The Physical and Social Infrastructures of Women-Led Solidarity Practices in Japanese Cities

Abstract

This paper focuses on the concept of urban solidarity as civic activism and suggests ways of thinking about it in relation to the material and social infrastructures of the city, based on fieldwork in Japan. The paper first summarizes the literature on urban solidarity and other related concepts as alternatives to capitalist urban development and austerity urbanism, and examines the development of civil society in Japan and its different trajectory from other developed countries. It then seeks to answer the question of when urban solidarity, as exemplified by the efforts of Japanese women social entrepreneurs who have been studied through participant observation since 2013 and through twenty in-depth interviews conducted in Saitama, Osaka, and Tokyo in the spring of 2023, is likely to emerge. The study's findings are interpreted through the lens of the material and social infrastructures of urban solidarity. The study concludes that social entrepreneurs concerned with the growing social problems of Japanese society continue their determined efforts against the individualization or loneliness of urban life and the privatization of urban spaces, despite the hardening of conditions and challenges in terms of access to the physical and social infrastructures that are fundamental to the materialities and relations of urban solidarity. Women-led urban solidarity in postrecession Japan, as explored in this paper, emerges in multiple forms in a different context from the postcrisis and migratory urban environments in the Western examples, making it an interesting case to explore in more detail.