The theory of over-urbanization, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century, related the poverty of developing countries to the poverty of rural areas and discussed the informal sector theory and the slum problem in urban spaces. However, this theory is no longer fully applicable to Asia as Asian cities have changed drastically since the 1990s. First, slums are growing due to intra-city migration and reproduction of lower cities. Second, inequality is widening, and lower-level labor is diversifying due to the informalization of a wide range of labor in the globalized labor market, not limited to the former informal sector. Third, even in Asian cities, the struggle for urban space is intensifying due to global urbanization and gentrification.
    Since the 1970s, slums, which are lower urban settlement areas, have expanded in Bangkok. In Thai slums, participatory community development was introduced in the 1980s following the failure of slum evictions. Since the 1997 Baht crisis, public participation has been further promoted against the backdrop of austerity. This situation resulted from the introduction of participatory development theory and community organizing methodologies by NGOs and public institutions, as well as the theory of intrinsic development based on historical and cultural community discourse. As a result, “sustainable economy” and “community” were included in the development plan, and “participatory community development” became widespread.
    This paper examines how Thai slum communities have changed in terms of labor and how the dynamics of Asian cities have transformed over four decades. Specifically, it investigates the changes that occurred in four cases of participatory community development in Bangkok. The findings of this study show that while participatory community development has progressed and some results have been shown, the social exclusion experienced by slum dwellers due to living in the lower urban areas remains a grave and unresolved problem.

    The purpose of this paper is to explore how recent industrial changes triggered by overseas migration and the growth of the IT-BPO industry have impacted squatter settler's households in Metropolitan Manila. The change led to the increase of highly educated and occupational middle-class workers, specifically among women, while the growth of the middle-income class has been relatively marginal. The paper will focus on college-level educated female workers in a squatter settlement and their households to examine their interests in professions and specialties and family strategies for educational expenses.

    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.

    This empirical study examined the following four hypotheses with reference to J.Jacobs' research, Urban Sociology, and Commercial Science. (1) When local residents go to the shopping street in their neighbourhood, they communicate more with shop assistants, than when they go to other shopping districts. The more they go to the shopping street, (2) the more they trust their neighbours, (3) the more they get local information and (4) the more they are attached to their area.
    As a result, the hypotheses (1), (3), and (4) were statistically verified with the survey research. Therefore, Japanese shopping streets can be the place they communicate with each other, exchange information, and make sure their local connections. However, shopping streets is not associated with the trust for their neighbours. Further studies are needed to examine the relationship between average levels of residents' trusts and features of local lifestyles.