The Politics of the Geographical Imagination Projected on the Urban Range and on the Rapid Transit System Network in Greater Osaka at the Beginning of Town Planning

Abstract

This paper focuses on town planning in Osaka City in the 1920s from a socio-spatial dialectical perspective. When I looked back on town planning at that time, I realized the significance of the relationships between the central urban districts and the peripheral rural districts, between residential suburbs and Osaka City and between the state and Osaka City. Thus, I applied geographical ideas, such as geographical imagination, space, place and scale to the various aspects of town planning history. Through this approach, I make clear the process of the use of politics among Osaka municipal bureaucrats, State bureaucrats and Osaka councilmen. This process is represented in the form of conflicts concerning spatial scales within their geographical imaginations.In Osaka City during World War I, citizens had encountered capitalistic industrialization primarily dependent upon heavy industry, a mass influx of laborers and serious urban problems such as a housing shortage. In order to cope with those problems, Osaka municipal bureaucrats imagined Osaka City as an organism, dependent on the discourse of the Garden City, and projected the reorganization of urban space.However, with the establishment of the town planning area, the bureaucrats in the Ministry ent of Interior proposed the Province as an organism, the larger urban range containing Osaka City and some middle central places like Sakai City together, and forced Osaka City to compete with such central places in order to aim at moderating its demands against the state. Thereby, they attempted to maintain Osaka City under their control. Meanwhile, Osaka councilmen strenuously resisted the incorporation of rural districts into Osaka City and tried to scale down the urban range. In this sense, the conflicts between the geographical imaginations of three agents came to surface as the politics of spatial scale.This politics materialized in the network of the rapid transit system. Osaka municipal bureaucrats regarded the network as a facility to organically link each district within Osaka City. However, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Railways insisted on cutting down the network on the periphery for the benefit of the railway corporations that run along the planned system. Meanwhile, Osaka councilmen wanted to reduce it in the rural districts in the area.As a consequence of this conflictual process, the geographical imagination of Osaka municipal bureaucrats institutionalized the spatial scale which could come to guarantee the reorganization of Osaka City as an organism, and it has been manifest that their geographical imagination has the capacity to resolve the housing problem, to prevent population spillage and to claim self-government in great cities against the state. The material facilities established in town planning such as the rapid transit system were initiated in the context of the politics of the geographical imagination such as the one which has been outlined above.