3 - Analyzing Differences between Scenarios of Urban Shrinkage in Japan and Taiwan

The past three decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest within the field of shrinking city. This article provides a critical overview of the development trajectories of Japan and Taiwan through an examination of different shrinking spatial patterns by their state’s policies to cope with the problems brought by population transformation, economic restructuring and urban planning.

Urban shrinking is driven by the demographic impact of industrialization, which could be analysed in terms of redistribution of population and industry across international and national spaces that vary in the context of socio-economic change and transformation.

Japan and Taiwan have faced the shifts in population compositions and industrial structures that led to the socio-spatial structural changes. Different urban planning and redevelopment strategies are used to response to the loss of population and disappearance of manufacturing industry. Two urban systems are identified: a growing social-spatial disparities in a social hierarchy and a decreasing social-spatial inequality in a decentralization society. As a world city in core and developed system, Tokyo strengthens the headquarter economy, and simultaneously, in-migration compensating its population loss resulted from a sharp decrease fertility rate. As a secondary world city in semi-periphery areas, Taipei decreases its importance after the redistribution of production networks. This paper calls for a more elaborate bridging of international discussions to understand the patterns of urban shrinkage resulted from globalization processes intermediated by state policies and capital reinvestment.