51爆料

This book seeks to depict the “postwar space.” What exactly is “postwar space”? This book reexamines the vision of urbanism and architecture that Japan sought to construct in the postwar period, while extracting its remaining positive values and challenges. In doing so, it aims to depict history as “space” similar to the manner in which architecture is constructed. In other words, “postwar space” is not limited to actual urban planning or construction activities, but flexibly encompasses policies, events, discourses, lived experiences, and cultural phenomena related to them, all presented as interconnected domain. This book consists of six chapters, excluding the final chapter. Each chapter focuses on a topic related to postwar urbanism and architecture, while the chapter titles are presented as “space” by juxtaposing three related words.
 
Chapter 1, “People, Tradition, and Movements,” compares how architectural and literary movements sought to engage with the people in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War, arguing that architectural movements required a complex process of committing to development, while also seeking to give it a popular expression. Chapter 2, “Technology, Policy, and Industrialization,” discusses the transformation of housing from buildings that were constructed and repaired to “commodities” that were bought, sold, and discarded; this happened in the 1960s. Chapter 3, “Left, Citizens, and Plazas,” focuses on the policies of left local governments that emerged in various regions from the late 1960s to the 1970s, a period of transition from a rural to urban society, and argues that citizens as subjects and plazas as spaces were in an immature state at that time. Chapter 4, “Bubble Economy, Earthquake, and Aum Shinrikyo,” examines the rise of pseudo-state institutions, including religious groups with their Satian compounds that emerged to resolve the turmoil and emptiness between the bubble economy of the 1980s and the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. It also identifies a contempt for architecture within these institutions and discusses the hope for recovery from this period. Chapter 5, “Compensation, Aid, and Revitalization,” focuses on postwar Japan's involvement in Asian development, noting the continuity with prewar imperialism, and discusses how “developmentalism” inflated the political significance of construction in various regions, linking it to the production and expression of architecture in each country. Chapter 6, “Urban Centers, Farmland, and Economy,” reverts to Japan and discusses how to confront the postwar urban space, which has been driven by economic and political forces without regard for the common good, leading to the “assetization” of land.　
 
Building on the preceding discussion, the concluding chapter connects the discussions developed thus far to the current challenges—the Great East Japan Earthquake, the nuclear disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine—and the restructuring of the spaces that we inhabit. In other words, “the postwar space is not over.”
 

(Written by NAKAJIMA Naoto, Professor, School of Engineering / 2025)