to analyze the real-world political process of constructing the binomial classification of urban formality and informality.

    This paper describes how people understand the relationship between internal migration and social mobility, and how this understanding has changed from the period of rapid economic growth to the subsequent period of migration turnaround. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey and interviews conducted with Fukui-city public high school graduates from the late 1950s to the early 2000s.
    The eldest cohort lived in a time when not only college graduates but also high school graduates who did not continue on to college were understood to have a better chance of attaining a higher occupational status through internal migration. However, high school graduates from the next cohort were less likely to move beyond Fukui prefecture through their employment, while migration aimed at college enrollment increased. The number of college graduates returning to Fukui to seek employment also increased. Internal migration came to be understood to relate to social mobility only through higher education. Internal migration to attain a college education became almost a requirement for the youngest cohort to maintain the equivalent social status to their parents and also to remain identified with the reference groups of their own generation. In parallel, polarization emerged among college graduates based on the ranking of their high school. Graduates from highly ranked high schools tended to remain outside Fukui after finishing college, while other high school graduates tended to return to Fukui after college. Although the internal migration experience extended to the broader population in the third cohort, for most of them, migration and social mobility no longer seemed to be related to each other.

    This paper proposes an analytical framework for identifying and classifying migrants who intend to return to or maintain affiliation with their hometowns as well as those who are likely to return to their hometowns. This new framework has been developed using the “hold” concept, which is derived from the study of dekasegi, migrant workers from the Tsugaru area of northern Japan. Although the findings of previous studies show that some urban migrants maintain close affiliations with their birthplace before and after moving to a new city, they fail to consider the effects of “hold,” which is the likelihood of return, on the decision-making process of urban migrants. I argue that it is important to recognize that there are urban migrants who might return to their hometowns.