What High-Rise Living Means for Tokyo Civic Life: Changing Residential Architecture and the Specter of Rising Privacy

Social theorists, architects, and community leaders observing changes in Tokyo’s built environment worry that urban residents are ever more isolated in private life and ask what might be done to create social and physical spaces in which civic community flourishes. Here I turn our gaze around on three such community stakeholders. Their depictions of the threats inherent in high-rise Tokyo unselfconsciously blame precariat youth and individuals who do not fit into a bourgeois “family” image for weakening civil society. My analysis encourages reexamination of problematic assumptions buried in the civil society ideal and in related movements such as New Urbanism.