The Nested Global City-Region: Intermunicipal Income Stratification in the Tokyo Metropolitan Region, 1980-2007

Abstract

This study investigates whether or not income stratification by place has widened within the Tokyo Metropolitan Region (TMR) over the past 30 years. Its analysis shows that although income stratification among the TMR's 228 municipalities has expanded noticeably since 1980, it has remained far less severe than that in America's three largest metropolitan regions, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Declining regional industrial employment, expanding national income inequality, falling land prices in the region's core, and the entrepreneurial waterfront redevelopment policies of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) were some of the catalysts that propelled this rise in stratification in the TMR. Conversely, the region's unique racial-ethnic context and the municipal merger policies of Japanese Government were two of the factors keeping its level of income inequality far below that of America's largest urban regions. These findings support the position of Nested City theorists, who claim that embedded forces remain the most decisive determinants of growth trajectories in the TMR.